Going downunder … Another travel blog

Canberra

Hi guys,

This morning we came back from a short trip to Canberra, Australian’s Capital City. As it is about 1000km away from Adelaide, we took the plane ;). Canberra is not part of one of the 6 states here. It is the Australian Capital Territory and has 330.000 citizens. Compared to Sydney, Melbourne or Adelaide it is pretty small, but t is the biggest Australian inland town. We arrived in Canberra on Thursday evening and took a taxi to the YHA youth-hostel. As we arrived pretty late, we only had a short walk through the city shopping area that evening. The Friday was our ‘Explore Canberra Day’. We rented a car and started our trip at the Australian National Botanic Gardens, which have a really nice rainforest area. Then we drove to the Australian National Museum. First we thought that we didn’t want to spend a lot of time there, but as the building and exhibition was pretty cool, we stayed there for 2 hours (which was still pretty short for this museum). Our next stop was at the Australian War Memorial. It is a big Memorial to remember the soldiers of the first and second world war.

Australian War Memorial

The street which is going to/from the memorial is really big and has a direct view to the old and new government house. We spent another two hours in the war memorial before heading to the High Court of Australia (Oberster Gerichtshof). Their court rooms where open to the public, so that we had a short look at them. From there we visited the Royal Australian Mint (Münzprägerei), where you can watch the workers producing Australian Dollars. As the time went by fast, we then hurried up to visit the old and new parliament houses. Both are very nice buildings and from the new one you have a wonderful view over Canberra.

Us at the top of Parliament house (in the back is the old parliament house, the war memorial and Ainslie Hill)

In the evening we then drove up Ainslie Hill, which is in the direct opposite of the parliament house to have the nice view the other way around. The Telstra or Black Mountain Tower was our last sightseeing point. We waited there until sunset and had another beautiful view over the city during daytime and in the dark.

Canberra

This night we spent in the car before we flew back to Adelaide, where we first tried to catch up on our sleep that we missed in the car :).

See you guys, have a nice weekend!
Verena and Johannes