| "Planes, Trains & Greyhound Buses" - part 1 |
| 22 June 2004 |
| So, after 8 months of saving and living in Sydney, we have finally escaped and hit the road!! First stop Canberra, after all it's the nations' capital so thought we should at least pay it a visit! Leaving Sydney on a rather unglamorous, but backpacker-typical Greyhound bus, after a few hours travelling we arrived to a freezing Canberra afternoon. After reminding ourselves again of just how heavy our backpacks are to carry around, we found our hostel, and hit the streets to explore. The capital city was totally planned from scratch in the last century after Melbourne and Sydney were both fighting about who should be the capital! The new Parliament House was designed and built after a competition, and carved into the hillside complete with grass roof! Armed with our invaluable "Lonely Planet" guidebook we headed up to check it out. It wasn't bad, we got onto a free tour, got to sit in the Senate and the House of Representatives while they were discussing some matter or other, then up to the roof for some panoramas of the city. Not everyone's cup of tea, but to be honest this was probably the most interesting thing we came across in Canberra. The National Museum is also here, another new and controversially designed building, so we checked it out on our second day. Not bad, some interesting exhibits, the theme of the museum being "what it is to be an Australian". A pretty freaky experience was seeing a headstone from a "Thomas Greer", who was taken to Australia from Belfast as a convict in the 1800's, and then settled his family here...maybe some distant relative...who knows?! We also got to take a peek at the "Aboriginal Tent Embassy" - it's on the lawn right outside the old Parliament House, and apparently a group of Aborigines camped there in the 70's to campaign against the Government not granting them rights over their ancestor's land, and looks like it has still remained a site of protest ever since...there's banners all around and a few people living there in tents and a converted bus!? We were pretty glad to be leaving Canberra and it's deserted streets and not quite "all there" people! (Probably to do with the fact that there's FAR too many politicians in such a small area, or the legalisation of possession of cannabis?! Hasten to add Mum & Dad, I did learn this last fact through the good ole "Lonely Planet", not through personal experience!) So we flew south-west to Melbourne, this time hoping to find a city with a little more life than the one we'd just left behind!! (pleeease!) We had been told quite a bit about Melbourne before we had ventured there, and alot of people had "hyped" it up for us, so we were a little disappointed. Don't get me wrong, Melbourne's a beautiful city, but personally, we just didn't quite find that "X" factor that Sydney seems to have...maybe we were just looking in the wrong places, or possibly I'm just biased after living in Sydney for 8 months!? Most of the backpackers in our hostel seemed to rate the top 2 Melbourne attractions as the Melbourne Cricket Ground (MCG) and the "Neighbours" tours!! We missed out on the MCG, but did take a trip to "Pin Oak Court" AKA "Ramsay Street", the street in the suburbs where they film that ever-popular Aussie show!? I know it's a little sad, but when in Rome...?! We were surprised to find quite a few (all of them Brits!!) backpackers doing the same thing! So we spent a while working out whose house was whose and thinking how small the street actually looks in real life! An amusing incident while we were there was a "pesky" Brit out to cause trouble...he was dared by his mates to go and knock on one of the houses and demand to speak to Harold Bishop (one of the characters for the less-informed!)...when the woman in the house strated to get quite irate she then went on to explain to him that actually they only film the OUTSIDES of the houses and the characters didn't really live there!! Yes, childish, but yes, quite amusing all the same...guess you had to be there?! We did also got ourselves over to St Kilda...one of the funkier beach suburbs, to watch the sunset over the pier, did a spot of shopping (we had to really, seeing as Melbourne's famous in Australia for it's shopping!), introduced ourselves to Melbourne's Cafe culture, rode the old old city circle tram, and had a bite to eat on Lygon Street, in the city's Italian Quarter...beautiful! (thanks for the recommendation!) Melbourne is also famous for it's nightlife, claiming to be heaps better than Sydney, so we joined the hostel's "Pub Crawl" and went to a jazz bar and clubs other nights...think we were in the wrong places, as we didn't seem to find the crowds we were expecting, and were a bit disappointed!! Oh well. But we did get talking to some guys from our hostel in a bar, and turns out they're from Kings Lynn?!?! (A town about an hour from my home for those not from UK!!)...how freaky...come all this way and meet some Norfolk boys?!!! Whilst in Melbourne, we also did a tour out to Philip Island, a few hours away...it's a spot famous for Fairy Penguins, the smallest penguins in the world...you sit and watch at dusk as all these little things huddled in groups run up the beach returning home after their day fishing...they are sooo cute...they have all these walkways over their burrows and you can wander back from the beach as they're waddling to their burrows and calling to each other...god for small things they can be damn noisy!! It's funny coz as you're watching them some of them look up at you, and you're not sure for a second just who's the one being observed! Was good experience to see though (even if we did freeze with the bracing winds from the sea!!) Couldn't take any piccies unfortunately though...didn't wanna scare the little things! |