G'day from the Capital City!!

We arrived in Canberra early on Friday morning after our 10 hour bus journey from Melbourne. We made our way down to our hostel, couldn't check in until the afternoon, so dumped the bags and headed off to check the city out.

We wandered around the 'concrete jungle' and eventually found a spot to get some breakfast. We soon learned that this was a very confusing place for tourists, but grabbed a map and got on with it.

We soon found our way down to Lake Burley Griffin, this is a gigantic man-made lake that lies right through the middle of the city. Here we saw Captain Cook's memorial which is a skeleton globe tracing his travels, and a water jet that shoots a geyser-like column of water 147m into the air!!

The weather started to heat up so we returned to the hostel, checked in, and got into some shorts!!

We caught the bus to Capital Hill, the home of Parliment House. We looked around at the Great Hall, the Galleries and the artifacts, before getting a lift up to the roof. The roof is grassed and from here you can take in the views of the whole city, or in Lee's case spend a few mins sunbathing.

From here we walked along Federation Mall, past the old parliment house and took a bus to the National Museum of Australia. The museum was free - thank goodness, as both feeling rather uninterested, we had a quick look around but didn't take much in.

After a stop for some grub in yet another Irish bar we returned to the hostel for a swim. It was here that we found a replica of Roy's pool - no deeper, no bigger and just as cold - a nice reminder of home. So we took a dip.

We had showers dried off and decided to head off to the Telstra Tower. This is a 195m high tower that stands upon 812m Black Mountain. We got a bus to near the base, and crazily decided to walk up the mountain. After a steep 4km trek we eventually made it, and it was worth it!! We took the lift to the viewing deck 58.5m up in the tower, before climbing a few more steps to the outside viewing level at 62m - a total of 874m above sea level. The views were breath-taking, this is a must for anyone who visits Canberra - although we would advise a taxi up the mountain!

We then returned to the hostel to watch England beat Australia in the cricket - yee ha!!

Saturday was the first day of the Canberra Multicultural Festival, where there were stands from around the globe advertising tourism in their countries and selling their local food. We spent our morning looking around before induldging in some chinese.

Before we knew it we were heading to the station to catch our 4hr bus to Sydney.

Hope the snow's cleared now.

Love Lee and Emma

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