After spending the whole day looking at kangas with baby roos we made a lovely meal of kangaroo and sweet potato for dinner!

Early next morning we headed to Canberra where we were met by Cate clunies ross - thankfully she had her government name badge on otherwise we may never have found her. We had a lovely lunch with her and her mum, julianne.

Canberra according to the lonely Planet is lovely and green however the last real rain they had was last september and so it is very brown at the moment.

We had a lovely relaxing time at Julianne and Adrian (OBE) house with their dogs and even managed to watch the series finale of neighbours - and toadie got shot - sorry to give it away to everyone in the uk!

Despite being told by all backpackers to miss canberra out - it really did have great museums and was a lovely area. We had a tour of Parliament house by Cate (who works there). It is a huge building with a gym, hairdressers, cafe and basically a whole city all dug into a hill! The parliament houses are not red and green as in the uk but "outback red" and "eucalaylptus green". We also saw the "famous" prawn fossil in the marble entrance hall.

We had a quick look at old parliament house before visiting the egyptian exhibition at the national gallery.

Julianne then managed to get us into the national archives and see all sorts of clunies-ross documents including notebooks from the 1800's. It was all very exciting as we tried to read things with our white gloves on!

The next day we visited the Lifesaving expo at the museum where they had all sorts of lifesvaing things from years ago - inlcuing 1960's resus mannikins. They also had a surf rescue race simulator which was good fun (mel won!). In the afternoon we visited the war memorial of which Adrain is chair. It is a truly amazing museum with so much info we could have stayed for a few days. Stu was dragged through at a very fast pace as he tried to read everything. We saw the excellent presentation about the sinking of the Emden at Cocos and about sydney under attack from submarines.

We managed to watch Miss Marple and Midsomer murders (who says we need to be in the uk!) and then were dropped off at 1115 for our overnight bis to Melbourne. Which was of course late and we had to stand around outside for a long time. And of course there was a meal stop at 325am because obviously we were hungry then!

And then at 8am we arrived in Melbourne,

Love from the country that wants rain,

mel and stu x