It took us nine hours to reach Canberra by bus from Melbourne, which was fine by us as we slept for half the journey and watched the films they put on (the Australian version of 'Free Willy' and 'Indiana Jones') for the rest of it.

We only spent two nights in Canberra after the bus operator downright refused to let us book anymore and tried to dissuade us from stopping at all; 'there's nothing to do there' he kept saying. I was hoping he'd be proven wrong - after all, it IS the capital of Australia.

So, Canberra: there's a lot of flat grass and straight roads and shiny buildings and a huge, placid lake and a sparse sprinkling of people on the streets, mainly in suits. It reminds me a bit of Canary Wharf - nice, and undeniably well-made, but lacking soul. Almost like toy city. Nonetheless, it's not true that there's nothing to do - just that you can do most of the good stuff in one day and the 'good stuff' is all of the museum and/or sober variety.

Canberra's annual 'Floriade Festival' is on at the moment so when we were there we took a walk through Commonwealth Park to see the thousands of colourful flowers, fairground rides and (pretty good) craft stalls. Afterwards we walked to Parliament House, which is built into the side of the hill so that people can walk around on top of it, and poked about the free Museum of Australia for a couple of hours, before wandering back to our hostel via a lakeside path. We had pizza and wine in the bar next to our hostel but had to leave at 7.30 as the entire place had been reserved for a private event. That just about summed up Canberra for us: if there is fun to be had there then it is not that accessible to casual travellers.

Canberra is also the first place where we stayed in a dorm room. We weren't that excited about the lack of privacy but thought that at least we'd get to meet some cool people. In reality, lights were out at 5pm as we had one person seriously into his early nights. We also had two heavy snorers and an inconsiderate player of loud music, who would stroll into the room in the middle of the night, take one look at all the people sleeping, and start playing music. In the dark. As you do. This seemed to really rile snorer number one and he kept tapping on music player's bunk to get them to turn it down. I wonder if mr snorealot was aware of the sounds he was emitting every time he dropped off. Everyone seemed to have places to go so tinny phone alarms went off at 1am (yes, really!), 5am, 6am, 7am etc followed by lots of rustling in bags and loud, dramatic exits from the room. So, to cut a long story short, we have decided to stay in double rooms from now on wherever possible and sod the budget. When else will we be in Australia again ey?

Yesterday we jumped on a bus to Sydney. We're both excited to be here as it's such an iconic city and there's so much to see :-)