When you arrive at your hotel at 4am, after an 8 hour bus journey, there is nothing worse than something going wrong with your booking. So naturally, that is exactly what happened.

We turned up to our hotel room (as there are absolutely no hostels in Canberra - telling you more about Canberra than I ever could) to find we only had one rather small double bed. Thankfully, the receptionist took pity on us and put us in an apartment room, with 2 bedrooms, a kitchen and 2 living rooms. Slightly excessive considering we were only going to be at the hotel for 6 hours, but we took it.

A few more hours of sleep later, we set off to the war memorial. Although we were aware it wasn't a usual stop for backpackers, we were pleasantly surprised and impressed with it, and left feeling very cultured.

The rest of the day consisted of a lot of walking, as it became clear very quickly that buses do not run regularly in Canberra. Luckily, most of these walks were along scenic routes and the weather was cloudy but warm, making it a perfect walking day.

Following on from our cultural experience at the War Memorial, we headed to the national gallery where we took a lot of sneaky photos and experienced some of the most pretentious 'art' I've ever seen.

After deciding we didn't want to waste money on the Science Musuem we thought we would add politics to our war and art day and visited the old and new parliament house. I can summarise these both in the same way I would Canberra: pretty, cultural but a bit boring.

Therefore we didn't spend long and instead headed to the shopping centre to get a bit of shopping done before our journey to Sydney.

Although we almost ended up being roped into an aboriginal protest, we eventually made it safely to the bus and made our way to Sydney.

If there was anywhere that was the complete opposite of Canberra, it would be Sydney. When we arrived at 9.30pm the hostel was chaotic, with a large group of people waiting in reception for crab racing!

Feeling a bit overwhelmed with the drastic change in pace, we went to bed so we would be ready to explore in the morning.