Canberra

Canberra is the seat of government in Australia. It has many interesting things to see and do, if you have the time and also have a car. However, most of us seem to prefer to avoid Canberra and go elsewhere for our holidays.

I had a purpose in visiting Canberra. The National Gallery of Australia was showing one set of folios from The Book of Kells. This book is one of the most fabulous creations devised by humans. The calligraphy is superb, but more so are the illuminations. Somehow, the Book of Kells has managed to survive the last 1200 years mostly (but not entirely) intact. It is a bible, of sorts, but I don't hold that against it!

So, for Easter 2000, I drove the 700-odd km to Canberra, all so I could see the most magnificent book in the world.

Along the way, I stopped overnight at my sister's place in Wodonga and got her all excited cos I was meeting up with a chap in Canberra. :-) O, I am such a tease! Then, I made the most foolish mistake in the world, something that one should never do when travelling. I made sure that I was well-hydrated.

An hour out of Albury-Wodonga, there is a town called Holbrook. This is an extremely conveniently located town with extremely convenient conveniences for those of us who have a big drink before leaving. It also has a submarine in a park, the HMAS Otway. I kid you not - see? The only problem with the sub, and getting a picture of it is that it is extremely popular with tourists, particularly large Japanese families who like ensuring that they have combinations of photos with everyone in them.... I had to wait about 10 minutes to get this shot.

The drive is pretty boring - most of the scenery starts looking the same after a while - rolling downs, brightly green (remember this is autumn in Australia) after some rains, a few cattle or sheep, lots of divided highway.... The small towns along the way are ideal to break the drive.

One of my favourite stops is five miles out of Gundagai, where the dog sits on the tuckerbox. By the time I got this far, I was starting to feel pretty wonky, so excuse the camera angle ;-) The petrol is as dear as it ever gets at this point, and the souvenirs are pretty tacky - all in all, a perfect tourist spot.

Once I reached Canberra, having dodged Winnebagos (ack, they have reached Oz!!!) and speeding Greyhound buses, I eventually located the most salubrious Canberra Youth Hostel. Next time, I will remember to take the YHA guide book with me so I don't have to rely on visitor centre maps and my own dodgy memory. Also, since Canberra is based on circles with the joining roads sprouting off at weird angles and winding around hills, navigating across town with only my memory of the map was very exciting.

I recommend the Canberra YHA - it is a very nice, clean, spacious hostel on the edge of some bushland.

The National Gallery opens at 10am, so I arranged to meet Michael at his digs at that time, then we could move on and see the Book of Kells. As it turned out, only two pages of the Book were on display on any one day, so after queueing for about 50 minutes, we finally got to see two pages of The Book for all of about 60 seconds. Was it worth $12 and a long queue and a drive to Canberra? Yep! The exhibition of illuminated books was very interesting - there are quite a number of books in Australian (and NZ) collections. It rather surprised me as I would not have thought those sorts of treasures would have been brought here - the books and manuscripts being several hundred years older than white settlement of Oz (and NZ).

Photography within the exhibition was banned, but I got a couple of funny shots outside the gallery - here are some of me and Michael with a sculpture. Hobbits rule, ok?

Afterwards, I dropped Michael back home so that he could do stuff like Christians do at Easter and then happily went and did what pagans do - ignore Easter and do some sightseeing instead. Here are some of the places I visited in my 20 hours in Canberra:

a view from the Telstra tower	a different angle on the tower	there really isn't a picture here. so don't even look for it!
mist on pond at the National Gallery of Australia	view from the tower	sunset from the Telstra Tower

OK, I visited lots more places than this but I didn't get any pictures that I would show my mother, let alone anyone else. The Mt Stromlo observatory was very interesting, and I recommend a trip out to it, but be very wary of their space shop if you like pics of space like I do - very damaging to the wallet.... There are also places like the Dinosaur Museum and the unfortunately named Cockington Green (or something like that) which has miniature houses, etc (ok, I like that stuff...), the science museum, the war memorial and lots and lots of other things, plus plenty of bushland and the national Botanic Gardens. Something for everyone! Oh, and Parliament House and the old parliament house. But not in winter unless you like it cold - Canberra is on a plateau and it is often freezing, literally, and snowing there. Summer temps can reach 40 degrees celcius, so it suffers extremes of weather.

At about 2PM, I fled Canberra and headed for the coast

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