A Tale of Two Cities - Sydney and Canberra

We arrived into Sydney on the Virgin Blue flight at around 10.30pm (is it our imagination or are the seats REALLY uncomfortable on that plane?), which sounds late, but of course was only 8.30pm to our body clocks which were reset to Asia/WA time way back in November! We picked up the car without incident and rather than doing the 30 mins into town and try and navigate a busy city in the dark, we headed to the airport ‘Formule 1’ to rest our heads. Here on the East Coast we are going one-way, in a roundabout sort of fashion, so we will drop the car off in Brisbane right before our flight to Auckland. But anyway, back to Sydney…

Next morning we were up late – our 7.30 has turned into 9.30 =:-o!! Not wishing to partake of the Krispy Kreme breakfast option next door to the hotel we decided to head to Sydney’s most famous brekkie joint - Bondi Beach. It was gorgeous, the sun was shining, good food and people watching, followed by a run on the winter weekday sand.

Bondi Beach:

Yes, of course it’s winter here, although sunny and 21 celsius seems like a pretty good ‘low’ season to me! If only November temps were like that at home. We headed into town to our hotel on William St – bang in the middle of town. We have taken to tracking recently refurbished hotels as they often slash their rates – this one is a quarter of the rack rates thanks to winter specials and a refit. That afternoon we walked over the very high Sydney Tower and zoomed to the top for amazing views over the city and harbour:

Also included in the price was a funky 3D movie thing all about OZ which was really good reef/beach and outback revision for the girls. For our second day we did the traditional tourist ‘hop on – hop off’ open top bus and stopped to tick the Opera House, Bridge and Darling Harbour off the list. It was another lovely sunny day so we didn’t freeze in our flip flops as we wandered through the wonderful Botanical Gardens too.

Classic Sydney Postcard Pic:

Chris gets arty at the Opera House:

The next day we checked out and drove the 3.5 hours to Canberra to see Miss Smith (her name is actually Sarah!) – Fin’s Year 2 teacher from school last year. Sarah’s partner Jon secured a job in the nation’s capital from the UK and so they have relocated for a year and it was great to see some familiar faces! The nights suddenly got a LOT colder (down to freezing) and we had to change rooms when we realised the heating didn’t work in the first one! Amazingly the sun still shone pulling the temps up to 20 degrees in the day and we saw lots of the sights of Canberra over the 3 days we were there:

Parliament House (which was cool – amazing that you could walk right into the public gallery over the chamber) – with the symbol of Australia gleaming like a spider web on top:

The War Memorial - encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian war involvement and more tears by the wall of names:

Lanyon Homestead - so interesting and beautifully restored to reflect station life in the 1850-1900’s:

The National Museum of Australia (microscopically charting Aussie history from the indigenous tribes right through recent history) – showcasing this special exhibition of an incredible aboriginal ‘land claim’ map:

We saw lots of Sarah and Jon and talked a lot about living overseas and the pros and cons, and had dinner with some of Sarah’s very extended family who live in Canberra and have small children, which was a great evening for the girls.

So despite the derogatory remarks of Bill Bryson and others we enjoyed our time in Canberra – there is certainly plenty to do, but it does lack something compared to other Aussie cities. Settled when it was it’s a real shame that it wasn’t developed in an art deco style (such as Napier in New Zealand) or similar classic style of the time – it would give the city more of a focus and place in time, it was actually settled in 1913 but most of it looks as though it was finished last week. Chris and I have visited Perth, Darwin, Cairns, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney and now Canberra on our travels and remain convinced that Aussie cities have never really evolved past the administration centres they started out as. They are too glossy, too many trendy conversions and lack a lot of wonderful Edwardian and Victorian buildings that would have been built – the best examples we saw were in Kalgoorlie, where all energies have gone into getting gold out of the ground – it’s too remote to try and attract huge tourist numbers. City life is absolutely NOT what Australia is about, and Sydney has always been our least favourite – it just tries too hard. This trip we liked it better, but not as much as Perth, and certainly nowhere near as much as Hanoi, Bangkok and the other Asian centres which still maybe have a sense of worrying too much about sustaining life and health and much less about image.

(However, when all's said and done, as Bill Bryson said, Canberra is still the Gateway to Everywhere Else! - Ed)

See ya
All love CRFS xxxx