It all started quite boring and innocently with a rainy 6 hour drive from Melbourne to Canberra. I had eventually met up with Dominique, one of my travel buddies (formal introductions will have to wait until Katrina, our last travel buddy, arrives in a few days), in Melbourne. She had just come back from Canberra with a friend and we decided that the cheapest option for us to get north was to drive up again to Canberra with said friend.
Once we arrived in Canberra we decided on a YHA hostel. Bad move that was. We were just sipping our second beer in a bar downstairs when I eventually met Pete, without a doubt the craziest person on this planet. Dominique had been staying with Pete for the better part of six weeks, so as soon as he came into the bar he made us get all our stuff from the hostel to move to his house. That’s one way of wasting 30 perfectly good dollars. But I just love the aussie hospitality!!
I just couldn’t believe how cold it can actually be in Australia during winter. And Canberra is probably one of the colder places, with temperatures around 3° C at night. So a lot of the time we just sat around the oven in Pete’s shed sipping beer, dancing to Bob Marley and laughing our heads off. I blame that for the lack of fresh content on Travel-Junkie.com. Those hangovers the day after had absolutely nothing to do with that…
We didn’t just party, though. Dominique and I went for a long drive to Tidbinbilla. The Americans have some kind of huge satellite dish installed there. There’s a small museum attached, where I found out that on some planets I just weigh 5kg while on others I’d suddenly put on 200kg. On the way there you can still see the devastating effect the bush fires from 2003 had on the area. There are vast stretches of land with absolutely nothing on it or just recent reforestation going on
What Canberra has in abundance, though, are Kangaroos. They are everywhere. We spent ages looking for the jumpy little buggers behind the Defence Forces Headquarters. And when we found them Pete went after them with the car. Sometimes they would just stop and we could get a good picture, but most of them were just happily skipping away from us. Apparently kangaroos are highly developed creatures as well and always stay close to the signs that say that you have to drive carefully for the next few kilometres…
Before coming to Canberra almost everybody had told me that it will be so boring there. I loved it. Granted, there is not that much to do there, but it all depends on the people you know or the people you meet. I had an awesome time. Short before we left, Pete set us up with Ben, a mate of his, in Cronulla, Sydney, where we stay right now. Incidentally, the night we arrived was also Ben’s 30th birthday party, so the next hangover was pre-programmed…
