http://www.marmot.net/2002au/2002-04/2002-0422_Canberra/

Posted several pictures from our wanderings around Canberra today and yesterday--in particular, Parliament House, the National Museum of Australia, and the Australian War Memorial.

Comments

dancubca

April 23 2002, 08:45:39

Hey Daniel,

I absolutely love the posts (and pics) from your trip! Thanks for doing it :)

Of course, I'm really looking forward to your post about Perth as I'm considering a move there someday.

danlmarmot

April 23 2002, 15:37:25

Running away from something? Perth is absolutely the furthest city you can go to from the Bay Area!

Still, I'm …

Spend a wonderfully pleasant day in Canberra. Mailed off a box of books back home; for the record, it's A$60 to mail a 16kg box of printed material to the US.

Then a bit of more shopping at the clearance racks at Katmandhu, a block away from the apartment. I needed a few more hiking shirts, as my old North Face 100% nylon shirt has got a bit too stinky. Walked by a park with some 'garden sculptures' of huge casuarina seedpods--must get a picture of myself sitting on them tomorrow morning.

Then we drove over to the Australian …

One heard three times today: "Australia is a young nation, so... [insert some whinging here]."

Well, yesterday (Sunday) we had one thing to do: go to the Buchan Caves in eastern Victoria. It's one of the few nature thingies you can do regardless of the weather--and good for that, as it has just been pissing down rain on Saturday since we left the Prom. Fields were all flooded, rivers were surging, and potholes were sprouting.

Buchan Caves were fairly interesting; we did the Royal Cave tour. With six inches of rain in the past few days, they were wet as well--the water had percolated the 30m or so into the cave system, with dripping water …

Yes, that's what I think I did to my modem when I plugged it into the lovely phone line at the St George Motor Inn in north Melbourne last week.

But all is better now; an quasi-cheapo PCMCIA modem now does the work. Still, I still think the old modem could be OK, and perhaps it's the phone system here in the past three hotels. They all emit an odd warbling tone for the dial tone--and then just go silent while you dial. Even now, I can't dial my very national ISP, Telstra BigPond, on this particular phone line. So …

Wonderful day hiking around at the Prom (Wilson's Promotory NP).

We rented a cabin in the park for tomorrow night, at the very southern tip of the park--and the Australian mainland! Should be fun, though it is a 19km hike in.

Yet another Strange Wildlife Sighting today: while waiting in the parking lot, Chris got a jump from a rosella that landed on the radio aerial! The rosella--a kind of parrot--then hopped onto the rear view mirror on my door. I snapped a few pics, then it flew off. It wasn't more than two feet away.

That's one thing about …

How many oceans are there? Really?

We took a day trip down the Great Ocean Road southwest of Melbourne.

Anything goes

Not enough curry

I tease a swan.

OK. I've decided to post more pictures. I'm getting rather slow... making sure each picture is perfect.

So I'm now aiming for speed: grab a few interesting pictures, do batch editing on all of them so they look sorta decent, then doing a thumbnail sheet of them all with minimal captioning.

Yesterday's pics are at http://www.marmot.net/2002au/gal/2002-0411/ . We went to the Melbourne Garden and Flower Show and the Melbourne Museum, and there are a couple of pictures of what streets look like here. Enjoy!

Not enough boy flowers at the Melbourne Flower Show for you, Dan?

A great day in Melbourne--first to the Garden and Flower Show, then to the new Melbourne Museum behind it, then to Prahan Market for foodie stuff.

It was a nice warm day--maybe 25c; we took the train to the flower show, which is a big big major deal. It's $17 to get in, and thousands of people were going. Browsing the retail stands you can certainly tell this is a nominally British country: it's all about daffs and tulips and various bulbs and English cottage garden plants. The Queen would be proud! Does Melbourne have the same climate as, say …

I've finally made web pages for a project on our trip. The idea is to make a visual log of where we've been, so every time the odometer rolls over another 1000km I've taken a picture. Plus it helps me remember all the places we've been.

The log can be seen at http://www.marmot.net/2002au/log/odometer/ Enjoy!

everywhere else, but not

I walked down Chapel Street in Melbourne tonight

A fast internet connection

Back from Tasmania. The ferry departed at about 4.30pm on Saturday. We once again took advantage of the 'Teen Lounge/Galactica' video game and pinball machines, noticing that (a) Teenagers of Today have no concept how to play pinball and (b) pinball machines on ships don't have their tilt sensors activated at all!

So we had dinner at 6.30, read a bit, and went to bed... for the ferry was scheduled to dock in Melbourne about 5:00am. yawn You couldn't sleep much past 3am anyway, since they kept on announcing 'Breakfast is now served in the Promenade …

Grrr. My ISP, Telstra BigPond, has a very interesting ISP dialin number. There's only one number for all of Australia, and it's charged at the price of a local call (80 cents typically). Makes it handy.

Telstra, being the national telco company and holding a pretty good monopoly on local phone service, pulled this off by creating their very own special area code: 01.

Irritatingly enough, though, some PBX's can't handle this funky new-and-Telstra BigPond ISP number at all. Like the PBX that's in this rather dingy apartment we've rented for the week in Melbourne.

So... hee hee, I dusted …

Bad.

...

Warm summer day.

Wet and cool. Chris and I took a cruise up the Gordon River into the rainforest. It was misty and mountainous; reminded me of pictures of China's Three Gorges. Cruise was OK, but at 5 1/2 hours it was about 1 1/2 hours too long.

The best part of the cruise was right at the beginning: when we went out of Macquarie Harbour into the ocean through the 60m gap called Devil's Gate. The tide was going out, and we glided out. into the Southern Ocean. Out in the Southern Ocean a couple of miles, a pod of …

Breakfast at the Oatlands Lodge was quick, we then headed out on the road across the Central Highlands, following a route described in the big "Explore Australia by Four Wheel Drive", a big bible of a book we picked up somewhere in Sydney.

Interlaken was our first stop; it looked like a town between two lakes and I had vague visions of a Swiss like village. Sorry, no. It was in high grazing country, with sparse eucalypts and fields, the village was no more than a few sheds and some battered weatherboard houses. What's more is that one of the …