travel diary — day 225

In australia, travel on 26 October 2009 tagged australia, beer, blue poles, boxes, breakfast, bus, canberra, circular quay, coffee, darling harbour, exhibition, federal mint, ferry, fish and chips, gallery, harbour bridge, hostel, jackson pollock, john howard, kirabili, koala, luna park, mall, map, matilda, meat pie, national library, nick cave, norman hotel, opera house, parliament house, rain, steak, sydney, the lodge, tickets, train, yha with no comments

day 221 — when i checked into the hostel (the day before) i got a sydney city map which also had some coupons attached. one of the coupons was for ‘break­fast with the koalas’ at sydney’s wild­life centre. it soun­ded good, but required get­ting up early.

i walked down to darling har­bour and was dis­ap­poin­ted to find that the wild­life centre was shut. i found an employee and he told me that the break­fast idea had not been pop­u­lar and they’d stopped offer­ing it. damn! so i headed back down to cir­cu­lar quay and the opera house for another look around.

i went back to the hotel, checked out, and decided to see if i could get a bus to can­berra. four hours later i was wan­der­ing the streets of our nation’s cap­ital look­ing for the local yha. i bought a yha mem­ber­ship, which gets me a 10% dis­count on yha glob­ally, checked in, had a late lunch and spent the after­noon wan­der­ing around lon­don cir­cuit (can­berra, not eng­land, lol) and check­ing email.

day 222 — i wanted to make a big day of it today, so that i could try and get more done. i jumped on a bus after break­fast and headed straight for the new par­lia­ment house. the fed­eral politi­cians weren’t there, so i wandered around for a while. par­i­la­ment house is really nice and it was fun to look around.

i saw ‘blue poles’ by jack­son pol­lock (the biggest and most expens­ive piece of crap in the world) and looked at all the por­traits of former prime min­is­ters. i couldn’t find john howard’s por­trait, which is a good thing, cause i might have torn it down and pissed on it … which would have got me into trouble (maybe not, nobody likes john howard).

i walked around the out­side of par­lia­ment house and down to the lodge (where the prime min­is­ter lives). i had a look at the out­side but couldn’t go in (obvi­ously). i had also con­sidered going down to the fed­eral mint, but i didn’t know exactly where it was, i didn’t want to spend $20 on a cab fare and it was too far to walk. so i went back to par­lia­ment house and had to wait nearly an hour for a bus back towards town.

then it was off to the national lib­rary for a spot of lunch and a cruise around the nick cave exhib­i­tion. i actu­ally liked the nick cave gal­lery. there were some great pho­tos and diar­ies cave used to write his song. on the walls were boxes with ‘open me’ writ­ten on them. i opened one and nick cave’s voice bel­lowed out at me, explain­ing some aspect of his career. it scared the abso­lute crap out of me.

the after­noon was get­ting late and i was start­ing to think of head­ing back to sydney. i had spent a lot of money and didn’t want to spend too much more. i wandered around the mall, look­ing for buses, trains and flights back to bris­bane. most were too expens­ive, so i came up with a plan to wing it and pick up a last minute ticket on the train. i returned to the hotel, had din­ner and spent the even­ing on the internet.

day 223 — i went to bed at 2am, which was prob­ably a very stu­pid thing to do … con­sid­er­ing i had to get up at 5.30am to go to the train sta­tion. sur­pris­ingly, i woke up at 5.30 (without an alarm), grabbed my gear (quietly so as not to wake the other people in the dorm) and headed to the train sta­tion. it was a fast run to the sta­tion and i was a little bit pan­icky, not know­ing exactly whether the train was leav­ing at the right time and not know­ing whether i could actu­ally get a ticket.

it turns out that i had 30 minutes to spare and there were plenty of tick­ets. the train ran through to sydney where i had already bought a con­nect­ing train to bris­bane. while on the train to sydney i was so hapy i cel­eb­rated with a pie and a cof­fee for breakfast.

the trip to sydney was only a few hours and i had a lot of time to kill before the train to bris­bane. i real­ised that i’d for­got­ten to take mat­ilda to see the opera house, so i checked my bag and headed back into town again. this time i walked across the har­bour bridge to kirab­ili. i had some fish and chips for lunch and while i was eat­ing it star­ted belt­ing down rain.

i braved the rain and walked to luna park to take some pho­tos. then i jumped on a ferry which took me back to cir­cu­lar quay. the rain had star­ted to ease up and i man­aged to get back to the train sta­tion. i got some cof­fee and listened to music while i waited for the train.

the trip back to bris­bane was fairly unad­ven­tur­ous. i had a con­ver­sa­tion with the car­riage guards who were inter­ested in my cam­era and angry at the people who were secretly smoking in the toilets.

since i had the whole seat to myself, i curled up and man­aged to get some sleep.

day 224 — i arrived in bris­bane early and caught the train to craig’s house. i caught up on my sleep and lazed around the house for the day. in the even­ing, four of us went to the nor­man hotel where i ate a whop­ping 600 gram steak. des­pite the size, i pol­ished off the steak, and the veget­ables, and two beers. hehehe … it was a huge meal.

day 225 - after all the recent adven­tures, i needed a break. i stayed at craig’s house and caught up with web stuff.

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