Australia Part 3 – Kangaroos, Botanical Gardens and Bonzai – and the War Memorial

17th to 20th March, 2020

Righto, the final post (the Last post?). Quite a lot to fit in, but here we go…

Claire very kindly drove us out to the west of Canberra with the aim of seeing a bit of the countryside (scenery?), though unfortunately almost all of our objectives were closed, largely due to the fires that afflicted Australia earlier in the year. We still had a lovely drive and in the end went to a nature reserve that we happened to pass, which was brilliant, not least because we saw some kangaroos!

Robin especially seemed to enjoy himself…

By the way, Robin managed to fall over a few days earlier and land squarely on his nose, hence the appearance of strawberry jam smeared over his visage!

And then it was time for the kangaroos!!!! A very elect number of photos (you can guess how many I took!).

We did have one last place to visit and that was the observatory at the Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex. The telescopes were impressively large!

And finally, some sheep! (and another bird).

We seemed to be doing our visit to Canberra in phases – museums, galleries and now the world of the outdoors. Our next visit was to the Botanical Gardens, very conveniently located in the heart of the city and absolutely abounding with plants, trees and animals, including a brown snake, which we met rather unexpectedly. We all got a surprise! According to one source I found, I think it was an Eastern Brown Snake: ‘Fast-moving, aggressive and known for their bad temper, eastern brown snakes, together with other browns are responsible for more deaths every year in Australia than any other group of snakes. Not only is their venom ranked as the second most toxic of any land snake in the world (based on tests on mice)’. Luckily we didn’t’t know this before we met it! To give it its due, it slithered off smartish. I did manage a photo, but you would be hard pressed to see where it is as it was in full slither at the time and blended very well into the background.

Luckily we were never likely to get lost…

There were a lot of Banksia (named after Sir Joseph Banks), which had some lovely flowers (I think they are the flowers…)

There was a pleasant amount of friendly wildlife..

It was a lot of fun for those of us who have just learned the joy of walking…

The Gardens varied from rainforest to the arid centre of Australia to a lot of eucalyptus trees.

And finally somer photos that didn’t seem to fit into any other category..

A lovely visit and we managed to replicate it the next day to some extent when we visited the Arboretum. Now they actually had a fire some years back, so actually there were not many trees to see other than those recently planted. However they did have a very fine bonsai collection, a lovely grassy slope and some great views.

First up, the bonsai. It is a seriously cool skill. Some of these were older than we were.

There seemed to be a sort of open-air amphitheatre, which Robin especially enjoyed, though to be honest, I think Val and Georgie did as well. It looked as though once Robin started down the slope he was not going to stop!

And the views..

And finally some features of the architecture at the site…

OK, our last day and having done most of the packing, I ventured off to the War Memorial. It is number one on the TripAdvisor list of attractions in Canberra and certainly lived up to its billing. It is located very prominently at the end of the wide Anzac Parade, which itself has several monuments to different contingents of the Australian armed forces.

The museum part is very well organised, with sections for the main conflicts of the 20th Century, though there is coverage of the period before that (Crimea and especially Boer Wars). The displays are easy to follow and, in the case of the section on the prisoners-of war of the Japanese particularly moving. Quite a lot of use of modelling…

And that was pretty much that. We had a lovely last evening and set off the next day for the dive to Sydney, returning the car and off to the airport. Thankfully the planes were still flying and so it was off to Singapore with Qantas and then to London with BA. 23 hours later we landed in Heathrow.

I hope you have enjoyed the blog. It has been fun and hard work to do! Not sure when the next one will happen as travel is certainly not on the agenda at present.

Stay safe and well.