A pretty good lie-in and a surprisingly good AU$ 4 breakfast (provided from refrigerated bits and pieces behind reception). Back through Canberra's mystic one-way system. Given a starting village of nothing, Canberra has been transformed into Australia's capital city of not quite perfection. The city is covered by layers of circles, hexagons etc. that radiate out until suddenly a circle of roads has an epicentre elsewhere which coliides badly with everything else. Of the important roads, flip a coin as to whether it continues in a circle or only allows one-way traffic. Choose a segment of the city at random to find the main shopping and eating plazas and we stumbled across the only two supermarkets we saw by sheer luck. The city has no soul, from what I can see and its surprising largeness and prevailing hotness (today 31C) prevents any ramble about town.
We send more films home (Helen her 73rd film) and try and get some money from a cash point but none appears. Did I press the wrong key -- no way to find out until I get an online statement or try the machine again (not likely). [We then ] get lost in the one-way system before taking an enforced look at the Botanical Gardens. Frankly, gardens in 30C don't have much to offer than a generally parched look. They do have the odd lizard and parrot scuffling about but that's it. They did have a couple of fenced or alarmed Wollemi Pine, one of the world's rarest trees found a few km from Sydney in 1994. Unchanged in 480m years it's so special they go to extreme lengths to guard it from theft etc.
We try our luck at the parliament building. It's not a bad building nice and cool (a personal attraction) but it doesn't inspire. It's quite characterless but well made. Oddly, it does house the final imprint of the four Magna Cartas amongst it's paper relics on display. Not hidden but quite inconspicuous for such a rare and important piece. It's been too long and too hot so we forgo the National Archives, we've seen a facsimilie of Queen Victoria's assent and it's not that interesting. Except if was if you ignored the text and looked at the writing: every few words or so the size of the text jumped to nearly double as though the scribe had finished the previous "burst", refreshed his quill and started again with a revived and more relaxed hand. No matter how many words were involved I'd have thought they could have done a better job than that.
We head off for Narooma, our base for the night, just down the road from Bateman's Bay. As dull as the first time, I fell asleep immediately. When Narooma appears it's a lovely little town but not for us as Helen's booked us into Merimbura an hour down the coast. Merimbura is more than the map suggests and we dine in a restaurant with a hideously obsequious hostess. Still the food wasn't bad and more importantly the wine went down rather well so we went a touch over budget. It's hard to say if Australia is more expensive a place, a lot of the prices are broadly the same as NZ but we have US$20 more per day [in the budget], thanks to the Lonely Planet budget, so we certainly feel a little more flush. Mark suggested, as you might fathom from looking at things, that there is a broad pound-dollar parity for incomes and outgoings until you look at some things more closely. As tourists from rich countries we have a lot of money to spend and [we] spend by budget -- if it fits in we'll have it. But then we, two scruffy and sadly quite stinky (it's been a hot day) people just spent AU$101 on a meal. I hadn't spent that much on a meal in the UK for a while, and it didn't look like many tourists did. Given that so many restaurants charge roughly AU$ 20 for a main course, do Aussies eat out a lot? Mark says yes, and he's been here five years now so he should know. So there's a bit of figuring out how Aussies get through. A six pack of bottles of beer is AU$ 10. Should we look at that as US$ 5 hence £ 3 or £ 10? We return to the hostel to the amplified sound of talkers outside the window. Frankly this doesn't bode well for a good night's sleep.
Wandarrah Lodge, Merimbula S36.89539 E149.91400 Elev. 27m
Copyright 2003 Ian Fitchet. All rights reserved.