RestlessNatives.net NativeGuide to
AUSTRALIA
Sydney to Heron Island :: Lizard Island :: Weekends from Sydney
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Australia page 3: WEEKENDS FROM Sydney
So far this page includes Jervis Bay and Canberra. If what you're looking for isn't here, try our first Australia page, which contains more on Sydney and its surrounds.
We also visited Melbourne for a weekend.
Deb completed her first marathon (woohoo!) and we went to our first Rugby
World Cup match (Canada v Wales).
Jervis Bay
For our anniversary in 2003, we drove down the coast a couple of hours to Jervis Bay. Or rather, we drove what seemed like forever to get out of Sydney on Friday evening, and then zipped down the highway to Jervis Bay.
Jervis Bay (pronounced JARvis in Australian) is an area on the southern New South Wales Coast with a few small towns, plenty of wild coastline and protected forests, and excellent wildlife. The central town is Huskisson, where we spent two nights in one of several average motels near the shopping strip and dock that serves as the center of activity.
It's a nice quiet place, more so because we visited off-season, where the best food is in the local pub (outstanding fish and chips), there's always someone coming or going from the dock in a diving or whalewatching or fishing boat, and a string of shell beaches stretches out for miles to encircle the big bay. Deb put her feet up with a good book when we weren't out for a walk on the beach or whatever, and George dragged his sorry butt out of bed on a cold morning to go diving...
The local dive shop is called "Pro-Dive" (aren't they all) and they got me sorted out with a 2-piece 5mm wetsuit, but the water still felt very chilly when I hopped in. Completely worth it, though, because we were out at the local seal colony for a dive with the seals. They're Australian fur seals (there were also a couple of NZ fur seals hanging about on the rocks) and they live in a small (and unfortunately for us, shady) inlet in the coastal cliffs a few miles south of the mouth of the Bay. As we pulled in and started to don our gear, they poked their heads up to check us out, but we were soon abandoned for a more interesting visitor; just as we were getting ready, an adolescent humpback whale (say, 2/3 adult size) cruised by maybe 50 or 100 meters away, and all the seals swam out to check it out. It reminded me of an elephant walking through a field with dogs in it. I got the distinct impression that the whale was massively apathetic about the antics of the seals all around it. Eventually he plodded on by and the seals came back to play with us (I saw probably a dozen or so of them but there could've been more around).
Speaking of antics, the dive folks told us that we ought to act as goofy as possible underwater, because if the seals get bored with us, they'll just swim away. So there we were trying to entertain seals. Used up my air pretty quickly doing it too. Great fun though. The seals are basically like big dogs that happen to swim really, really well. They'd swim up, eyeball us, loop around, etc., seemingly as interested in us as we were in them. It did strike me as being a lot like playing with dogs 20+ meters underwater. (Strange dogs, that is -- so I didn't poke my hands at them despite them getting close enough to touch a few times.)
George and the divers caught a glimpse of another whale while they were out, so the whale watching seemed like a good activity to book for the next day. Unfortunately, we cruised around for quite a while and didn't see any whales or any of the many dolphins that live in the Bay. But it did give Deb a chance to see the seals playing in the water and up on the cliffs, and right at the dock we saw a lost little penguin happily chasing things around the pilings. (That's their name, "little penguin"; they're bluish and only a foot or so in length.)
So we saw a couple of critters and generally had a nice relaxing weekend. Even the Sunday drive home was ok, as we got to see the countryside we'd missed in the dark on the way down.
Canberra
We heard about some special programs at the National Zoo, and decided to make a quick trip to Canberra our 2004 birthday present to ourselves.
Canberra is about a three-hour drive southwest of Sydney (a nice enough but very warm drive with the top down on the day we went). The Australian Capital Territory (ACT) is a small landlocked area carved out of NSW in much the same way that DC was created from VA and MD in the US. (Thus Australia resolved the dispute between Sydney and Melbourne as to which would be the capital of the country.) Canberra is arranged around a manmade lake and, like Washington, is very much a planned city, with the broad boulevards and symmetrical forms and contrived sightlines that implies. There's even a Mall extending from Parliament House, reminiscent of the one in Washington.
Canberra has some mildly interesting public buildings and memorials and museums and the like, and clearly it attracts some tourists (though nothing on the order of DC), but as a general rule if you tell people in Sydney that you're off for a weekend in Canberra, they're liable to respond with "Oh. Why?" in a tone which implies that they have trouble thinking of any persuasive reason to set foot in the ACT.
Well, we had two things planned in Canberra: a trip to the zoo and an evening at the rugby. Anything else we fit in would be a bonus.
Why go all the way to Canberra for the National Zoo when we have a good zoo right here in Sydney? Because we'd heard about a couple of special offers. One was a tour with a keeper, the focus being on getting a bit closer to the bars and feeding some of the larger carnivores through the bars. That sounded (and was) pretty cool. But the one that got us down there was the chance to spend 15 minutes or so inside the cheetah enclosure.
They have three cheetahs, two females and a male, sharing a fairly large enclosure. They have become comfortable enough with their regular keepers to accept the strangers that the keepers bring into their territory. When we walked in, one of the females was keeping watch nearby while the other two napped in the shade of a little covered den. It being middle of the afternoon on a very hot day, we weren't expecting much activity, and in fact they were pretty happy to just lie there and be petted. Cheetahs do purr just like enormous housecats, and they gave us a lick with tongues like sandpaper. We sat and stroked the cheetahs and chatted with the keepers -- and snapped some photos, and had the keepers take a few for us -- and the fifteen minutes and more flew by. In the end it was entirely worth the money and trouble to spend some time up close with these animals.
As you can imagine, the other tour was a bit anticlimactic after the cheetahs, but still fun. We visited (and in most cases fed) their otters (seven of them, named after Snow White's seven dwarves), sun bear, tigons, colobus, lions, cougars, dingos, tigers, and European brown bears before finishing up by acting as a jungle gym for a big olive python. Each critter had its own quirks and each visit was a bit different in terms of our interaction with them. We went into the enclosure and petted the dingoes, tossed shrimp to the otters, had our fingers licked clean by the brown bears, etc. The otters and the baby colobus were very cute, and it was fun to pet dingoes even though they're basically just dogs, and cougars are very striking, but the tigons were maybe the best part. They're the biggest of big cats, born to a tiger father and a lion mother. There never were many of these in the world as tiger-lion mating happens only in captivity, and there are even fewer around now -- the ones in Canberra are eighteen years old. So a chance to handfeed them was a treat.
After our fun at the zoo, we headed out to see a Super 12 (rugby union) match between the Auckland Blues (whom we've adopted just because the team is full of All-Blacks, including Deb's favorite, Carlos Spencer) and the local ACT Brumbies. The mighty Blues were supposed to win handily, but played from behind all night and essentially collapsed from poor decision-making near the end. It's hard to say which was more annoying, the Blues loss, or trying to get in and out of the small but idiotic stadium with its numerous unnecessary bottlenecks for cars and people. We kept half-expecting a moat and drawbridge to block our path.
The following day we visited the National Museum and then stopped by Capitol Hill briefly on our way out of town. The museum isn't bad, but Australian history just seems a bit...hmm... sparse, perhaps. Imagine visiting a State Museum of Wisconsin and you'll have an idea. The capitol area is reminiscent of DC, but the Parliament House in particular struck Deb as a bit Soviet in its grim (lack of) style.
We returned to Canberra in April 2004 so Deb could run in the marathon. She improved her time from her first marathon by about 25 minutes!
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