Friday, September 27, 2013

Around Canberra–Day 1

Another fun and interesting day in Australia.  We had a nice day in Canberra, but just scratching the surface of what is here.  Canberra is a beautiful planned city that was specifically designed to be the Australia National Capital.  In that respect it is similar to Washington DC.  It even has its own land area called the Australian Capital Territory.  It is a planned city in that there are specific areas dedicated to homes (both single family and apartment complexes), specific dedicated shopping areas, the Government functions, etc.

We started the day at the Mount Ainslie Lookout.  It is an excellent place to get an overview of the city.  This is a view across from the Australian War Memorial, down Anzac Parade, across Lake Burley,  the old parliament building, and the current parliament building.

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This view includes the same basic view but shows most of the extent of Lake Burley.  On the right is the Australian National University campus.

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We spent most of the morning and part of the afternoon walking through the National Gallery of Australia.  It is the main art gallery and has both new (modern) art works as well as paintings that cover the entire Australian time period.  Their display of Aboriginal art is extensive and very interesting.  Unfortunately, photography was not allowed so no pictures. For more information on the museum see.

From there we visited one of the many parks along the banks of Lake Burley.  So many water birds that were there.  They included:

Black Swan

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Eurasian Coot

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Australian Pelican

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Grey Teal

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Other birds we have seen, but no pictures are the Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, Galah, Crimson Rosella, Australian Raven, and the Australian Magpie.  That was just today.

We also sighted some kangaroo’s.  We understand they are fairly common around ACT (as well as other states).

Here are three we saw today.

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Instead of the “deer crossing” signs along the roads, we see a lot of these instead

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We drove through the Embassy area.  Many of the embassy buildings are constructed along country themes.  this is the Malaysian Embassy

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This one is the Embassy of Thailand

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At the end of the day, we went to the Telstra Tower on Black Mountain,

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Although the observation area is not that high above ground level (60 meters), being at the top of Black Mountain, the views are excellent.  It is located Northwest of the city so is best in the afternoon.

Parliament building and Lake Burley

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Lake Burley covers a large area as can be seen in this view.

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So as the sun sets over Australia, we leave you with this view of the setting sun…….tomorrow, more of Canberra.

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