The Canberra "Day-trip"
Trip Start
Jun 13, 2008
1
3
4
Trip End
Ongoing
Canberra,
Australian Capital Territory,
Australia
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Ingredients: 3 men - 2 Sri Lankan, 1 Irish. 1 brand new Nissan (just off the truck), 700kms of road and 15 hours of driving. Oh.... And 24 hours in which to do it all.
Well, if I didn't know how big of a country Oz really is, after Canberra I'm in doubt... its feckin massive.
So there's me, Kaveesh who I work with, and Kaveendra who lives with Kaveesh. So fair enuf, we didn't actually check the distance from Melbourne to Canberra, I mean Jaysus, they're virtually beside each other on the map. So I'm up outta bed at 6am on Saturday morning to meet the lads at 8pm at the train station. Being me, I'm 15mins late. Fashionably of course.
Kaveesh has the world's smallest camcorder and tells me he's making a home video of our day trip. He shows me the brand new Nissan that we've rented. The bleedin glare off it'd blind u. So we set off from Melbourne. It's about 8.30am.
Kaveendra is d co-pilot with all the maps and fair play to him; he gets us out of Melbourne without any fkk ups. It takes ages just to get out of the city!
We're all there telling each other "yeah, it should take us about 4/4½ hours to get to Canberra". We settle into the journey ahead. We discuss things like what we're gonna see first and whats the easiest way to get around Canberra.
We agree the Parliament House is No1 on the list, followed by the War Memorial, and then the museum if we have time. And the 2 lads want to visit the Sri Lankan embassy. I'm cool with that.
After a couple of hours, it's time for a pit-stop.
Fin gets Punk'd... (read 'Part 2' first!)
A bit of food at a roadside lay-by. We got sandwiches and water, and then these cheesy-puff things (which are addictive like Pringles, leading me to believe that they're full of MSG - but they don't seem to label it down under... the bastards. There's Coca-Cola and Cadburys 'Jamaican Rum' chocolate, which I have to say is a bit rich or me, but Kaveesh loves it. Seeing as it's the only chocolate going, I eat the stuff but I think Kaveesh is a bit miffed that I'm not keen on it. And who said choc was an aphrodisiac?We check the clock, looks like we're a bit behind schedule but it's difficult to make out where exactly we are on the map. We assume we're not too bad. We tidy up and get back on the road. I should say at this point that, roughly, the first 6 kangaroos I've seen in my life we're all road kill. They're dotted all along the roadside. Poor things... sometimes there was a trail of guts and shit. Although I'm betting that was a quick death.
So the next item on the agenda is a re-fuel. It takes a while before we get somewhere with a filling station, in a town called Albury on the Victoria-New South Wales border. It takes us a good 10 mins scooting around town to find a filling station. (I swear to God, little ol' Cavan has better services than this).
It's around this time that we figure out just how much we are off-target. Y'see, Albury is on the map. We know how long its taken us to get there. And we can judge roughly how far we've got to go. We've been on the road for 3½ hours. We're not quite half way. Ohhhhhhh shit. Kaveesh cant actually believe it. "Man we cant have that far to go?!" he asks. We show him the map. We show him where we are. We show him where we need to be. It doesn't look good.
But Kaveesh is one headstrong mofo. That ain't gonna stop us. Goddamn it... we'll get there if it kills us. So we're back on the road. No more pit-stops. Its non-stop to Canberra from here on. Kaveendra argues that perhsps we should consider abandoning the idea of Canberra, as we may have bugger-all time there. I must say, it sounds like a realistic idea from I'm sitting. "Maybe we can go somewhere close-by and have a few hours quality time there instead", I ask. Kaveesh has made his mind up. He says we'll get there and still be able to see the most important things and that our plan was to see Canberra - we should stick to it. He's a really hopeful guy, keeps the chin-up almost all the time. So we stick to the plan.
We arrive at Parliament House, the centre of Canberra, at 4.35pm. It closes at 5pm. The tours have already finished. So we get about 15mins to wander around indoors before we have to leave. I race up there to maximize my time inside. It's free entry thank God, or else I sure as hell wouldnt pay in for 15mins. Have to say, the grounds were very pretty, as was the interior - I gotta cool snap of me and a statue of Queen Lizzy herself. We look like the Fun Lovin' Criminals.
