Post Date: Sunday August 12, 2018
We woke up bright and early again and headed into the city center. We stopped at a Macca's to see what interesting breakfast foods they served in Australia. Hunter had a Mighty McMuffin and I had a big brekkie burger.
We then went to the National Museum of Australia. It was really neat to see and read about the old new land of Australia. Most interesting was information about how the Europeans brought new things over, such as rabbits, which caused many issues. The rabbits were invasive and drastically took over Australia. They have a funny video about it that was like a horror film. They also talked about the platypus. The natives knew it reporduced by laying eggs, but the Europeans didn't believe them, so after a scientist dissected hundreds of them, he finally agreed that they layed eggs. There was also a large section about fire in Australia. Fire has played an essential role here since the times of the first aboriginal people. They practiced controlled burn techniques called fire farming. When the first European colonists arrived they adopted a zero tolerance policy towards wildfires and attempted to immediately extinguish any blaze. While this worked for smaller fires, it led to huge fires that took hundreds of lives. While fires are still a major issue in Australia, they have now adopted the native techniques, which has led to a large reduction in the amount of damage caused by fires. However, global warming could change this and Australia has seen huge fires again in recent years. Our Air BnB the night before highlighted this with wildfire damage going right to the edge of her property.
After the museum we toured about the parliment. It was pretty cool. We then drove up to a lookout point on Ainslie Mountain. Here we could see the entire capital. Canberra is a planned city which can easily be seen by how organized everything is. They even built a river in the city!
When we parked at the lookout, we saw a family of Kookaburras hanging out in the trees!
Next we began our drive towards Sydney. We went a longer way to check out this awesome bridge called Sea Cliff Bridge. It goes along the side of cliffs over the ocean. It’s really beautiful. When we got there, it was very busy and eveyone wanted to walk across it, but we had different plans. We hiked up the side of the cliff to see aerial view of the bridge. The hike is a hidden gem not many people know about and has a hidden entrance. It is also very steep, but some really nice people put up guides and ropes to help climb up. The view was totally worth it!
After our hike we headed into the city to our cute Air BnB. The apartment was built by an architect who lived adjacent. By the time we got settled it was dark, but Hunter had one more activity before we went to bed: Mrs. Macquarie’s Chair. This location gives beautiful views of the city skyline including the Sydney Opera House. After messing around on my phone, I found out how to get really awesome night time photos. It was quite cold, so we didn’t stay too long, but it was amazing!
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