Merry Christmas from Australia

Getting into the Christmas spirit

A mixture of the traditional and very very different marked the run up to Christmas. On Friday night we had a quasi-Christmas dinner at home, with me on cooking duty rustling up some pork and roast spuds Mum will be proud of. So it was a pretty traditional dinner, but note I am wearing shorts (it was about 32 degrees or so!)

Saturday found me in the Australian National Botanic Gardens, a beautiful place at the foot of Black Mountain. There’s some real lush Aussie foliage here and some great smells coming from the plants.


























It was a bit of a lizard weekend to be honest, this dragon variety was seen by the café in the Botanic Gardens…


Now, it’s been pretty dry recently, but half way round the Botanic Gardens a storm surfaced and the rain came whipping in for a good half hour or so. Thankfully there was a little shelter to hide under…it was so good to see some proper rain and turning the dusty landscape temporarily lush, with the grey barks of gum trees getting a good rinse and turning a rusty red.


The rain seemed to have made little difference on Sunday, during a typically dry and warm walk up Mount Majura. Now, Mount Majura is another one of Canberra’s ‘mountains’ and I think is the highest at 888 metres. One of the great things about Canberra is that you can be getting frazzled with Christmas shopping one minute and ten minutes later feel like you are out miles away from anywhere in the bush. You can see how little the rain had changed the landscape as we look East from Mount Majura.

It was a reasonably demanding walk, but the views at the top were good and again there were glimpses of wildlife along the way…yet more lizards and some roos.




So a pretty different Christmas Eve I’m sure you’ll agree. Christmas Day beckons, the presents are under the tree and it’s gonna be a cooler 20C to make it feel ever so slightly more like home. Not quite cold enough for mulled wine but I’m sure I’ll find appropriate substitutes to keep me watered!

Noice Shayyyyne

So it seems the sensible thing to do right now would be to become a Strayan citizen. Sure I'd have to change my name to Bruce or Shane, wear a wifebeater, speak (almost) like a Kiwi and eat Lamingtons, but at least we would've won the Ashes!

So I'm off to Parliament House.

Advance Australia Fair!

A working Christmas

Golf the Australian way!















The Great Falsonio dazzles me with his conjuring skills!


My support team...




And getting support from the bar...

The Deep South

We seem to be getting a few more cockatoos stopping by the house these days. They are pretty but the noise is probably the sqwawkiest of all the noisy birds out here…not good for the morning unless you need to get up early.

An early morning was a good thing on Saturday however, as it was a good day to escape the heat of Canberra and head to the coast. Once again it was onto the Monaro Highway southbound to Cooma, where a road stop in McDonalds brought about a surreal situation. Sweltering in shorts, armed with a frozen coke and avoiding the flies, the background music felt a bit wrong… “Oh the weather outside is frightful, and the fire is so delightful…” clearly needs to be rearranged for the Australian market… “Oh the weather outside is delightful, but the bush fires are pretty frightful”

After Cooma, the drive took us through barren sunburnt plains and hills before leading to the more easy on the eye environment of South East Forests National Park. This was a blissful stop, with lush succulent smelling forests and overlooks to the hazy fields and hills heading to the coast. Like every road to the coast, this one was no different, zig-zagging down from 2500 feet to near sea level in the space of a few kilometres.

A lunch stop followed in Bega, home of one of the most famous brands of cheese in Australia, where I had a cheese-less bacon and egg roll and iced coffee. Finally after what seemed ages, we hit the coastline of the far south of New South Wales. I'll say now, this has been my favourite place I have been on the South Coast…beautiful beaches, lagoons, lakes, stunning bushland, mountains and rolling pastoral fields.

We were staying at a place called Merimbula, were there was another YHA for a cheap sleep…this one only 150 metres from the surf beach. Just down the road from Merimbula is a small town called Pambula and Pambula Beach, where a walk along the river was beautiful. I think the pictures tell the story.

Just across from Pambula is Ben Boyd National Park, one of the many coastal parks in this part of the world which encompass pristine bushland, secluded beaches, meandering creeks and rocky headlands. Taking a short walk out through some of the bush to a coastal overlook, an echidna was busily rooting around on the side of the path. He got scared a little, but not as much as I did when a wallaby or something leapt out of the bushes, crossed the path and disappeared into the undergrowth. So I was watching an echidna in the bush when a wallaby jumped out … how Australian does that sound?!

Just a hundred yards from where the echidna was curling up were these rocks which are called The Pinnacles.

Ben Boyd National Park surrounds the most southerly NSW coastal town of Eden, which is a haven for whales in the winter and at 6pm on a Saturday night in December a haven for very little else. It was pretty dead, but there was a nice overlook over Twofold Bay and the coastal mountains, which, in the smoky haze and cloud which had bubbled up gave an end-of-the-world type feel.

Back in Merimbula, the good times continued with a fine meal of crispy pork belly and roasted vegetables before a few games of pool and beers…


…fried breakfast was the order of Sunday morning, sat by the sea overlooking the beaches and estuary of Merimbula. It was shaping up into a beautiful day and Merimbula was sparkling. It’s called the Sapphire Coast down here, pretty apt name really.

From Merimbula, the Sapphire Coast Drive takes you to Bournda National Park, which features more bushland and beaches and, after a bit of a drive along a dirt track, a lagoon. This was one of those pure natural places, an oasis surrounding by golden sand, rocky eucalyptus covered hills backed by the roar of the sea over the dunes. It was a wonderful stop for a bit of a dip.

It was tough to leave and a long drive waited up the coast and back across the mountains to Canberra. There were a few stops along the way, including Mimosa Rocks National Park, where I

decided to sit (and nearly fall off) a tree!

Luckily I wasn’t sat on the tree that must have fallen over after we had gone past it, as, on the way back out of the park it was partially blocking the dirt road and we had to squeeze through!

The landscape alternated between hilly bush and national park, golden farmland and windswept beaches and the pretty tourist village of Mogo until reaching Batemans Bay and turning back inland towards Canberra. The drive over Clyde Mountain was as spectacular and ever so slightly hairy as ever and then followed the drag back across the tablelands to the promised land of Queanbeyan and finally the ACT.

Canberra was feeling steamy and decidedly smoky. There are big bushfires in Victoria at the moment and a few other smaller ones closer to home, creating a smoky and hazy atmosphere and a doomsday red sky as the sun goes down. It sure is gonna be a different Christmas!

Where am I...?

Some Christmas decs went up today and it was a more wintry feeling 25 degrees Celsius, brrrrr! England were doing well in the cricket. I came face to face with lions, tigers, bears, monkeys, giraffes…what on earth is going on?!

The cricket I cannot explain but the un-Australian animals are all part of the excellent Canberra Zoo and Aquarium. It’s not the biggest zoo but seems to have a good set up and I think the fact that it isn’t huge keeps it interesting. There were a diverse range of animals including a slightly deranged monkey who was good entertainment value. There were a number of these birds which, despite the colour, are not Australian but from South America.

Reassuringly the zoo had a small sample of good ol’ traditional Aussie fare, with emus wandering aimlessly around and this koala who was typically docile.


There was less of the cuddly stuff on the two hour Zooventure tour, which was a great way to be shown around the zoo, see some areas off limits to the ‘common’ public (!) and come face to face with things that could seriously chew your arm off. First up was a European brown bear, the smallest of the brown bears apparently. Didn’t seem that small when she was stood on hind legs licking some gooey cereal off your hand however.

A tiger was next, though after two or three chicken drumsticks being poked through the cage he seemed to get a little bored of chicken. I guess it’s like getting an eight piece bucket from KFC or something. A couple of cougars / pumas / mountain lions / whatever they are called followed and then it was on to stand at head height with a couple of giraffes. The ranger dude seemed particularly fond of this giraffe, getting a couple of snogs from that big tongue!!

Having handled bits of dodgy raw meat it was nice to hand out bits of carrot to a few of the animals. Here I am with an impala.



To end the tour though of course it was necessary to give a few scares and thrills, so first up we fed the lions…

…and then lined up in a row we pretended to be trees for a python to wind its way across our shoulders. I felt I made a really good tree, but not as good as the five year old kid, he kept as solid as an Oak.

...oh yeah, Canberra

What better way to remind myself of where I am than to go up to that big pointy tower thing that seems to get everywhere in my photos? Black Mountain is where it stands, though for some reason my mind keeps making alternative names for these places – Slack Mountain, Dead Hill, Mount Pains me…(yeah, OK, I’m starting to get as deranged as that monkey)

The Telstra Tower looks OK from a distance (say from Mount Pains Me with the sun setting over it and Slack Mountain) but close up it is quite a concrete monstrosity really. The best place to be though is inside where the views are never anything less than panoramic.



This is Canberra man, where are the buildings?!! Well, just left of my right elbow is Parliament House and maybe if I was to raise my arm a bit I would be pointing at about where I live. After nearly four months here I feel like it is my home (for the time-being at least) and I kind of know what’s going on round here. I even managed to negotiate the journey from Slack Mountain back to Barton (no nicknames for that yet…suggestions welcome) without the need for a map!

I knew that this was looking out towards Mounts Ainslie (right) and Majura (left) and that Majura is slightly higher than Ainslie even though it doesn’t always look it.

Green isn’t it? However green some of the bushland looks from above, it is pretty dry on the ground and we are facing stage 3 water restrictions in a couple of weeks, whatever that means.

As you can see, that pointy tower thing still manages to get in the photos! I wonder if they decorate it with Christmas lights?