ANU has a great global exchange network that offers activities for international students. One of these activities was to go to Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve. It is only 45 minutes away from campus. Tidbinbilla is only a small part of a bigger park: Namadgi National Park, which is itself one of many parks in the Australian Alps, the highest points in Australia, and found in New South Wales and the ACT (in the form of Namadgi). Don’t get that excited though, the mountains still aren’t that tall. From Tidbinbilla: Canberra is northeast, Namadgi is south, and the Australian Alps are off to the west. The ACT has only a small sliver of the Alps.
Anyways, we went into Tidbinbilla and did two relatively short walks through the koala path where, you guessed it, you can see koalas in the wild. The other path was a place called sanctuary, a walking path that circled around some ponds. There, I was able to see some black swans. But I also saw the iconic, yet elusive, platypus swimming around. Those mammals are dope, but they are some weird looking creatures. Our next stop was outside of Tidbinbilla where we went to see Canberra’s Deep Space Complex. It had a small museum but the main attraction was the massive, and I mean massive, satellite arrays. We were required to turn our phones on airplane mode before we entered because it messes with the satellites; but if you didn’t, you would get an actual notification on your phone to turn it on. Technology man… The deep space complex is one of only three in the world, and is actually ran by NASA; but I’m not surprised because of the US-Australia relationship. Our final spot of the day was the cotter river, Canberra’s water supply, for a nice swim. The water was a bit chilly but still manageable. From there, we came back to ANU.
That week, Canberra also ran a festival called Enlighten on the lawn of Old Parliament House. Sticking true to its name, all of the buildings were lit up in intricate designs. They had live music, entertainers walking around on stilts and covered in lights, a film festival, and other activities. One of those other activities was a fire dancer show performed by a married couple. They performed some cool tricks but my biggest takeaway from the show was that they totally get off from playing with fire. At around 10/1030 Sarah and I walked home, which took us about an hour to do. We had plans for early the next morning.
Sarah and I got up around 5:30 that morning to go to the balloon spectacular at Old Parliament House Lawn. It was a weeklong event where multiple hot air balloons take off at once. I have never actually seem hot air balloons inflate in person. It was pretty interesting; I didn’t realize how much fire goes into inflating it. We were there for about two hours but the balloons never took off because of the weather, It was kind of a let down, but what are you gonna do about it? So instead, we decided to hike Mt. Ainsley, a local mountain right behind the War Memorial. getting there was a task as it was 5 miles away. We began our hike up the back side of the mountain once we reached it’s base, passing some type of military training along the way. We also passed signs saying “beware of mines,” ???? Anyways, we get to the top of the mountain for a fantastic view of Canberra. The hike up took only half an hour. As we headed down, we found the main path that is directly behind the Australian War Memorial. Our next stop was Black Mountain, which is directly on the other side of the city 10 miles away. By the time we got to the Civic center, which is about half way, we called it quits an ordered a pizza instead. That was it for the day. Later that day, my frined and exchange student from Italy, Andrea, organized a trip to Jervis Bay.
Jervis Bay is a 2-3 hour drive from Canberra and is on the South Coast. It’s actually a part of the ACT, but I don’t know why. There were 10 of us on that trip and we took two rental cars down. The majority of the people that we were with were Italians, although David was from Western Australia (but originally from Italy) and Bilal was from France. We got to Jervis Bay at around 11 and stayed at a beach called Hyman’s Beach. Jervis Bay is known for the whitest sand in the world, and boy, did it live up to the expectation. The water was also warm and pretty blue, It was a good place to spend the day. I did learn a good lesson though: be wary of sprey sunscreen. It was windy on the beach, and the spray sunscreen was basically useless. Apart from a few streaks, my entire back was burnt.
We stayed on that beach for a few hours before we moved to a new one, where some of Andrea’s friends showed up to. It was 30 Kilometers away at a place called Callala Beach. Being burnt, I went to grab food for most of the time we were there. We ended up leaving around 6:30 to head home. The drive back was rather interesting as there were no street lights and it began to lightly rainm; the real kicker were the awesome flashes of lightning up in the mountains that illuminated the sky.