Day 400: Canberra Sculpture Walk

If Wellington is the coolest little capital in the world, what shall we say about Canberra?  I think what most people say about Canberra is 'where is it?'  We arrived at what appeared to be a train station in the middle of nowhere and were greeted by a convenient bus that drove us through open bush to the hostel and dropped us there.  The hostel is in the very centre of Canberra, if it can be said to have a centre.  Canberra is sort of like Milton Keynes on steroids.  In fact, Mike said the best thing to do in Canberra would be to take some drug or other and wander around imagining oneself in a science fiction movie.  When we went out after dinner to look at the local sculptures, we bumped into a number of people who were doing just that.  Many of them were pushing their supply of drugs around the huge expanses of empty space in supermarket trolleys.  Otherwise, Canberra at 7:30 pm is about as deserted as most cities at 3:30 am.  That's what you get for designing a city in which only people who can't afford cars are wandering around on foot.  The hostel charges $25 dollars a day for a bike - for two people, that's nearly as much as a rental car, and they can get away with it because walking anywhere here takes forever.  Canberra should stand as an eternal monument to how not to build a liveable city. In the meantime, I'm rather enjoying it.  Going on a sculpture walk in a deserted city at 7:30pm is about as close to a science fiction movie on acid as you can get: