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 June 28th: Canberra to Bankstown (Sydney)
Huge green areas and white buildings in Canberra On the top of the Parlament house Canberra is a funny city. Walking around in the middle of the city you still have the feeling that you are somewhere in the bush (maybe a bit exaggerated, but only a bit). The buildings are widely spread with huge green areas in between. The city-planner was a great fan of large public areas and believed that buildings must not dominate the nature or each other. Thus, it is a really nice city to be in, but it is not particularly suited for busy pedestrian tourists because there is so damned long to walk between the places.

The parliament was built in consent with the original ideas of the city planning and is the result of an architectural competition. It had always been the plan that the parliament Aerial photo of the Parlament house on/in Capital Hill should be situated on Capital Hill, but the problem was how to avoid the building from being too dominating. The competition was won by an American architect with the brilliant idea to remove the hill, build the parliament where the hill once was, and then put 80 per cent of the earth back on top of the building - so now it looks almost like a dugout (see Coober Pedy :-)

Besides the parliament we also took the guided tour on Australian art in the National Gallery of Australia. Linda liked it, Klaus didn't.

Gorge in the Blue Mountains At 3 pm we left Canberra and got permission to take one orbit over the centre. The weather was beautiful and we had a pleasant flight into Bankstown where Ernestine picked us up.

John and Ernestine Visser are another pilot/navigator couple (with some more experience though) whom we also had met through a newsgroup (long live the internet). They had kindly invited us to stay in their home while visiting Sydney.