(Post backdated to the day it happened. Posted Sun 8 Oct 2006.)

I thought Jetstar liked me, when the lady at check-in suggested I not check-in my bag. It was light enough, she said, that I could carry it with me on the plane, provided it didn’t have any sharp objects in it — which it didn’t. Great, I thought. It’ll save me time.

But soon I discovered that Jetstar does, in fact, hate me. Why? Because not only was I booked on a flight on which there were two football teams and the Rutherglen netball team all going on their end-of-year trips. No, not only that. I was placed in a seat right in the middle of one of those teams.

They were a soccer club from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs. And during the flight I discovered just how loud a soccer team on their end-of-year trip can be.

I also discovered that there is one thing louder than a soccer team on their end-of-year trip. And that is: a soccer team on their end-of-year trip after being served alcohol.

You’d think the Jetstar practice of charging $6 for pre-mixed spirits or crappy beer would have put them off. But no — this was their trip and they were determined to enjoy it.

As the booze flowed, the noise level rose, and I attempted to bury myself further in my book. There was laughing, there was joking, there was walking around the cabin, there was lesbian pr0n on one of their video iPods. And don’t for a minute think that there was a lack of politically-incorrect comments in reference to the stewardesses.

The soccer club boys were enjoying themselves so much they were wishing it was a longer flight, perhaps to Perth. I was silently thanking the gods that it was a nice short flight.

We landed in Hobart pretty much on-time, and give the soccer club boys credit, they did recognise my status as a civilian, and let me out first. I told them I hoped they’d have a good weekend, and they assured me that that was their intention.

We all climbed off the plane down onto the tarmac (no sky docks at HBA) and I very nearly kissed the ground at having made it through the din with my ears still functioning.

Disembarking at Hobart Airport. The soccer club boys can be seen in their matching t-shirts.

I had decided to catch the airport bus into town, since I knew it went past the B&B Marita had booked, it would be cheaper and almost as fast as a cab. Given I hadn’t had to wait for baggage, I was the first to board, and I watched as the soccer club and the netball club came out of the terminal building and into their various hired buses. A small choir group also came out — I’m betting their section of the plane hadn’t been as loud — or if it had been, it was probably more harmonious.

But I did find the other football group got onto the bus. They were older, and less rowdy. The bus zoomed down the freeway, over the bridge and into Hobart proper. First it made a stop at the Customs House, where the footballers were staying. Then, with Marita SMSing to ask where I was (for we had a dinner engagement) I found myself being taken on an involuntary tour of Hobart, around the waterfront, along Sandy Bay Road (by which point I was tracking our position on the map, and silently protesting “But now we’re going away from where I want to be!”) down to the Wrest Point casino, where more people got dropped off.

After that we went back and finally got to the Edinburgh Gallery B&B, my destination. Lesson: if going to Hobart, the airport bus is a good cheap way of getting into the city, as long as you’re not in a hurry, or you’re heading to the waterfront. Otherwise, a cab may be a better option.

Marita was waiting and there was just enough time to drop my bag off and use the facilities (more about that later) before hopping in a cab to the restaurant. The B&B man, Felix, had very helpfully called the cab, then went outside to wait for it. Then he locked himself out, and had to use our key to get back in…

Dinner was at Annapurna, an Indian restaurant in North Hobart, a spot the cab driver knew straight away, without even having to be told the street or the suburb. We shared dishes between four of us, and it was thoroughly delicious, and surprisingly cheap.

Having no time constraints afterwards, we walked back in the dark, pondering how quiet most of central Hobart’s streets are after dark.

I’m off to Hobart today, for the weekend.

The first thing people have asked me when I mention it? “Are you hiring a car?” — as if Hobart is so horrible that as soon as we’ve arrived, we have to escape it.

Maybe it’s just that Hobart is small. That’s the verdict from the advance party (Marita, going to a conference down there), who let me know within hours of getting there that we should consider hiring a car to see more of what’s out there in Tassieland.

I’ll find out shortly.

The other thing some people have asked is if I’m flying or boating. Hobart’s on the wrong side of Tassie to go by boat… it would take all weekend.

Oh, and since my camera has gone to Europe, I’ve borrowed my sister’s. I guess she’ll be borrowing one from someone else if she needs one…

My camera’s gone on holiday. At the moment it’s flying to Europe via Singapore, for some time in England, Ireland and Italy. Just for a fortnight or so.

Alas I’m not going with it. I lent it to Justine, whose camera has mysteriously disappeared.

So if you’re travelling in Europe in the next couple of weeks, say hello to my camera if you see it.

On the road driving up to Euroa on Saturday.

I’ve been planning some activity for my many frequent flyer points, many tens of thousands of which were earnt over several years of paying for childcare on a credit card several years ago. It adds up, I can tell you.

Firstly I’ll be jaunting down to Hobart for a few days in October with Marita. Then I’ll be taking the kids on a little holiday over the Melbourne Cup long weekend. Their preferred venue? Sydney. Because although they’ve been there before, they want to (again) ride the monorail and the double-decker trains.

Poking around on the Qantas web site, I found tickets were available on points for all those flights. Who’d have thunk? Mind you some of the flights to/from Hobart involved going via Sydney — hardly a logical proposition. I managed to find some direct ones though.

In the small print on the site it mentions government taxes, fees and surcharges, but it gives you no clue as to the magnitude of them. This is only clear when you’ve worked your way through the booking, and I suppose it doesn’t know the precise amounts until you’ve said where you’re flying, but it’d be nice to have a clue early on, because it turned out to add up to about $50 per sector.

So for instance I could fly to Hobart for $49 plus 8000 points. Or alternately I could just book on Jetstar for $79 all-inclusive, if I was willing to put up with a rigidly enforced 30 minute check-in and no free food en-route. Eventually I decided to fly down on Jetstar, and back on Qantas. (And hopefully Marita can book onto the same flight home; she’ll be in Hobart before me on a work-paid conference trip.)

And the Sydney flights? Well I compared the costs of Qantas versus Qantas on points versus Jetstar versus Virgin Blue. Bearing in mind that kids don’t fly for any less money than adults on the cheapest flights, the totals for three passengers on return flights came out at:

• Qantas on points, fees $300
• Qantas on paid tickets $740
• Virgin Blue paid tickets $594
• Jetstar paid tickets $621 (bleuch, flying out of Avalon, what a pain that would be)

So using Frequent Flyer points is far from free, but assuming there isn’t some super-dooper-mega sale later down the track, it’ll still save me about $300 (and with the benefit of free nibblies thrown in), so given how infrequently I fly anywhere, this time round I’ll go with the points.

Marita, Justine and I went down to Sorrento yesterday for a gallery opening. While we were there, we had lunch and took a walk down to the beach.

(Click on the picture to see it without all the navigation guff getting in the way)

The traffic was pretty bad on the way down, making it a 2 1/2 hour trip from Footscray. (If the government was serious about getting 20% of trips onto public transport, it’d warrant a fully-loaded bus all the way down the Nepean Highway at least every 10 minutes… rather than one every hour-and-a-half as at present.)

Provided the timing was right, it would have been quicker to go down to Queenscliff and catch the ferry across. Maybe next time.

• Last time in Sorrento: around the bay in a day

(This post backdated to the date it happened, not the date I wrote it.)

Not much to day 3, but during breakfast a rather impressive hot air balloon sailed by not too far away. We caught a cab to the airport, the only notable thing about the trip back being that tea strainers bought on Friday and packed in the hand luggage attracted the attention of the security scanning people. As did Marita’s boots. And her handbag, which had a nail file in it. Then they decided she was worthy of a random explosives scan. Hmmm. Maybe I have a dangerous girlfriend.

We got back into Melbourne on time about 11:10, and Marita and Justine headed for Trentham to get their dog, while I caught the Skybus then and a train home.

All in all, a great weekend away. There’s lots more of Canberra to see, and I look forward to getting back there soon.

(This post backdated to the date it happened, not the date I wrote it.)

It might have been a negative-something night outside, but the bed was lovely and warm. We awoke, had breakfast and showers, and …

Wait, I should mention the shower. Everything in the serviced apartment we stayed in was great. Except the shower. It was designed by sadists.

The shower head was at about the level of my nose, so I had to crouch down to get my hair wet. A sign extolled the virtues of short showers, but surely that’s not the type of short shower the water authority had had in mind.

Worse, the taps had pointy handles, so as I was crouching, I kept stabbing myself in the back. I don’t think I’m making too much of it by saying that a special place in hell should be reserved for whoever designed that shower.

So, after showering we headed out to (new) Parliament House on foot.

We walked up Canberra Way Avenue and found the back end of Parliament House, including the loading bay and garbage collection area. Very nice. As I snapped a picture of it, Justine backed away in case any security personnel were about to burst out of the bushes and wrestle me to the ground.

Around to the front for the obligatory photos of the big wire coat of arms, through the security check and into the building itself. My, but it’s big. Very damn big. And given how big it is, there didn’t seem to be huge numbers of tourists moving through, though there were a couple of overseas tour groups. It had me wondering why the insides of foreign countries’ parliaments would be interesting to people. It’s not like they’d often see the inside of our parliament on the news or anything.

We found the House of Representatives. The attendant was handing out maps of where each MP sat. Not that it was in session of course, but I managed to spot my local MP’s seat. Similarly in the Senate, they had a map so I could find my state’s senators.

A lift was available to go up to the roof, a big grassed area with the humungous flagpole in the middle (prompting the Get Smart variant joke: “That’s the second biggest flagpole I’ve ever seen”. There was a terrific view over the city from the top.

The roof itself isn’t really that high up off the ground — part of the grassed area actually slopes gently down to nearby the entrance, but it’s fenced off for security reasons. So the building, while huge, is largely underground. Now I’m wondering if it inspired the Teletubbies house.

As we walked down to Old Parliament House, a procession of WW2 jeeps, trucks and motorbikes was coming up the driveway, as preparation for the following days’ VP anniversary events.

After a hot chocolate at Old Parliament House, and a quick look for the famed John and Jeanette Howard postcards (such a sickly thing; perfect for sending to relatives, but alas I could only find John) we got a lift from one friend to another’s house in Florey, a suburb in the North East.

Tangent: transport and urban form in Canberra

This just re-inforced to me how spread out Canberra is. Some naysayers claim that Melbourne is too widely dispersed, too low density to support viable public transport. To that I now say pah, if you want low density, look at Canberra. It’s undoubtedly very green, but everything is so spaced-out so as to make any trip (but particularly on foot) a long one.

There are big gaps of bushland between the activity centres, with not-quite-freeway roads linking them. While the traffic isn’t too bad, so it would be theoretically possible to cycle on the roads, I reckon you’d have to be super-fit to handle the distances.

And there are big gaps between the government buildings in the Parliament House area… for the most part huge carparks that fill with the cars from workers during the week, but leave a concrete and ashphalt desert on the weekend. This makes the entrances to some of the buildings (such as the National Gallery) quite unfriendly for pedestrian tourists. A stark contrast to the National Gallery of Victoria, for instance.

So it does seem that all of Canberra is car-dependent. There are buses, but most of them don’t seem to run particularly often (perhaps every 20 minutes at best), and not many run late at night. Consequently few people seem to use them. The level of traffic isn’t terrible, probably because the population is under half a million. One wonders what the anticipated growth is, and what kind of planning has gone into it, as when and if it reaches a million, there could be dire problems (even beyond the current ones of total car/petrol dependence in an environment of spiralling petrol prices; job catchment and social issues for isolated youth and the poor; and the usual batch of issues associated with the road deficit).

Interestingly, the subject of impending road expansion came up several times in conversations with the locals. One major road project is held up in the courts at the moment, but some (completely unprompted from me) raised the topic of public transport alternatives. Light rail in particular has a lot of backers, but the ACT government seems to have no stomach for it, apparently failing to realise the effects of induced traffic following road expansion.

Back to the travelogue

We had lunch at Marita’s friends’ place, then afternoon tea with my friend Merlin, one of a handful of people I’ve known since primary school. His two and a half year-old son Kai was going gangbusters, which was amusing to watch. Merlin and his family face a similar situation to mine: currently renting in a cold depressing house they don’t like, but light is at the end of the tunnel, as they’re buying and will move in the next few months.

Merlin gave us a lift back to Kingston. We watched the TV news for a bit, trying to find the AFL scores, but eventually gave up and checked them via SMS/PocketNews. Canberra’s TV stations are more focussed on rugby. In fact on Friday night we’d found that with a combination of free-to-air and the hotel’s hobbled Foxtel options, we’d had two channels of rugby, two of cricket, a handful of crap movies, and frustratingly, no AFL.

Then via cab we headed out for the birthday party that had brought us to Canberra in the first place, in a suburb I can’t recall, somewhere around the back of the rather imposing Black Mountain and its viewing/communications tower.