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LSD trip to Sydney and Canberra


Toitjie

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Hi Toitjie!

Thanks for all the well informed posts re your trip. Especially the part about Canberra! I can't wait for us to do our visa validation trip!

One question. I see you say Canberra vs Pretoria. Why? Is there allot of similarities? Are they the same in size? Just curious.

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Canberra War Memorial

Prime minister Kevin Rudd's residence

Canberra War Memorial

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I cant load more than those 3 photos, I dont understand why exactly, i thought if i put the next batch in a new post it would be ok but it still says my limit is 162.98 k

can anyone tell me how to load more photos please?

jenny - I live in Pretoria so its the easiest to compare. I think Canberra is more or less similar in size to pretoria, with one big difference, in between all the suburbs there are huge green-belts and conservation areas, so you might drive through farms and nature reserves without seeing one house, and then all of a sudden you are in the next suburb.

weather wise i think its a bit colder than pretoria, but very much similar, i wear the same clothes now as what i wore there last week

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Are there any aviation experts around? I am curious - when we flew to Sydney, it took 11 hours, and on the monitor in front of every seat, you can follow the flight plan, on a map of the world with a little aeroplane. The flight path made a slight downwards curve, which might be attributed to the curve of the planet.

but when we flew back, it was 14 hours, and the flight path turned downwards sharply, we flew over ANTARCTICA!!!, and then upwards again. It was absolutely magnificently beautiful, I have never seen the south pole, and the icebergs were huge, but why did we fly over the south pole? No-one could answer me, one flight attendant said he thinks it has something to do with the winds, but surely to fly 5000 km's south of the normal route is too far????

anway, thats only for curiosity...

Well, the shortest distance between two points on a sphere would be the Great-circle distance. It definitely won't follow the line of latitude that we would naturally expect when looking at RSA and Australia on a flat map which uses any sort of projection that keeps the latitude lines parallel. If you fire-up Google Earth and draw a measurement line between NZ and RSA, you'll see that it goes almost over the South Pole. This is the shortest, i.e. Great-circle distance between those two points. Between JHB and Melbourne, you would be clearing the southern ice shelf by about 1000km, so this is not such a great deviation. And the reason for this deviation is almost certianly to avoid flying against the polar jet which circles Antarctica all year round and is quite strong.

Glad to hear you've collected some nice experiences on your LSD trip. But why not stop over in Perth next time around? :ilikeit:

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thanx omzig! next stop for ozzie definitely perth. there are a number of people that i would like to meet in perth apart from the lot that i already know! i sometimes wish we were going to perth....

when we're there ill invite myself for that infernal promised braai of yours....he he he :ilikeit:

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Thank you so much for the photos and all the info - it gives me hope for Canberra! I know it gets extremely dry there so I was picturing a desert in my mind - I like the fact that it looks so green and lush.

Am a bit worried about the teenagers you describe - but then when I walked here in Guildford today and actually looked most of them looked pretty weird here too! I think you just don't notice it after a while.

Did you visit any shopping centres and what were they like?

Also pleased about the 12 C temperatures - after experiencing max 1C temperatures here in the UK and darkness for months on end I'm thinking I will be able to handle that easily. We used to live in Gauteng so its probably quite similar.

Thanks again!!!! :whome:

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Thank you so much for the photos and all the info - it gives me hope for Canberra! I know it gets extremely dry there so I was picturing a desert in my mind - I like the fact that it looks so green and lush.

Am a bit worried about the teenagers you describe - but then when I walked here in Guildford today and actually looked most of them looked pretty weird here too! I think you just don't notice it after a while.

Did you visit any shopping centres and what were they like?

Also pleased about the 12 C temperatures - after experiencing max 1C temperatures here in the UK and darkness for months on end I'm thinking I will be able to handle that easily. We used to live in Gauteng so its probably quite similar.

Thanks again!!!! :)

The big shopping centre in the CBD is bigger than Menlyn centre, its huge, with more shops than you can dream of, everything you will ever need. but what I liked a lot is that every suburb has its own shopping centre too, some are very small, but most (those I saw - and I have been mostly in the south only) are relatively sized, like a IGA (like our Spar or something), a news agency (like CNA), a hairdresser or 2, a few clothing shops and about 10 eating places). We stayed in Kingston, and I loved the shopping centre there, it was winter, cold, not a lot of tourists, but by 7pm, almost all the eating places were full!! so it seems they like going out, and the economy is goooood! :angry:

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