week twenty six | tidbinbilla nature reserve, act

Canberra is the kind of place that requires one to be really good at resting, and after about four days you suddenly realize that unless you are going to watch another documentary about the Tudors or turn your mind to uni (ew, no!) then you’re going to have to come up with something cool to do a bit outside of town.

Lucky for me, my wonderful friend Rose suggested we spend a day in the sunshine going on a light hike in Tidbinbilla Nature Reserve, do some bird watching and have some time to catch up. It turned out to be one of the best ideas she’s ever had.

Tidbinbilla is about an hour from my house, on the edge of Namadgi National Park. The country side is stunning. We passed great campgrounds, lovely picnic spots and some pretty picturesque scenery on our way. Once there we made our way into the info centre, paid our $7 entrance fee and got on our way.

First stop was ‘the sanctuary’. Now Tidbinbilla (I now know) is one of the best places in Australia to see native wildlife because of the huge lengths they take to preserve habitats and keep out unwanted alien predators. On our walk we scared a couple of red belly black snakes, saw a few kangaroos, saw a lot of brilliant birds and a few pretty rad lizards. It was so much fun, and made even greater because of who I was with, and the fact that Rose is a biologist and so knows far more about pretty much anything then I do.

Other highlights included the wild platypus we spotted (a first for me!) and also the cutest little koala we saw climb down his tree walk across a log and back up the neighbouring tree – now if you know anything at all about koalas it would be that they sleep almost all day so we got extremely lucky.

After that we stopped by a creek to eat some snacks and talk about boys (Dan and Max are you at all surprised?) and enjoyed the quite and the sunshine.

I really loved our visit and will definitely be going back for longer hikes, and also to bring visitors – because it really is a new favorite Canberra must see.

TRIP RATING: 5/5 FLUFFY KOALA BOTTOMS