We got up very early the next day for two reasons: first we had another 2.5 hour drive to Canberra and the car had to be returned at 10 am. Additionally, we wanted to see the sunrise, but unfortunately it was quite cloudy why we couldn’t see anything and we directly started to drive. We soon got to know why the 160km should take over 2.5 hours. The road is very windy compared to other roads in Australia and we did around 500 m difference in altitude. But we did that easily and after we returned our tent, air mattress and air pump in Kmart (we wanted to get back our money) we arrived at around 9.55 at Europcar. We left our luggage at the nice Aussie who worked in Europcar and went to the city. First we did our way to the Australian Parliament, which is apparently the ONLY interesting sight in Canberra. Besides that, Canberra is just boring for sightseeing. Unfortunately, all the Australians who warned us before (“don’t go to Canberra it’s boring and there is nothing to do”) were right. On the other hand we were there only for half a day and that’s quite a good time to see the parliament district and we could go back to the “city” were we got picked up from our driver to Melbourne. We found a very spontaneous lift to Melbourne, otherwise we would have tried hitchhiking again. An Israeli (we unfortunately forgot his name) who drove together with his girlfriend, who moved back from Canberra to Melbourne. Therefore they were driving to Melbourne and were looking for additional passengers. 30$ per person seemed to be quite fair to us (the train would have been 57$). We started delayed at 16:15 instead of 15:30 and had quite a nice talk with his girlfriend Lauren. She is studying in Melbourne in order to become a teacher and told us from some of her former trips to India.
After a while we both were a bit sceptical due to some signs with “Sydney 260km” but stupidly we didn’t say a word (you should think the driver should know the way, right?). Then he suddenly realized that we were driving in the wrong direction, after 20 minutes, so we had to drive back all the way and lost another 45 minutes. That wouldn’t have been a big deal if we wouldn’t have had a couchsurfer in Melbourne, who obviously wanted to go to bed at some stage. The drive was said to be around 7 hours so we would have been there at around midnight, until our driver decided to have a 10 minute break for dinner which lasted more than half an hour. So we lost another 30 minutes… Then they filled up fuel: you remember we paid 60$ for the lift. After half way they paid 34$, meaning we paid for all the fuel for the drive. After it became dark, the guy stopped driving a while ago, his girlfriend had problems with driving and Tobi started to drive. As we come closer and closer to Melbourne we asked them a couple of times where they would drop us off. After we asked several times he finally said that he would drop us at the train station, just to find out that we would miss the last train to our couchsurfer who was living a bit outside of Melbourne. A cab would have been another 50-60$ which was definitely too much, a fact we told them, the guy just said it would be too late to drive us there, even though it would have cost them not more than half an hour. Apart from that we paid their whole fuel and Tobi drove for 2.5 hours during rain and dark, it would have been just nice to drive us home. After Kerstin asked quite obviously if they know if it is possible to sleep in the train station Lauren seized the chanced and directed us to drive home while the guy was sleeping in the back. It was quite obvious that she would have driven us home anyway if there wouldn’t have been this guy… Anyway, we arrived at around 00:45 am at our new home for the next week and fell asleep after a short talk with our host and two other British Couchsurfers.