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Published: December 20th 2022
1. Flood Damage
Evidence of the recent floods as we head towards the Blue MountainsToday we took a trip to the Blue Mountains, specifically the The Scenic Skyway Katoomba. They have various things to do here, a cableway, railway , walkway and skyway. It was a reasonable drive, it took us around 90mins but we did stop off at a national park on the way as there was a viewing area which overlooked some of the flood damage they’ve suffered here recently. It was amazing to see what the force of water can do, large trees had been knocked flat, the tarmac from the road was missing completely in some parts. All back to normal now though. We stopped at another high up area overlooking this a bit further on, it must’ve been quite a sight when the water was at it’s worst.
At Skyway, there’s free parking in a multi storey car park, which was filling rapidly as we arrived at around 11am. Once we’d parked, we walked to the entry point and there were two queues, one for online tickets which was very long! And one for ticket purchases which oddly, was much shorter. We joined that one as we hadn’t bought any tickets beforehand.
It took AGES! The online queue
2. Katoomba Falls
The falls at Katoomba wasn’t much better. We couldn’t work out why this was taking so long. The queues were badly setup, the online queue had to wait and cross a bit of a thoroughfare to get to the desks and we observed at least one couple who just barged their way through the entire queue, probably assuming they didn’t need to queue as they’d got an online ticket, then just walked straight up to a desk and got served – while the rest of the queue had been waiting probably around 30mins at that point! Shocking but not surprising given the setup they had.
It seemed the slowness issue was because they ask every person if they’d like them to run through the map of the site with them – and from what we saw, about 95% of the people did want this which took ages. When we finally got to the desk we took no time at all to get our 2 adult tickets, take our map and decline the offer to talk through what was a dead simple map, even a 5 year old could follow it!
Once we were finally in (about 40mins after arriving!) we decided to
3. Katoomba Casscades
On the Scenic Skyway walk past the Katoomba Casscades try the Skyway first. This is a cable car of sorts, which just runs horizontally between two cliff tops, giving you a lovely unhindered view of the Katoomba waterfall on the way over. The journey across probably only takes about 5 mins but they have drivers giving you information about the park and the area. An interesting fact mentioned on this one was the bush fires back in 2019 which wiped out about 75% of the forest in the Blue Mountains. You’d never guess now, but I imagine the landscape was very different just after that.
After crossing on the Skyway, you arrive in what is basically a national park, not part of the Skyway setup. There’s a lovely walk down to the Katoomba cascades, which is a small waterfall, very pretty and popular with the small kids who paddled in the little rock pools.
After getting a few photo’s we moved on and climbed our way back up again to get to the various viewing area’s. This is all still in the publicly accessible national park, ending up near the top which had a view of the Katoomba waterfall we’d passed on the Skyway.
At this
4. Scenic Skyway
The Skyway above the Blue Mountains point, the signs indicated that it would take around 40mins to go back the way we came, or about 20min to continue on and essentially walk back to the main station so we opted for that route.
Once back where we started, we then tried out the railway, which is the steepest passenger railway in the world! It travels 310m down a 52 degree (128%!)(MISSING) incline which sounded unpleasant to me! They use a system of wristbands with barcodes here, which is a great idea, so you scan your band to get through the turnstiles then queue up much like on a rollercoaster – with each seat row having a waiting point.
We were at the front of the 2
nd carriage (there were 3 in total) and while waiting for it to arrive, spotted a sign saying you could adjust your seat depending on your preference. So you could sit it back to make it feel less steep, keep it in the middle or set it to ‘cliffhanger’ which tipped you even further forward. I’d decided the middle one was probably my choice knowing Roy would do the cliffhanger!
The railway arrived, barriers opened and we walked
5. Blue Mountains Bushfire Recovery
The Blue Mountains showing damage from the bushfires forward….. at this point I realised there was only the one setting for the entire bench seat, seemed logical now I thought about it, I think my individual button option was just wishful thinking! I think Roy was kind and set it to ‘normal’ but it still felt quite tilted to me! He kindly pointed out you could rest your knees on the padded bar at the front, but my knees didn’t reach it!
We set off and I looked over and said to Roy that it really did feel like a very slow rollercoaster….. the front carriage tilted even further over as it got to the edge but it was too late for me to back out now! We tilted over next, it wasn’t too bad after all, I had various handles to hold on to, but then once the final part had tilted down it seemed to race forwards into total darkness for ages!!! It really was like a rollercoaster!
We eventually emerged back into daylight and you could see the trees and the ground we were plummeting towards (I think the darkness was preferable!) I ended up having to abandon the back of the seat
6. Looking down on Blue Mountains
The Blue Mountain canopy from above and kneel on the padded bar to give my arms a rest at this point! It was probably only about 2 mins end to end, but it felt much longer to me! It was good though, I’m glad we did it – Roy seemed to enjoy it!
Once back on solid ground, we had a walk down on the boardwalk around the forest floor. You could walk down to the cable car station, or take a medium length walk or a long walk. We started towards the station while we decided what we wanted to do and came across some pf the old artefacts from the coal mining days including a look into some of the 100km of tunnels, only from the entrance though. We did start on the medium walk, but it just seemed to be constantly sloping down and fit looking people coming back the other way were puffing and panting. Given we’d seen forest floors many times, we decided to skip it and go on the cable car.
This was probably the least exciting one, it was still quite scenic on the way up, but I guess cable cars are quite normal especially after that
7. Bilpin Apple
An advert for Bilpin Apple Pies railway experience!
We had planned to do another return trip on the Skyway to try to get a better view of the waterfall, but when we headed to the station it was heaving and we didn’t fancy queueing, so we decided to call it a day and head out to see some more of the Blue Mountains. The Skyway cableway/railway e.t.c were enjoyable but I’m not sure I’d recommend it given the slow entry issues and cost. The best parts (cascade and waterfall viewing area’s) could be accessed without it.
After a quick trip into Katoomba, we decided to drive around a little further up and see what was there. There are quite a few walks you can do, some viewing points. We stopped at Cahill’s lookout, which have quite a few platforms at different levels with views for miles around. One was called Boar’s Head lookout, we could see the head in the rocks, but the jury was out on the animal. Roy thought it was a dragon, I opted for a dog (as did the lady who was there listening to our chat about it!). This whole area was lovely, so much more peaceful than the Skyway area’s.
After this, we drove a different route back through the Blue Mountains, heading back to Sydney. There wasn’t really much else to see except it became apparent how much devastation the fires had caused, from above it all looked fairly green but below the upper canopy the trunks of the trees were bare and scorched, it’s amazing how quickly it can start to regenerate. It was a nice journey back until we got nearer to the city. The drivers here are awful! They do not give way to anyone, they never let people pull out and are borderline aggressive – in fact they’ll speed up just to prevent you getting into a gap! Worse than London drivers.
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