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Published: January 26th 2008
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Although this is the Blue Mountains / Australia Day blog, Joe can't begin without mentioning his best morning of the trip so far. Waking up at 6.30am to watch football is plain wierd, but it was so worth it to watch Tottenham annihilate Arsenal 5 -1. We're going to Wembley!!! Anyway back to the less important stuff....
We checked out of our room at Base with its creaky beds, rattling windows and resident ants and caught the train up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. It was a pretty easy 2 hour trip and arrived at the hostel just after lunch time. We were waiting for the hostel owner to come and check us in when this dodgy bloke in a boiler suit walked past. Kim thought he was the owner and said "Hi!!!" in a cheery voice. After a few seconds it became clear he was definately not the owner and had probably escaped from some sort of institution as he walked past us several times and eyed us up. Fearing being mugged for our dirty laundry we quickly grabbed our bags and hid in reception and locked the door! Thankfully a few minutes later a little Jackie Chan
5 - 1
Come on you Spurs!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! lookalike came along who WAS the hostel owner and we checked into our room (which was actually a room in a small house down the road).
Included in our train ticket was a bus ticket that gave us unlimited stops on the Blue Mountains circuit for 3 days. Fearing that Friday would bring bad weather we took the opportunity of some sun to get some good photos. First stop was Echo Point, home of the famous Three Sisters rock formation. There is a nice visitor centre up there and a few walks you can do, so we had a look around and got some fantastic photos. When you look out over the tree covered valleys below there is a beautiful blue haze just above it that blends into the sky. This is caused by the oil from the eucalyptus trees being dispersed into the air, and light refracting through it causing the blue haze.
Next stop on the bus was Leura Cascade followed by Gordon Falls. We walked the tracks down to these waterfalls and took a few pictures, as well as being big kids and playing on the swings in the park for 20 minutes! To save
our energy for our walk on Friday we headed back for some food, and got the fright of our lives when we were cooking as 2 people walked in and said Hi! We didn't hear them come in but they turned out to be Tom and Jen who are from Cornwall, so we had a little west-country evening in the house! Tom also went to uni with someone who Kim went to school with, small world!!
Friday morning we had to move into a dorm in the hostel so after trekking up a huge hill with all our bags to the main building we set off for our Cliff Top walk. It was pretty miserable weather as we'd anticipated so put our raincoats on to look cool. We didn't need them for long though. We arrived at the first lookout point and all we could see was white mist. After turning around for 30 seconds to get something out of our bag the mist cleared and we got some amazing views. We walked around the clifftops for about an hour, past honeymoon point and arrived at the visitor centre at Echo Point. We met Goloomba, a local Aboriginie and
then headed out for the second part of the walk.
There is a stairway that has been put in called The Giants Stairway which takes you down the side of the Three Sisters and down into the valley below. There are over 900 steps down, some carved out of the rocks and some steel ladders. It took about 20 minutes to get down! We then walked around the bottom of the three sisters and through the valley rainforest, passing under Katoomba Falls and finally reaching our destination of the Scenic Railway. This old railway is the steepest in the world and was put in when there was an old mining operation in the area so people didn't have to walk back up and didn't have to ride in the coal buckets to the top. And believe us it is steep! At one point you are practically standing on the footrest as the incline increases! Kim didn't like it and had her eyes closed the most of the way.... She should have walked!
Feeling pretty tired after an energetic day we headed back to the hostel and found Tom and Jen again, who were in our dorm! It was
pretty cold in the hostel and it felt like being back at home as we were sat in the lounge with the fire on! We were going to stay again on saturday for the day, but decided to head back to Sydney early as it was Australia day and we wanted to check out the free events going on. We bought our Australian flags and Joe got a paper tattoo on his face!
So now we're waiting for our bus to Byron Bay which leaves Sydney at 10.30 tonight and arrives in Byron Bay at 10:30 tomorrow morning! There are some fireworks and lots of things going on in Darling Harbour tonight so we will probably add some photos of that at some point. Hopefully we'll find the sun in Byron Bay......
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