Katoomba and the Blue Mountains

Date visited: 19-21st March

The highways felt very busy after the empty-driving' in New Zealand. Quite a shock to the system. At least the car was a solid brand new Nissan which was a pleasure to drive through the traffic. Eventually the traffic eased off a bit as we approached Katoomba, perched high on a hill it seemed with fine views of the rainforest canopy and blue mountains. Katoomba certainly had an end of the road before Wilderness begins' feel to it.
The streets were quiet and packed with cafes and arty shops. Where were the tourists?

The temperature was cooler than in Sydney but still a pleasant 23o.

We managed a walk in this area which took us deep into a canyon in the Blue Mountains national park. The path was steep at first before levelling out going through real jungle Indiana Jones terrain. I was pretty excited and bemused we were in this 'situation' especially walking behind Ben doing his 'Matrix' funny walk to avoid the bushes and cobwebs. True you had to keep a look out but avoiding every leaf and branch simply would have taken us all day on this 3 hour walk. We heard a few stories before from travellers who had walked in the Blue Mountains - large huntsman spiders crawling along hand-rails, (paralaysis) ticks landing on your head, the odd snake?! We didn't see any of these on our stroll through the forest, but thats not to say we were never thinking about what was ahead - especially on the ground. We wore good hats to keep the ticks off us and did the odd 'back-check' to ensure nothing was crawling on us (shiver).

We drove upto a viewpoint which gave us a panoramic spectacular sweep of the Blue Mountains - you could indeed see the blue haze produced by the eucalyptus trees here. The three sisters - 3 vertical rugged orange tinted rocks amidst this looked special when the sun shone on them late in the afternoon. At sunset we enjoyed another stroll on the clifftop overlooking the national park listening to a whole array of new bird sounds (some I hope will be heard from my film).

This whole place had a very relaxed vibe - just what we needed after the hubbub of Sydney. No wonder people come here for weekend walks to relax.

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