Lee's Birthday - Blue Mountains

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Everything we have done for the last three months has been the last time we will see this or the last time we will do that, before we leave. This month, it would be the last time that either of us would have a birthday in Australia. It was to have been a joint birthday party, as Claire has the same birthday as Lee, however Claire was leaving us to go to New Zealand a few days before the big day but this did mean that Lee had May 9 2008 all to herself.

Lee hired a 3 bedroom house up in the Blue Mountains for the weekend so that Lee and I, Rosie and Phil and Fran could all go up there and stay for the weekend in comfort. The house looked lovely on the internet and we had arranged to get an extra day off our works so that we could take our time and enjoy everything that the Blue Mountains had to offer. We were staying in Katoomba, the main town for sightseeing in the Mountains and the plan was for me to finish work early on the Friday and get up to Katoomba, get the keys for the house and get everything settled in for when the others arrived. Lee and Fran would head up a few hours later once Lee had finished work and Rosie and Phil would head up in the evening. My work had been kind enough to give me a half day and this went down really well with Lee whose work had refused her request to finish early which meant that she would have to work on her birthday while I went up and started the party early. I had only a few simple instructions to follow:

Get to Leura and pick the keys up from the Agent
Get to Katoomba and pick up some firewood for the fire in the house
Get yourself a bottle of wine if you feel like it.

The third instruction had little or no importance attached to it in the grand scheme of things, particularly for Lee, and yet as the time for Lee and Fran to arrive drew nearer, I had picked the keys up in Leura without incident and had also been to the off licence to pick up a bottle of wine for myself. Now in a town where every hotel, lodge or holiday home advertises log fires, you would imagine that it would be relatively simple to find logs for said fires. Not so, apparently. I went to meet Lee and Fran off the train and informed them that we had no firewood. This did not go down well so I went off to ask around the hotels, you know, the ones that advertised these log fires all over town but it turns out that they use gas in their “open” fires, at least they had the decency to look embarrassed when they told me this. A few people told me that the only place that sold firewood was about 10km away on the highway and to be honest that was a walk too far and there were no buses. Rosie and Phil came to the rescue by getting off the train a stop early and then getting a cab to the petrol station that sold the wood and then making their way to the house. This was not to be the end of our firewood adventures though !!

Once our resident fire-maker, Rosie, had got a roaring fire going, everyone settled into their new surroundings, we basically had a huge 3 bedroom house to ourselves with a massive kitchen, dining room and a really cosy living room for us to relax in. Seeing as it was Lee’s birthday, we decorated the dining room with streamers and party hats and did the party thing, with a lovely steak dinner and settled in for the night with plenty of wine and beers to enjoy.

I should really point out at this moment that you shouldn’t get the idea that Lee and I drink constantly, it’s just that the occasions we have chosen to include in the blogs, tend to coincide with occasions when we have a drink. For the record, there have been loads of times when Lee and I weren’t drinking.

Breakfast the next day was enjoyed courtesy of a Scottish butcher Lee had found in Maroubra, not far from my work. I had gone there on the Friday before we left so that we could have a proper Scottish breakfast for Lee’s birthday and stocked up on black pudding, white pudding, square sausage, tattie scones and even proper scotch pies, it was magic. Lee and Rosie were feeling awful by this point but it’s amazing what the smell of a fry-up can do for a hangover. Lee had been curled up in a ball on the couch for the morning and when we asked what she wanted for breakfast at first, it was beans on toast, but in 10 minute intervals we got “can I maybe have some bacon with that ?”, then “maybe one slice of black pudding” and within about half an hour of breakfast being started Lee had a full fry-up on her plate and made a fairly impressive recovery.

Everyone’s recovery had taken a little longer than planned but we were still able to make it out of the house in the afternoon to go down to Echo Point. Echo Point is the main tourist attraction in Katoomba and the Blue Mountains; it’s a lookout point that gives you absolutely stunning views of the mountains and the valley that gives them their name. They are named the Blue Mountains due to the eucalyptus trees that line the valley that runs through them, the vapour released by the trees appears to give the air a blue-ish tinge so hence the name. They are completely stunning, the lookout is on the edge of a vertical cliff face about 300 feet up and there’s not many places on the planet where you will either get this kind of view or be made to feel so small at the same time. Because of the time of year, the sun was disappearing fast but we did manage to catch the sunset over the mountains and get a ton of photos that were all atmospheric and moody. The other attractions at Echo Point are the Three Sisters, an outcrop of three large jagged rocks that jut out from the side of one of the cliff and break up the huge curve of the valley. You can walk round the cliff walk to the Three Sisters and climb out to the middle one but by all accounts you can’t actually get a good view of them from up close, so we stuck to the lookout point.

It gets really cold up in the mountains at this time of year and it was no exception this time either, hence the reason we headed off to the shops to see if we could get some firewood again. On our way back up the road, there was a sign for a chocolate factory serving “real” hot chocolate so we decided to pop in and see what the difference was between theirs and a tried and tested mug of Cadbury’s. It’s all in the presentation to be honest, oh aye, and the taste. This is how the future of hot chocolate should look. You get given a tealight holder about 6 inches tall with a tealight in the bottom and a round metal cone-shaped holder in the top. On the plate next to it they give you a small dish with loads of chocolate drops and a small jug of milk. What you do is put as much chocolate into the holder as you like and then top it up with the milk and let the tealight heat the mixture until you have your hot chocolate, it’s the absolute business, perfect for a winter’s night in the Blue Mountains.

We still had a little bit of wood left over from the previous night but we needed more but once again we were told that the only place we could get wood was this petrol station 10km’s down the road. The Katoomban locals obviously hadn’t reckoned on the resourcefulness of us Celts, because on our way home, we managed to assemble a pretty impressive collection of firewood entirely from natural materials, including a couple of carelessly discarded logs that had been left lying around in the street which would keep our wee fire going for ages. The other firewood we did manage to obtain came through rather strange circumstances, as we were walking back up the road from the gorge, we spotted some logs sitting in someone’s front garden doing nothing so rather than just half-inch them, we approached the owner who was out the front and asked if we could buy the logs from her. She said that she would get her husband to help us and he comes out the front and could barely speak a word of English. We explained what we wanted and it turned out that the logs that we had see in the garden were bricks (it was pitch dark by this tie) but he guys takes me and Phil round the back of his house and lets us pick through his garage for any decent logs (chopped up trees) we could find, it was pretty surreal moment but we did manage to pick up the logs for $5.

Unfortunately, the next morning Fran had to leave us as she was due in at work I the evening and this left the 4 of us to do a proper days exploring of the Blue Mountains around Katoomba. There are 3 brilliant ways in which you can view the area around Katoomba. From Echo Point to the other side of the gorge, they have built a Skyway attraction that takes you across the 300ft deep gorge in a huge cable car and allows you views of Katoomba Falls that you could not get any other way other than in a helicopter. Another interesting part of the Skyway is that once the cable car has cleared the cliff face on either side, the floor becomes completely see-through !! It’s a bit of a pant-wetting experience at first but the car is so smooth that you don’t feel that uncomfortable at all once it gets going. Once you get to the other side, there is the usual gift shop and cafeteria that you would expect to find at such an attraction but you can also go down in to the gorge via another cable car ride. This time, the cable car takes a leisurely cruise across the tops of the trees before dropping 150ft in not much time at all, it’s not what you would call a thrill ride but the feeling you get standing at the front of the car waiting for the drop to happen is very weird. Once you are down in the gorge, they have built a huge maze of wooden pathways and walks designed to give you an education in the mining industry that was a big part of this area 100 hundred years ago. You can go and see the old miner’s huts and get a look at the opening to the mine. Phil, however, was more interested in other things.

Back home in Ireland, Phil works for his fathers construction firm and from the moment we set foot in the gorge, all he could do was try and figure out how much the construction of the footpaths and walkways must have cost. Seriously, he was doing mental costings for the steel and wood all the way round and pointing out that some of the girders looked like they hadn’t been riveted properly. Not sure he actually took any of the info about the mines in, but we all have our little things that keep us entertained, don’t we ?

The best way to get back up the gorge to the top is via the scenic railway. It’s one of those funicular railways that you’ve seen every so often taking people up the cliffs at Scarborough and stuff like that, but it is the steepest of these railways on the world. You wouldn’t think it was though when you get into it because you are almost lying flat in the seats with your feet almost at the same level as your head. It’s only once it starts moving and they play the Indiana Jones theme tune in the background that the thing starts up the cliff face. It is pretty much vertical as well, for the bulk of the trip, you are almost traveling up with your back parallel to the cliff face and you are standing on a small ledge with a cage round you. I didn’t think it would be but it was worse than crossing in the Skyway looking between your feet at the trees below you. The whole set up though is an absolutely perfect way to see around the area, it doesn’t stick out like a sore thumb and ruin the scenery, nothing has been bulldozed or chopped down to build these attractions, they use the area to make the experience a whole lot better.

We finished off our day with an hours hike round the cliffs from the Skyway to Echo Point and got some pictures with our legs hanging over the edge of the cliffs looking and feeling absolutely miniscule against the backdrop of the mountains and the valley below it. I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon but I can’t imagine the experience would all that different from this.

Once we got back to the house, we decided to phone around one more time to get firewood. In an area fairly hoachin’ with trees, we couldn’t believe how difficult it was to get a fire going. We managed to catch K-Mart before they closed and spoke to one of the guys in the relevant department, talk about lost in translation; this is what Lee got on the phone,

“Hi there, do you sell firewood at all?”
“I’m sorry, what ?”
“Do you sell firewood?”
“I’m not sure I understand what you want”
“Firewood !! You know, logs for putting on the fire”
“Ooooooooooh, right, you mean chopped up trees !!!”

Now by this time we were rolling about on the floor listening to Lee try and get the guy on the phone to understand what she meant, you know that when you come to Australia, there will inevitably be the odd time when there is slight language barrier but this took the biscuit for us. From then on, firewood was re-named chopped up trees. We did think about renaming paper the same thing but this was deemed confusing.

And then it was 2. Rosie and Phil left us on the Sunday as they had to be back at work on the Monday so Lee and I had the place to ourselves for our final night. It was really strange because it was the middle of May, but it felt like Christmas time, cuddled up on the couch so we got ourselves Chinese carry out and relaxed by the fire. By this time, we had actually found out that at the bottom of the hill there was a home hardware store that sold chopped up trees by the bag load and all we had to do was take a small walk down the hill and pick some up. It was a bit of a bummer finding this out at the end of our weekend but we had all had a laugh about the lack of wood in the place so it probably contributed to a great time that was had by all. Lee loved her birthday and this was the icing on the cake for the trip as well.

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