Truly beautiful Blue Mountains

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Our Blue Mountains tour started bright and early with us having to get to the local pick-up point for 7:20am...I know, very early! We’d been told that it was a fun tour (Happy tours) as the brothers who run it were born and raised in the Blue Mountains themselves, knew it like the back of their hands and had good senses of humour. Well after a bit of confusion over who was on the tour and who was not, (there were lots of pick-ups for different tour companies at the same place and time, we set off on our journey to the beautiful Blue Mountains. We had been talking about the tour to a few people in our hostel the night before who said they’d been on it, (different tour company) but that they had a really poor day due to weather problems, and the road to the national park had been closed as it was too wet. We were really lucky with the weather though as it was bright, but not too hot, in fact it was perfect for the day we had. It would have been a bit miserable if we were soaking wet trying to hike around.

We headed straight for the road that had been reopened and went into the national park to look for kangaroos. Unfortunately, there was grass cutting in progress which had obviously scared off the ‘roos so despite our little kangaroo hunt, (walking around looking around us), we were on a wild kangaroo chase and we saw none. No problem though as we’d already seen them on our own road trip to the Great Ocean Road and knew we would come across them again at some point.

The next stop was at a little village cafe for breakfast. They had an amazing selection of cakes (which Matt was salivating over), and pastry goods too. After a short stop, we went to our first of many viewpoints of the day and eyed up an amazing horizon from the edge of a cliff. Trees and mountains, oh and a car wreck down the embankment too...I wonder what happened there? The view was spectacular and our photos probably don’t do it justice. We were told that there were 93 different types of eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains but unfortunately, none of these are liked by koala bears so we weren’t going to have the honour of seeing them that day. It’s a good job that the guide, Simon, told us that at the beginning of the day as I might have spent my whole time cricking my neck, looking up at the trees trying to spot the cute little bears eating away at the leaves or sleeping cosily amongst the branches.

Like Cate said, the cliff-top viewpoint we first stopped at really was amazing - we’ve become a tad over used to seeing amazing sights along the course of our travels and we’d started to worry that maybe we’d seen so much awesome stuff that we wouldn’t get the “wow factor” from anything in Australia, but this first viewpoint was utterly gobsmacking, standing on an open ledge at the top of the valley looking out for miles and miles, and such fresh air too!

School time.
Geography lesson: who knows where the name Blue Mountains comes from? Well, if you look out across any of the breathtaking vistas of the scenery you’ll see a blue haze that hangs over the scenery, hence the name.
Science lesson: what causes the blue haze? The forest in the Blue Mountains is primarily eucalyptus, and the leaves give off a vapour which forms the blue haze. Yeah it’s something to do with refraction I think, the light and the vapour causing the blue colour.
Class dismissed.

Anyway, following our mountain-top lookout session we went deeper into the Jamison Valley, and headed off to do some trekking around to a couple more lookouts and to see Wentworth Falls (the largest permanent waterfall in Oz). The shopping trip to get Cate some trainers to wear for the trip really paid dividends, the trekking paths had only just been opened following floods (some were still closed) and it was nice and muddy, not to mention steep (our poor little unfit bodies!). I really don’t know how we’ll cope if we attempt to climb Machu Piccu, especially with the lack of air as we ascend to high high heights.

The trekking was really good fun and we got to see lots of beautiful views from different angles and as ever we took many photos and Simon really tried his best to keep us away from the other tours that were trekking around - he knew all sorts of alternative routes and it for most of the time, it felt like we were the only people out in the Blue Mountains that day. We stopped at a little cafe for our tour guide to pick our lunch - steak, tomato and onion pie with puff pastry and salad. We were driven the short distance to Echo Point where we sat on a bench listening to an aboriginal Australian playing the digereedoo and ate our beautiful pie and salad - it really was tasty. I think I might attempt to eat pie for every meal we have in Australia (on the rare occasions that we eat out of course...it’s rare that a hostel would have an actual oven to cook them in, boo.)

Echo point is another viewpoint for the stunning scenery. It is also the viewpoint for three rocks that are called the “Three Sisters.” There are many dream-time stories about the Three Sisters but we were told one story by Simon that aboriginals used to believe about the three sisters. It goes something like this. There was a man who had three daughters. He had to go off somewhere to do something (I can’t remember what) and he asked his daughters to look over the valley and keep an eye on something, (I can’t remember that either). Unfortunately the sisters were very bold (tut tut Shuv, Jo and Cate) and they started to mess around on the rocks causing a landslide to occur. Bad ladies. Now, at the bottom of the valley lived a bunyip (a monster) who became very agitated with rocks falling on his head, so he went after the three sisters who had to in turn, run for their lives. The father came back and saw that his precious beauties were in trouble and so he whipped out his wishing bone, (lucky he had one eh?) and turned them to stone creating the three rocks so that the bunyip couldn’t get to them. It was for their own good, honest. Now, the bunyip was getting increasingly angry, especially now that he didn’t have three young girls to eat or kill or whatever, so naturally, he went after the father instead. The father ran for his life and saw a cave that he rushed to and tried to get inside. Unfortunately he was too big to fit in. However, luckily he still had his wishing bone so he made himself into a bird to fly away, or get in the cave or something. Well, the bunyip couldn’t get to him so he was safe as a bird and the three sisters were safe too as rocks. Cool, all good, yeah? Well not really, because the father was a bird. And the three sisters were rocks. Can’t lead a good life in those conditions can you? So what should the father have done? That’s right, he should have turned himself back to a human again and transformed his rock daughters back to humans too. Did he do this? No. Why not? Because when he transformed himself into a bird, he dropped his wishing bone and without this he couldn’t perform any magic. So he was still a bird and his daughters remained rocks. The final part of the story is that there is a bird that lives at the bottom of the valley who still scrapes around in the soil looking for the wishing bone. Did we see the bird? Absolutely yes. Mad hey? So the daughters are the three sisters rocks and the father is the bird scraping around in the soil looking for his wishing bone so he can transform himself and his three daughters back to humans. So what happened to the bunyip? I have no idea. Maybe he is hiding in the trees. We didn’t see him.

Wow, a geography lesson, a science lesson and story time ... our blogs are excellent teaching aids, maybe we should get a government grant or something to continue travelling around the world. Hmmm.

After our scrumpious pie lunch we headed for the strange sounding attraction of Scenic World ... which basically offered three “rides” for opportunities to see different views of the surrounding scenery. The first thing offered was a glass-bottomed cable car across a ravine for a view of a Katoomba Falls, second was a cable car down to the bottom of the rainforest, and lastly was the worlds steepest railway down to the bottom of the rainforest ... all of which cost money so we, of course, chose the most economical option - a long steep walk down the Furber Steps (mountain path) to the rainforest and then a ride back up the worlds steepest railway back to the top (there was no way we were going to walk back up, although on our way down we did see some poor souls attempting it, suckers!).

So after a very long walk down a lot of steps towards the mountain floor (both of our legs started to go all wobbly from the repetitive stepping downhill) we finally made it down into the rainforest, whoop-whoop! It was at this point that Cate Goddard turned into Cate Attenborough (I’ve learnt on this trip what a nature lover she is) and was in her element in the rainforest, looking for wildlife and crazy plants wherever possible.

The area used to be a coal mining area with hundreds of kilometres of tunnel built through the steep mountainside. There were some coal mining things to see, unfortunately some of which that were in the middle of tree areas and bushes as after the mining ceased, equipment had literally been thrown over the side into the rainforest and left there. I thought this was a little strange and really not good for the environment. How could they? We wandered around looking out for things and came across the bird (that I mentioned earlier) putting on a show for his mate. He was really loud tweeting, singing, I’m not really sure how to describe the sounds he seemed to be making with his butt cheeks (I kid you not) and had all his feathers standing on end parading for his little lady. I captured it on video and we were actually really lucky to witness it as we probably wouldn’t have noticed it scuttling around had he not been putting on a show, and it stopped after a couple of minutes, and we noticed people just walking past, none-the-wiser.

The trees were great...they were so incredibly tall and the bark had completely peeled off some of them; I’m not sure if it was a disease or part of their natural cycle. There wasn’t much on the rainforest floor, probably because of the lack of sunlight reaching it, but I didn’t expect it to be quite as sparse (other than tree stumps of course).

The one remaining adventure was to tackle the world’s steepest railway, dum-dum-dum. At it’s steepest point it is 52 degrees! We bagged ourselves a seat right at the back of the train and as we were all going up the hill backwards (so that we were looking downwards at the crazily steep railway we’d just passed by) we were in prime position to see the scary angled railway without anything else in front of us. It felt a bit like a rollercoaster ride at first. I would have loved to experience it going down the cliff face but that would have meant an extra $9 each and we are skanks. Quite obviously. Built into a natural crevice in the cliff face it went really steeply up and down the vertical tracks from the clifftop to the rainforest - it would’ve actually been quite scary to experience it on the way down, but the way back up wasn’t too bad, the highlight being the Indiana Jones music that they played throughout the journey.

So there we have it, the Blue Mountains, as Cate’s already said the photos probably won’t do it justice as it’s such a beautiful area (and we were very lucky with the weather) ... but enjoy the piccys anyway.

Love Matt and Cate x

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Photos

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Can you spot the kangaroo? There weren't any!

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On top of the world!

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Amazing scenery

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Stunning