Blogs from Katoomba, New South Wales, Australia, Oceania - page 14

Well we have been deciding on arrival how long we want to stay as nothing is pre booked. Melbourne looked nice and after a couple of weeks out in the sticks with thousands of Aussie nuckle draggers we needed a bit of city life. We stayed in a nice hotel and recharged the batteries. Our last day was to be at the MCG for the one day England v Aus. Neither of us had been to a cricket match before and didnt know what to expect. How long a one dayer takes or even how the game is planned. We arrived at 1 for a 2:15 start and found ourselves surrounded by thousands of Aussie nuckle draggers except for Cleggy, a guy four rows down with an England flag and Cleggy written on his back. As ... read more

Checked out of the central hostel and walked down to the YHA which has been voted the best hostel in Aus for the last 2 years. The dorm was not ready so left the bags in the luggage storage and headed for the scenic railway via Echo Point. I got to the scenic world and purchased a return ticket which enabled me to use the railway and cableway. I caught the railway down into the forest, This railway is the steepest railway with a vertical drop of 250m and the steepest incline of 52 degrees. Once at the bottom I took a board walk through the rainforest and there were a number of different wildlife and plants, during the walk you got a view of the three sisters which are 3 rocks. Following the walk I ... read more

It was fun to go on a road trip with Morten and Marianne and we really enjoyed getting to know them over the four days we spent exploring the Blue Mountains together. The journey up to Katoomba would have been quite scenic but as we have come to expect the cloud and rain obscured the view! We arrived at our base for the next few days, the G’day motel and settled into our family room. After getting the lowdown on good places to eat we headed into town for some much needed food. One diner took our fancy as they were offering Kangeroo steaks on the specials board, Morten and I were up for tasting a bit of the nations wildlife! We were bitterly disappointed to say the least when our waitress told us that they ... read more

Today we headed off on a bus trip to the Jenolan Caves - a massive complex of cave's (some 300+ different cave systems) The trip out to the Caves took just over an hour and a half from Katoomba - and we went through some great Bush and Farm lands. Several Eastern Grey Kangaroo's were sheltering under the tree's from the midday heat and there were numerous Cockatoo's flying around the tree's en route. The entrance to the Cave site was through a huge archway in the moutainside called the Grand Arch, and once we arrived we were quickly sent off down to our first cave to start the tour. Our first Cave was Lucas Cave - one of the largest in the area is an hour and a half walk, involving 961 steps and leads ... read more

Hey everyone... Happy christmas... Its weird that its nearly christmas... Its warm here... its not hot but, we're 1000m up so mayb its not supposed to be... We go back to sydney tomorrow... We've kept ourselves busy when we've been here... but not too busy... really its been pretty laid back... There is some awesome scenery here tho and soem great walks... Some guys here went on a hike for about 8 hours... some of the views must have been awesome... but really 8 hours... Jen isn't the person to get me to do anything as stupid like that... which is probabkly a good thing but it'd be fun to do something stupid there is plenty of oppurtunity for doing stupid things here with the amount of stair ways that go up and down cliffs and ... read more