Sydney part 2: Out of the city and into the wild...

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While Sydney is a great city we decided to escape the hustle and bustle of World Youth Day with a couple of trips that showed a very different side to the area. We had already found peace and quiet on the coastal walk from Bondi to Coogee and the Scenic walk round Manly and had even experienced a bit of wild-life in the form of some huge but apparently harmless spiders on Manly, but we wanted more.

On Friday we got up at the crack of dawn to join an "Oz Experience" day tour to the Blue Mountains. The mountains are called blue because of the eucalyptus vapour that from a distance creates a blue haze but they are not blue up close! (and actually all mountains in Australia will look blue from a distance for this reason). We started the day with an encounter with Eastern Grey Kangaroos in the wild. We got quite close to them as they breakfasted on some grass! We then continued on to Lawson where we did an hour and a half bush walk past five different water falls and up and down a gorge. Lunch was spent in a park at Echo Point which overlooks the "Three Sisters" rock formation. After fuelling up we decended into a very deep canyon past the Katoumba falls spotting a deadly Funnel Web Spider on the way, and then took the easy way up on the "world's steepest train"! By joining a tour we had the advantage of a guide who really knew his stuff and also of meeting lots of different people.

On Saturday we took a boat trip out of Phillip Harbour in search of Whales and were not disappointed: we saw three Humpback Whales as they headed up the coast to have their babies! They didn't do anything fancy like jump out of the water but we followed two of them for a good while and got quite close as they came up for air. One even flashed us his tail!

While we could hardly be called "wild" ourselves we did get the chance to experience a bit of Sydney nightlife with our new found friends from the hostel (Ido from Isreal and Steve from exotic Southampton!). I even went as far as trying some real Aussie beer (in shandy form)!

Our last two days were more relaxed as we explored markets, the Botanic Gardens and the Opera House in a somewhat quieter atmosphere now WYD was over. Despite the fact we really had picked exactly the wrong week to be there in order to experienmce the real Sydney, we were a little bit sad to say goodbye when we had to board our 14 hour train to Brisbane.

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Photos

It was a bit blowy up there!
(Me and the Three Sisters)