Blue Mountains

Trip Start Oct 01, 2008
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Trip End Dec 30, 2009

Flag of Australia  , New South Wales,
Tuesday, November 11, 2008

We pick up our hire car. It is a Toyota Yaris and manages to absorb our travelling bags without too much difficulty. We have been "upgraded" from a manual to an automatic which is a nuisance as the engine struggles to cope with hauling the bags and us up hills. We eventually navigate out of Sydney and are soon driving through small suburban towns. We have been given dire warnings about the enthusiasm of Australian speed cops so I am on my best behaviour although all the other traffic whizzes by.


Small town NSW bears a striking resemblance to small town US: main street, shops with big porches etc. After an hour or so, we climb into the Blue Mountains and check into our motel in Katoomba.


The big draw here is the view out over the valley below. There are three pillars of rock called the three sisters. As a non-geologist, my understanding is limited but essentially the rock is made up of lots of different layers. Some of it is very soft and as that has been eroded away by rivers, undermining the hard layers above. They then shear off vertically to leave the spectacular layered appearance. Coal and oil shale has been mined here 100+ years ago and we see the coal seams in the cliff face in some areas. The shale seams are very soft allowing vegetation to grow in a stripe laterally along the cliff. The miners built an inclined railway to carry the coal up the cliff. When the mines became uneconomic, the railway became a tourism money maker.


We take a stroll for a couple of hours along top of the cliff, the Prince Henry Cliff Walk (6km) to the Leura Falls. On the way, Janice spots a lyrebird. It mimics other bird calls and then strings the calls together to produce a medley of sound.


We eat in the hotel grill: average although they did have James Squire beers.... When we checked in, the owner recommended a restaurant across the road as being special but said plaintively that his food was very good too. We felt we ought to give it a try. We have booked into the other restaurant for Friday night.
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