August 23, 2012

August 23, 2012

We have heard a lot about the Blue Mountains to the west of Sydney so we signed up for a tour to this National Park and World Heritage Area. We were careful to pick an excursion that was small and would allow us time to do some hiking. A few blocks from the hotel we joined a mini-bus with seven other passengers. From Sydney we drove west thru heavy traffic before we caught the Great Western Highway that extends all the way to Perth on the western shore. We took it two hours uphill to the town of Katoomba in the heart of the Blue Mountains. They are hardly mountains. First they are only three thousand feet high; they would be large hills in a continent that had anything bigger. Secondly, they don’t look like mountains. They are more like sheer cliffs. They would be mesa tops or buttes in Arizona.

Our first stop was Echo Point lookout that gives us a panoramic view of the Blue Mountains surrounding a wide heavily forested valley below. To our immediate left are some landmark outcroppings, which according to Aboriginal legend are three sisters that were turned to stone. In contrast to Arizona these mesas and valleys are not barren rock but heavily jungled. Because Eucalyptus trees (Gum Trees) are the predominant species here, the area looks like the mountain jungles of Africa.

From the overlook, we hiked down the cliff wall following the Giant Stairway Trail. It was a steep, damp, uneven rock staircase that hugged the escarpment. To avoid a nasty spill we had to step very carefully. Although we have done longer descents in the US none have been through rainforest. At the bottom of the cliff, but still above the valley floor, we traversed horizontally past Katoomba Falls ending at a rail lift, a leftover from a long-gone coal mine. We climbed aboard for the short trip up a very steep grade. At the top the weather turned ugly with high winds and a few raindrops. Our group decided to skip the next planned walk and we instead drove to nearby Leura for a short walk to Sublime Point, another lookout on the backside of the Three Sisters. From Leura we drove back to Sydney, stopping along the way for a brief driving tour of the 2000 Olympic Park.
During the entire trip our driver and guide talked non-stop about all things Australian. He was surely a trivia king and definitely made the long drive go by quicker.