Sunday 7 February 2010

Australia Adventures: 6. The Not-So-Blue Mountains...

I'm sharing a room with a number of girls (one is an old Irish Lady who sometimes acts like our Grandmother), a Belgium girl Angie and I took a day trip to visit the Blue Mountains near Katoomba west of Sydney - the mountains are part of the 'Great Dividing Range' and get their names from the mist of oil given off by the eucalyptus trees or 'gum trees' which are everywhere in Australia. Not that we could see them as the day we picked to go absolutely poured down with rain but our walking guide (who looked very much like Patrick Swayze, I thought anyway) did the best he could to make the day fun teaching us about how the Aborigines used 'Ochre' from the flakes of rock to paint artwork onto their 'Red Hands Cave' very interesting.

DSCF1701.jpg


DSCF1712.jpgDSCF1708.jpgDSCF1671.jpg

Despite the rain lashing down, we descended through the beautiful low climate rainforest to some monstrous waterfalls and gingerly treaded across the velocity of the water surges ahh!! was pretty intense and the National Park were thoughtful enough to put a sign up showing us 'You are Here' just to feed off my adrenaline


DSCF1656.jpgDSCF1659.jpgDSCF1662.jpg

ever wanted to be on the edge of a waterfall?
ever wanted to be on the edge of a waterfall?
good to know....
good to know....
We soon found ourselves standing before The Three Sisters Rocks - the evidence of a legendary Aborigine tale of a sorcerer turning three sisters into rocks to avoid the advances of three young males. The bum deal for the sisters was that the sorcerer died before switching them back. Geez now that's bad luck.

Except errrr.... we couldn't see it.

Can't you see it Angie?
Can't you see it Angie?
We ended our day in the mountains by riding the steepest railway in the world up an incline of 52 degree to the valley floor - wahooh, no really it was steep Indiana Jones would have been proud of me


DSCF1718.jpg


Just what I love about travelling is the unpredictability of it - on the way back to the city we heard word that there had been a landslide, causing road closures so we had to take an alternate route back to Sydney for a further 3 hours - ha! but we did bring back a little souvenir from our day in the mountains

A little souvenir...
A little souvenir...a leech















With Lonely Planet Travel Guide Australia 





No comments:

Post a Comment

Scribble back!