Today, our last full day in Sydney, we had booked a tour to the Blue Mountains. However, things did not go entirely to plan! First, I chose a tour company whose brochure advertised that they had been voted the No. 1 Blue Mountains tour company. Also, they were extremely inexpensive. In retrospect, I think we might have done better with a different company - at least the driver might have told us where we were!
Our first stop was at a lookout over the whole area. This was not a well-known spot and there were no railings so I was careful not to go too near the edge. My picture does show the blue haze for which the mountains were named.
The next lookout had a sign saying it was called the Cahill lookout, which our guide told us was a lookout over the whole Megalong Valley. It gave us our first view of the Three Sisters.
After a brief stop to explain the possible walks for the afternoon, we drove into Katoomba for lunch. After that, we drove to Echo point where we had a much better view of the three sisters, a series of 3 sandstone rock formations. There must originally have been more, you can see the collapsed bases of other ones.
The area has changed somewhat since I was last there; there is now a cableway, called the Scenic Cableway, which is an alternative way of returning from the bottom of the valley. There is also a huge glass-bottomed cable car called the Skyway which crosses the void, from one side of the valley to the other. We elected to walk down towards the bottom of the valley by the Furber Steps, and to return by the old Scenic Railway, (a funicular railway) which was what I did 12 years ago. Some other people in our bus did the same, others decided to go down on the Scenic Cableway and return by Scenic Railway and do no walking. One brave soul elected to walk down a very steep descent called the Giant Stairway, which also involved a very long walk at the bottom, before returning by Scenic Railway.
The Furber steps were quite steep, but there was often a handrail, and there was usually a fence at the lookout points. There was only one point where the steps and handrail were broken, and I had to descend backwards facing the steps and holding onto one of the steps above. We had some wonderful views on the way down, and the Katoomba Falls looked very refreshing on such a hot day, although there wasn't a lot of water going over them.
Eventually, we were down nearly as far as the lower station for the Scenic Railway. From there was a boardwalk, again new to me, and we walked along to look at the remains of a coal mine. The first mine opened in 1878, and there were eventually about 40 mines in the area. The coal was sometimes moved by horse-drawn wagon inside the mine, and it could be transported up the mountainside in various different ways.
There was a system of buckets at one time, but it broke. The Scenic Railway, which we intended to take back up again, was originally used to move the coal, which explains why the shaft up which the railway travels is nearly vertical - it is the steepest funicular railway in the world.
The boardwalk itself was quite interesting, with views of the dry temperate rainforest, and we were amazed by the height of the tree ferns. Some were more than 30 feet high, which, given they only grow a quarter of an inch a year, probably makes them 1500 years old.
As we walked along the boardwalk, we became aware of the smell of smoke, and we soon noticed a lot of smoke at the top of the hill. We walked back to the foot of the Scenic Railway, and could see that there was quite an extensive bush fire at the top of the hillside opposite. We were a bit worried about sparks falling down into the valley and causing fires closer to us, so we were quite glad to see the Scenic Railway carriage appear, ready to take us up to the top again.
The journey up is amazing, because the shaft is almost vertical. You start out sitting tilted back at a steep angle, and as your carriage starts up the vertical bit, you are suddenly sitting straight up and the ground is rushing away beneath your feet. I was fenced in at my side and asked Paul to take a photo for me, but we were moving too fast.
Once up at the top again, we got a good view of the bush fire, and could see it was quite serious.
It was decided to evacuate all tourists still in the valley, and only to run the Scenic Railway to bring them up again. This was a bit hard on our driver, who was waiting for the cable car so he could return to pick us up, and ended up doing a lot of running - and he was still late!
All tourists were being asked to leave the area, so that was the end of our trip to the Blue Mountains. As we departed we could see the helicopters flying over with buckets, and on the way back into Sydney, we passed 25 fire engines on the way to the fire - I counted them all.
Our driver took us to another area where you can often see wild kangaroos, and allegedly there were some, but Paul and I failed to see them - wrong side of the bus again. Finally, we went to the ferry stop at the Olympic Park, quite a long way up the Parramatta River, so we could return to Sydney by Rivercat. To our dismay, we discovered that, owing to difficulties in implementing the new ferry timetable, which started today, there would be no ferry service from Olympic Park today. So we drove back to Sydney through the heavy traffic in the bus.
Paul wanted to spend much longer in the Blue Mountains. But we leave for New Zealand tomorrow afternoon, so he'll need to think of a further trip to Australia some other year!
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