Travels around the world – The Blue Mountains

While staying in Sydney it is worth taking a trip inland and paying a visit to “The Blue Mountains”.  It’s about an hours journey, maybe a little more but it is a different world.  I ended up going because David had arranged the trip with a few people from his work and there was a spare place in the car.  They had booked accommodation and we were staying in a cabin in the middle of nowhere.

David and I were the only English people in a group of Australians but this was the first time in the Blue Mountains for us all.

The main thing you go to see is called “The 3 sisters”.  These are 3 natural spires within the mountain formation.  Looking at it from a distance it is instantly quite spectacular but gets more impressive when you start to comprehend the sheer scale of it.  It took a while before I noticed the movement on top of the sisters and then it took a little while longer to realise that there were people standing on top.  I think the sisters themselves get dwarfed by the huge expanse of land that contains them, you can quite literally see for miles.  The mountains themselves are not blue but have been given the name because they do appear tinted because of the gases released by the thousands of trees that grow in this area, or to quote one of the tourist guides…..

“The atmosphere is filled with finely dispersed droplets of oil, which, in combination with dust particles and water vapour, scatter short-wave length rays of light which are predominantly blue in colour”

I never made it close enough to the 3 sisters to stand on top of them.  If I am honest I am not sure I would have been able to having realised exactly how high they were.

I did, however, get to ride on the steepest incline railway in the southern hemisphere at Katoomba.  The track was initially built when the area was being mined and the train was the easiest way to move the coal to the surface.  The journey isn’t as long as the one up to Victoria peak in Hong Kong but it is a smaller vehicle and an open cabin so you are just held by the seat belt and have just a small mesh roof between you and the rocks as you make your way up or down through the small gap in the mountain so it was more like a very slow roller coaster ride.  In the 90’s this was just accepted but nowadays it seems that the health and safety aspect has taken over and the experience is much safer as the passengers are fully enclosed in the vehicle.
A trip to the Blue Mountains isn't complete with out a trip to one of the many cave systems.  We opted for an easy tour so that we didn't end up traveling back to Sydney covered in mud or soaking wet.  Even this was spectacular, you travel down narrow passages to find that at the end it opens up to a huge chasm filled with stalagites.  If I remember correctly one of the rooms was called "The cathedral" because of its sheer size and spectactular appearence.