Sunday, May 24th, 2009, The Blue Mountains
Bob: We left shortly after breakfast for an auto tour of the Blue Mountains that lie west of Sydney. On the way out Neville drove on the limited-access multilane freeway, which was the exact equivalent of an English Motorway, an Interstate highway in the US, the German Autobahn, the Italian Autostrada, the Spanish Autovia, etc. As it was Sunday morning, the traffic was quite light and the drive up to the mountains took only an hour or so. Once we started climbing the escarpment in earnest, however, the road decreased to a regular four-lane highway and then to a two-lane road with a passing lane as we wound our way up to the first crest. |
Monika: Before taking off for the Blue Mountains, Neville took us to the Hornsby train station to get our tickets to Dubbo for the following day. It seemed to be the first time that the ticket clerk at Hornsby had ever seen a Backtrekker Pass. Both of the clerks looked at it somewhat puzzled, but then one of them got on the phone and after a while she seemed to have had success and after another few minutes our tickets were printed out. Meanwhile we kept shunting people to the seemingly longer but moving line next to us. But finally: success, we were handed our tickets. Back at the Pollards' condominium, Lyn had gotten everything ready and soon we were off. Neville first took us to their old neighborhood to show us the house they had lived in with their kids before moving into the condo. Their condo, by the way, made me envious: it was a very nicely arranged 3 bedroom, 2 bath place with the master bedroom and bath somewhat away from the rest with its own verandah. There was a nice swimming pool in the complex. A shopping center with a large supermarket was five minutes away and the train station maybe ten. The little town of Hornsby had a lot of other stores and doctors offices, so that you could easily live there with minimal use of a car. We also drove through the campus of Kings College, the private school where their youngest son and a lot of Lynn's relatives had graduated from. It was a rather large, beautiful campus. Kings College had both residential and day students and it looked like a very nice learning environment. Australia is like England that it has a lot of private schools and that the alumni (old boys) are usually very active. For instance, this campus of the school was relatively new, and the old boys had insisted that the old chapel be dismantled at the old campus and re-assembled stone by stone on the new one. And indeed it was a very pretty church. From now on we went north to the Blue Mountains. For a long time we still seemed to be going through suburbs of Sydney. But finally we started climbing and the terrain started getting hillier. |
Bob: We turned off at Katoomba to drive out to Echo Point, which offered us a grand view of the escarpment on either side with a huge, verdant valley spread below. The valley area was completely unoccupied because it was a national park area and the forest canopy below us spread out in an uninterrupted carpet of green, leafy foliage. I found a map that showed a network of hiking trails down in the valley and that looked like fun, but Neville and Lyn told us about hikers who had gotten lost in those forests, some of whom had perished as a result. The view from the top, however, was stunning. Off to our left we saw the Three Sisters rock formation, a series of three rock spires that stuck up straight out of the valley floor next to the cliff. There was even a trail down to a catwalk of some kind on which you could clamber out onto them, but the trek down and up would have taken us more time than we had available on our parking ticket. So if you come out to visit the Blue Mountains, consider purchasing a multi-hour parking ticket if you want to wander down into the valley on the hiking trails, making sure you remember, of course, that coming back up will take considerably longer than going down! |
Monika: At Katoomba we turned off to go one of the main tourist attractions in the Blue Mountains: Echo Point and The Three Sisters. The Three Sisters is a stone formation of three rugged stone spires reaching into the sky. Lyn and Neville had not been here for some time and commented on how commercialized it had become. There was paid parking and a tourist shop, and on a Sunday both were crowded. When we finally reached the overlook is really was a rather spectacular view. The Three Sisters were seemingly close; other cliffs reared up on either side of us, some with cable cars going up and down. Across the valley where there were more cliffs of sandstone that gleamed in the sunlight. In between the cliffs was just a dense forest of green eucalyptus trees. Lyn told us that people had gotten lost in those forests. |
Bob: Retrieving the car, Neville drove us along the Cliff Drive that gave us more glimpses of the valley below as it wound around the heights. The road finally intersected with the main highway and continued up into the mountains to another scenic overlook, Govett's Leap, where we stopped to take a gander at a different section of the complex of intersecting valleys down below. Neville mentioned that the early settlers were stymied when they first attempted to cross the Blue Mountains because they followed the valleys up into the mountains, all of which dead-ended into the rock cliffs of the escarpment. But when they tried to first climb onto the ridges and follow those into the mountains, the settlers succeeded in moving onward to the open ranges beyond. The view there was, if anything, more spectacular than at Echo Point, partly because we could view another rock escarpment of that beautiful, buff-colored sandstone across the valley from us and partly because we saw a tall graceful waterfall just off to our right. The waterfall was quite high, at least 1,000 feet and quite possibly more. The torrent gushed over the face of the cliff and fell straight down so far that the wind twisted it into a braided stream of rivulets and spray. It was simply marvelous and reminded me of Bridal Veil falls in Yosemite National Park in height and beauty except it had far more water which made for a more impressive sight. |
Monika: We did not have any more time to do any extensive walking, so we just headed back to the car and kept on going. Neville drove us all around and we got glimpses of gorgeous scenery. We finally stopped at Govett's Leap, a gorgeous overlook with a beautiful, large waterfall. Wind would move the water around and it looked like a veil. The waterfall was on one side of the overlook, and again we had a beautiful sandstone cliff across the valley. Both Bob and I tried to capture the beauty of the scenery in single shots and panoramics. Wow. |
Bob: Having driven through the heart of the Blue Mountains, we took a different route back to Hornsby, driving first North and then back eastward on a two lane highway. Near the town of Bell, I think, we pulled off for a moment to hear the "bell birds". At first I wasn't sure if Neville was joking about that or not, but when I listened carefully the call of the birds really did sound like bells. Our more remote route back kept us far enough from downtown Sydney that we avoided its traffic congestion, so we arrived back in Hornsby after a fairly relaxed but long drive home. That evening Monika washed our clothes with Lyn's help while I worked with Neville to upload the pictures that Lyn had taken over the last few days into his facebook account. It was all fun, but that unfortunately that fun took up most of the rest of the evening so we didn't have time to watch another DVD before we went to bed. |
Monika: We drove back along narrower country roads rather than the motorway we had come up on. When we came through the hamlet of Bells, Neville opened the window and we could hear the bell birds with songs like bells after whom the town was named. We stopped at a roadside stand to pick up some apples for the next day and finally got home. There was a beautiful little lake right next to the roadside stand and that is where we saw our first wild parrots. Lyn and Neville introduced us to another Australian institution: the Clubs. There are clubs for veterans, rugby players and fans, etc. Basically these are social clubs that serve lunch and dinner at reasonable prices. You have to be a member, but can bring in guests. You can also eat there if you are not a member but live more than 7 miles from the club, so it is easy for foreigners to qualify. Sunday night was grill night, you could have pork or beef grill with vegetable and potatoes for $12.-- We all had the "small" plate which was plenty big enough for all of us. What surprised me was, that they also had slot machines and Keno gambling. We sat in the main dining room, but they also had a special sports section where they played the major rugby and other matches on big TV screens. So for a reasonable lunch or dinner in Australia, find a club and tell them you are from far, far away. Back home, we started a load of wash and then I did some planning ahead. I booked a cheap motel in Dubbo for 2 nights and in Broken Hill for three nights and also booked our tickets for the bus trip from Dubbo to Broken Hill. So now we were all set for the next few days. |
| Index |
| Prolog | Map of Australian Walkabout | Epilog |
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