Blue Mountains, Happy Poms

19/01/2012

So today was my [Luke] first day in Oz. And we were up at the crack of dawn to start the hour long trip for today’s activity; hiking around the Blue Mountains. For a little background info, the Blue Mountains are one of the top 3 most visited places in Australia, and it wasn’t hard to see why once we got there. Our first stop was Wentwood Falls, a twenty minute walk or so down the mountain and into the forest, surrounded by waterfalls of various shapes and sizes.

We went round with our tour guide Adam and 4 other couples. Adam had an obvious love for hiking and anything outdoorsy! He’d often stop us to smell leaves of certain plants or take us to little areas he loved to go to and tell stories of his travels. It was good to go with someone who was really passionate about what was going on around us. He did have terrible taste in music however…

After trekking over stepping stones rising from small lagoons and over bridges meters away from a waterfalls edge, we hoped back onto the coach ready for our next destination. A few more terrible songs later [a band called ‘Tool’, not great when you’re jet lagged, but feel free to check them out if you’re not] and a toilet stop in a pretty town called Leura and we had finally arrived at Grose Valley. This was our main trek of the day, an hour long walk, unaided through the forest and valleys. You really got a great visual of how vast these mountains are. They stretched for miles and apparently take at least a day or two’s walk to get from one mountain to the next. And they were actually blue [well, sort of]! Random info for you; the Blue Mountains seem blue to someone drilling for oil and shizz and the whole place is now covered in minuet specs of dust that show up blue on the colour spectrum, so when the light shines on them, they look blue… ok so maybe I didn’t pay full attention to the story Adam told us, but that’s about on the right lines, I think.

We walked around most of the trek with a couple from Hull, who were really nice, and if im honest, after the first 20 minutes of looking around, we just ended up chatting and not taking much in of our surroundings… Saying that though, my eyes did stay firmly on the ground ahead as we were warned quiet often of the amount of poisonous snakes in the area, and we were only wearing Toms [me] and flip flops [Scott], and a trip to the emergency clinic wasn’t on my agenda for my first day [at least]!
What we did see however was beautiful and as we stood on the last ‘look out’ on Pulpit Rock the sun finally began to shine. There was a large rock on the way made of limestone, and everyone was carving their names into it, so we did a special shout-out to our friend Susannah Jessica Orrell, as we wanted to cheer her up so she can stop this stress nonsense and GET BACK TO WORK! 

Another shout out has to go to whomever made out lunch for the day, the chicken pie was amazing!

Our third and final stop of the day was the more commercialised ‘Three Sisters’. This entailed a long, steep walk down the valley and through a few caves until we reached the train at the bottom. A few facts about this said train: - it is the steepest railway in the world at 52 degrees, which feels almost vertical and travels up the forest and the caves for 450m. So we used that as our method of getting back up to the top again [we had got lazy and this seemed much more fun].

So that was my first day and Scott’s favourite to date [just because I am with him obviously].  We are currently staying in a nice little hostel in the centre of Sydney in our own private twin room for only $30 a night, so quite the bargain! We have a few things planned for the rest of our weekend here, but don’t worry I won’t be writing about everything in this much detail ;)

Stay tuned…