Blue Mountains Photos and Trip Report

Well, that was a bit of a long hiatus! Things got busy at work and home after my trip to Australia and I never found time to post an update. Time to rectify that now!

The flight to Australia was pretty uneventful. Flew from Victoria to Vancouver, Vancouver to San Francisco, San Francisco to Sydney. The flight was about 13 hours long and I managed to catch a few hours sleep thanks to the Sony NC22B noise canceling headphones I picked up before leaving.

Arrived in Sydney at about 6am and got through customs in about an hour. Picked up the car and set out to the office that I was going to using the Garmin 60CSx GPS that I had loaded with the Australia maps. Managed to get where I needed to go without too many problems. One thing I hate about driving in a new city using the GPS is that you become totally reliant on it. I could not tell you how I got from the airport to North Sydney, I just followed the prompts on the screen. I read somewhere once that the current generation of kids will never know what it is like to be lost as everything will have a GPS and location awareness built in to it. All I can say is, I hope they have plenty of batteries, as once you become dependent on a device to tell you where you are and where to go, I think that spatial processing part of your brain starts to atrophy.

Be aware when driving in Sydney that lots of stretches of the motorways and some tunnels and bridges are toll roads that use an electronic payment system. If you don't have an epass then you have to pay cash if you can. Some toll roads have no toll booths and if you don't have an epass then you have 3 days to go to a website and pay the fee. I wasn't sure if the rental car had one or not (it didn't) and just drove on. If there is a toll booth it may only be in one lane or you may have to come off at a junction, pay at the booth and then get back on the motorway. If you don't pay on the website, the rental car agency will charge you about $30 AUSD for each toll.

The drive out to the Blue Mountains was pretty uninteresting. It takes about 2 hours from Sydney to Katoomba but I stopped at the Featherdale Wildlife Park along the way to see some kangaroos, wallabies, kookaburras and other Australian animals. The Mountains aren't really mountains as we know them in Western Canada. They are more of a gradual increase in elevation until you get to a plateau and then come to these amazing sheer-sided cliff mega valleys. I stopped at Wentworth Falls and did a geocache on the path to the Empress Falls viewpoint. I continued on to Katoomba, got some lunch and then checked in at the Red Leaf Resort in Blackheath.

After dropping my bags off in the hotel room, I drove back in to Katoomba and followed a gravel road to the top of the Golden Stairs. This is a path that follows the cliff face a couple of hundred meters down in to the valley. I was hoping to follow the trail out to Mt. Solitary but I only had about 2.5 hours of daylight left at this point so I only got about 1KM past Ruined Castle. Camping is allowed in the valley and I went past some nice camping spots as well as lots of trees that would be good for hanging a camping hammock. Despite having my headlight and rain gear with me, I turned around after about 1.5 hours and got back to the car after a 20 minute climb back up the Golden Stairs.

The next morning I did a short drive out to the start of the Grand Canyon loop at Evan's Lookout. This was a fantastic hike down the canyon along the narrow canyon bottom following a stream.It was very cool seeing the plants change from the dry top of the canyon to the much cooler and wetter bottom. It took just over 2 hours to do the 11KM loop.

After checking out of the hotel, I spent the rest of the day geocaching in the area and then drove back to Sydney along the Bells Line of Road. This was a great drive with lots of twisties and fantastic scenery.

Unfortunately, the rest of the drip was spent working so I was stuck in Sydney for most of the time other than a day trip to the Royal National Park but this was a little disappointing in the Winter. I'm sure it would much more interesting during the summer when there should be lots of animals around.

The rest of the trip photos are here.