Blue Mountains, Sydney

We arrived in Sydney on Wednesday evening and stayed overnight at an airport hotel, as the plan was to get a hire car the next morning and drive out to the Blue Mountains National Park, which is about 100km from Sydney.

The drive was pleasant enough, but the whole experience was not quite what I had envisaged from reading various guide books. I had expected the journey to be on a very minor road passing through a few small villages, with views of the mountains on either side. The reality was a four lane highway for much of the journey, with an almost continuous ribbon of suburban development stretching from Sydney to Kalumba, which was our destination for the evening. To see the mountains, one had to head off along one of the various side roads that lead to the edge of the plateau. We stopped off for a walk to a waterfall at one of these locations, and had a longer walk once we reached Kalumba. This took us down a long and winding flight of steps to the valley floor and to an old coal mining site. The way back up was via a scenic railway, running on the tracks previously used for the old coal trucks. Apparently this was the steepest funicular railway in the world at over 45 degrees of slope.

The next day we continued on along the Blue Mountain Highway, but the sunny weather of the previous day had changed to low cloud, which completely obscured the view form the variously lookout points that we visited. We finished up with a visit to some botanical gardens before taking the road back to Sydney. I was interested to see that the botanical gardens were selling Wollemi pine plants that had been grown from seed obtained from the grove of pre-historic pines that were discovered a few hears ago in the nearby Wollemi National Park. These have gone from being rare and unique to being so common that they were using one as a Christmas tree!

Overall, I would say that the Blue Mountains are an impressive spectacle that is well worth a visit, but without doing a multi-day trek in the valleys, it is difficult to go much beyond the fleeting visit that is typical of the coach loads of tourists that come out of Sydney every day.