So here we are, the world famous Blue Mountains… They are mostly famous for the fact that they are one of the “nature” spots in Australia which are easy to access by car or train (which is a bit of a contradiction but anyway). As we already figured out before, “experiencing” the nature bush in other parts of Australia usually comes along with a longer road trip. Nevertheless the Blue Mountains are a beautiful piece of land. By the way, they got their name not because of the colour of the mountains but due to the blue glimmer over the valley if the weather is nice. They are even kind of historically important, as their crossing allowed the exploration of Western Australia. As already mentioned they are very famous for three major groups of people. Number one are our beloved bus tourists (again the majority of them is from China) who jump in a bus in Sydney and drive to the three main attractions of the mountains, the “Three Sisters”. The second group (and we count ourselves to that one) are locals (and also some of the backpackers) who do some walking in the area for 1-3 days. Group number three faces the mountains as a good spot for extreme sport. That’s why there are a lot of tours for climbers (or people who want to become one) including abseiling in the waterfalls.
But enough with the introducing banter… We took the train on Saturday morning to Katoomba, one of the three major towns (or better villages) to visit the Blue Mountains. In the beginning we wanted to go there earlier (meaning Thursday or Friday), but unfortunately we had no luck with the weather once again. We were aware that we wouldn’t be the only ones who had the idea to visit the mountains on a sunny weekend, but we didn’t expect that the train would be filled to capacity. Fortunately, the majority of people got sorted to the already waiting tourist buses after our arrival in Katoomba, why it wasn’t that bad at all. As we left most of our stuff at Leanne’s house we had only one backpack filled with our camping gear and went to the camp ground which was directly next to one of the attractions of the Blue Mountains. Three gondolas which go over the gorge and down to the valley. Our first walk was to the Three Sisters in order to show them the respect due to them. Let’s say it like that: well, not really… They are basically three stones next to the gorge. Don’t get us wrong, the formation is really impressing, but not really worth 500,000 visitors per year. Anyway, we saw them and got in touch with a very nice and helpful staff of the visitor information who suggested us full of enthusiasm a four hour walk (to the Leura falls along the Prince Henry Cliff walk and back through the valley). We directly accepted his suggestion and started hiking (the solar charger perfectly attached to the backpack). The hike was quite impressive, first a couple of km along a cliff to a waterfall (Leura Cascades and Leura Falls). Along the waterfall, we went down into the valley and passed the Three Sisters back to the gondola. We actually thought about going back up with a gondola, because there are only 2 other ways out of the valley. The first one is 1000 steps along the Three Sisters or, according to the guy in the visitor centre, a walk with “much less steps” closer to the gondola, the Furber Steps. When we arrived at the bottom of the Three Sisters, it was already clear that we’ll miss the last gondola, so we decided to take the putative easier (and in addition more beautiful) way along the gondola. Whether you see 915 steps (Tobi counted) to be MUCH less, each to his own, anyway it was quite exhausting after a 10km hike.
Really exhausted we fell asleep immediately in order to go the next day to the Wentworth Falls. After we solved our problem with storing our luggage (inclusive tent) in the backyard of a small supermarket (there are neither lockers nor luggage storage at the train station or visitor centre), we started walking to the starting point of the hiking trails. This figured out to be a 1.5km long walk along a street and we were shortly before letting out our recently gained passion for hitchhiking, but we controlled us. Arriving, we chose the “Under and Over Cliff Walk”, mainly because it sounded quite nice and had the right time span. The name was actually the program as the walk went under and over the cliff with some beautiful lookouts over the Blue Mountains, but also along and over a waterfall. During our lunch break a little lizard showed a lot of interest in Kerstin’s food and came as close as 30 cm to catch some bred. At the end of the track we decided to walk a little detour and went down some steps to another waterfall (Empress Falls). There we were able to observe a group while abseiling the waterfall. The most interesting part was the amazing speed of the guide while actually running down the waterfall (he did around 20-30 meters in only some seconds).
After we climbed the steps back uphill, we obviously somehow had to get back to the train station and we both were not really looking forward to walking another 1.5 km along a boring uphill street. Unfortunately there were not many people at the car park why we couldn’t ask anyone for a lift directly, so we started walking along the street. After around 5 minutes, Tobi saw a car leaving the car park and while we were still thinking/discussing about if or if not to hitchhike, Tobi put out his hand and (not) surprisingly the car did stop. An Australian girl with her German boyfriend, who live in Sydney, were on a daytrip to the Blue Mountains and gave us a lift to the train station. We also had to pick up our luggage from the supermarket where we got three plums from the owner as a gift (this day we were really lucky with the Australian hospitableness 🙂 ). Some hours later we were back at Leanne’s (who cooked a meal for us again), to stay our last night at her place before we made our way to Canberra the next day. In order to do something useful with the last days we had we rented a car for four days and wanted to visit the coast between Sydney and Canberra. But more details will follow later 🙂