Australia’s Blue Mountains: Teapots, Loud Birds, and Three Sisters
It figures that on our last morning in Sydney before starting our road trip, the rain decided to stop! I was a little annoyed about that, but it gave us a chance to finally properly explore the Royal Botanic Garden. I also can’t be annoyed because of the lovely view we had on our walk back to the hotel:
Katoomba
After our morning stroll, we gathered our luggage and headed to pick up our rental car. They threw in a GPS for free, which was nice since unlike many of the other places we’ve visited, free wifi is pretty scarce in Australia. After picking up our car, we were on our way to Katoomba, a town in the southern part of the Blue Mountains.
Again searching for interesting and quirky places to stop, we decided to have lunch at a place called Bygone Beauties. Along with a cafe serving both lunch and high tea, Bygone Beauties featured a teapot museum with an extensive collection of teapots from all over the world.
Full of tea, soup, and beef pot pie, we left the teapot museum and headed on our way.
The Three Sisters
The Blue Mountains region west of Sydney in New South Wales, Australia, is a protected National Park as well as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The Blue Mountains were so named because of the blue haze caused when the light strikes the gases coming from the dense Eucalyptus forest (the Blue Ridge Mountains in the US got their name in a very similar way). The mountains were originally thought to be “impassable” by the European settlers, until a route through was found in 1813, a route which is still followed by the highway west from Sydney.
The park’s most famous feature is this rock formation. According to Aboriginal legend, the Three Sisters were local girls who fell in love with men from a neighboring tribe, which was forbidden, of course. A war ensued, and in order to protect the girls an elder turned them to stone, creating the rock formation. We went on a supposedly “easy” walking trail with views of the Three Sisters.
What none of the guidebooks mentioned is that almost the entire trail consisted of hundreds of stairs up and down the side of a cliff. We still walked right up to a rainforest waterfall and had a good time, at least in retrospect!
Another kind of cool thing from our hike was getting up and almost-personal with a large group of sulphur-crested cockatoos. These birds are so prominent in New South Wales that people tend to just ignore them — almost like they’re pigeons — but we were fascinated by them. As we reached the bottom of the hiking trail, we came across a tree full of dozens of these cockatoos. They were extremely loud!
By the time we finished hiking down to the bottom of the trail and back up, I was beat! We went to check into our hotel and rest a few minutes, but were reminded by the kind woman running the front desk that the sun set at around 4:30 pm. That prompted us to head back out and do a little more exploring before it got dark. We went to another lookout point to take in the mountains (but without hiking to the bottom of one of them this time!), then decided to explore the town of Katoomba and the surrounding area a little bit more. There were lots of little shops, but most of them closed around 5:00 pm, so we wound up going for an early dinner.
Dan went back out later to go to a local bar and have a few pints, but after our hike, I was pretty tired, so I wound up changing into my pajamas and relaxing in our hotel room and playing Nintento Switch until Dan came back and it was time for bed. We do try to be pretty active during our vacations, but sometimes it’s nice to just stop and relax.
Besides, we had a long day ahead of us the following day as we would drive through the Blue Mountains and then north to Hunter Valley, AKA wine country!
