The Blue Mountains and Canberra

We set off fairly early on Tuesday morning following the Western Freeway out to the Blue Mountains.

It took us about an hour to get into the Blue Mountains (Dave kept pointing out really nice bits of scenery just I was going round corners and couldn't look) and a further half hour to get to Katoomba which is the site of the world famous three sisters.

We parked at Echo Point and wandered down to the viewpoint. The view was spectacular and you could see a long way. It kind of looks like Yavin in the first Star Wars film. We took the walk around to one of the three sisters and then decidedly, somewhat foolhardly in retrospect, to walk all the way down to the forest floor and around to the foot of the base of the cliffs. Allegedly that's 800 steps. One way. And for some reason we ran part of the way back up.

We stopped off for lunch at this nice cafe on the way (mainly to recuperate and drink most of their water they provide free for customers - the lady actually brought us our own bottle by the end). We also had yet another case of Dave remarking how much a labrador looked like Winston. Fancy that.... a labrador looking like another labrador.

Our next stop was Scenic World which was built on the site of an old mine. It involves taking a cablecar down to the forest floor and a little walk through the rainforest and a very steep railway trip on the way up. We managed get be the only people in the cablecar on the way down which meant we were free to wander about the cabin and take lots of pictures. It was quite a steep descent but bizarrely controlled. The rainforest walk itself was pretty cool (ok so it was very cold punctuated only by Dave complaining about how cold it was) and an amazing mixture of some impressive trees (god I'm turning into my parents) and discarded mining equipment. There was also an opening to one of the mine shafts with various displays and a little bronze statue of a miner and a shaft-pony with the inscription describing the miner as welsh/australian - so we got a picture just in case the welsh part was Grandad.

We spent the night in Katoomba in a motel and grabbed dinner and a great little pizzeria in the town centre. Can't remember the name but it's opposite the real fancy hotel so I'm sure you could find it if you're ever there.

The next morning we drove the 70 or so km to the Jenolan Caves in the far west of the Blue Mountains. The last twenty km were windy cliff roads that were great fun to drive although would have been less so if we'd actually have met someone coming the other way.

When you arrive at the caves you have to drive through a huge cave archway to get to the main site which almost looks like a swiss chalet village. It soon became apparent that the cave network was so big that there were about ten different tours round different cave networks. The next one starting was to the Chifley cave and took about an hour so we decided on that one.

We had about 45 minutes to kill so we wandered through the archway which was very impressive. It was probably about 30 or 40 metres high and the same wide. There were several entrances - all locked off for the various tours. A river (the 'Styx') flowed out at the bottom down into the valley.

Our tour guide was called Ford and he led us into the Chifley cave network. There were about 20 of us all together. It was a fairly impressive set of caves including the main Chifley cave being the first cave in the world to be lit by electric light and the wiring hasn't required changing since. They've had the same bulb in (allegedly) since 1923.

The tour took just over an hour and then we headed back up towards Katoomba, stopping at a historic village. The village was abandoned in about 1923 or something like that when the western railway network went north of it towards Bathurst and Lithgow rose up to be the main admin centre of the region. Now it's just a ghost village. We arrived just after two busloads of school children so we spent all our time managing to avoid them which we did pretty well.

Our next stop was Canberra - some 300km away and we managed to make it as far as Goulburn before finding ourselves a motel and crashing for the night. Goulburn is a fairly large town of 20,000 or so but there didn't seem any real point to it. It had a central road and only one pub (???). We didn't hang around long enough to find out any more.

Our reason for visiting Canberra was to get ourselves a Vietnamese visa which are only available at consulates. We got to the Embassy about ten which was in a leafy superb of Canberra called O'Malley. We had a bit of a palava trying to sort it all out as we were about $20 short of the fee so I had to dash off and find an ATM. Thankfully all sorted and they now have our passports so fingers crossed the visa comes through soon.

Canberra itself is very weird. It looks very nice and the Parliament House looks very intriguing with a metal thing on top. The city itself is a ghost town. We wandered round it for about an hour or so and saw about three people. Maybe four. Lots of empty restaurants and cafes but no actual shops or anything. We took a few photos and decided to head back to Sydney and Civilisation.