Blue Mountains and Beyond!

28/02/09

Blue Mountains Trip in brief

Journey out
Glenbrook
Kangaroos
Wentworth Falls
Wildlife
Witch’s Leap
Bush Telephone
Three Sisters
Funicular
Katoomba
YHA
Tour cock-up discovery - grr.
Ceilidh


We are up early today – we’re going to the Blue Mountains! We’ve booked it with the OzTour people and we JUST make it onto the coach by the skin of our teeth… My meticulously and carefully set alarm doesn’t go off as I fiddled with my phone clock’s settings to get it to the right time zone. Annoyingly, it has clearly decided that Ishould be awake at London time, not Oz time…
Still, we make it on, scampering and panting, and apart from a slightly disgruntled air on the little bus and a few minutes late starting, we are on, happy and off in short order!
We are lucky they waited for us, though it does make you feel a bit of a pariah for the first few minutes!
We sit tight as our guide and driver talks us through some of the places we are passing: Paramatta Road, which seems to be the best spot to buy a car around here; a signpost to Canterbury; the Sydney Olympic Site, which is now being used as a business park as well as sport and looks a little like Wembley; the Olympic Village, which is now being used as a normal Sydney suburb; the Paramatta River; a place called Penrith.
Paramatta apparently means ‘Fresh water’ in Aboriginal.
But Coogee means ‘The nasty smell of rotting seaweed’…
Nice!
We get onto the freeway and head for the Blue Mountains… The first settlers would have been able to see them clearly from Sydney. The Mountains provided a barrier to the settlers and the rainfall, so the weather was different there. In 1830, the Great Barrier Range (?) still remained uncrossed. When it was broached, it took weeks to cross the mountains, and six months to build the road.
The Blue Mountains are actually blue… This is caused by the moisture and gum oil in the air, which refracts the light in a particular way (this is due to the short wave light not escaping from the blue mass. I think. Probably).
I can’t help but think here, in particular, that Australia was probably the Creator being a. experimental at the beginning of everything or b. post-modernist at the end. It is vast, with nothing for miles except a small spider with enough venom to bring down a horse… Definitely experimental or a drunken late-night prank!
We pass the Queen River and are officially out of Sydney. Our driver/guide is very enthusiastic about everything and points out local places of interest and plants and critters he likes on the way, both in the bus and when we’re out and on foot. Apparently the local plants are all well-adapted to fire and heat, an essential survival strategy somewhere as hot and dry as Australia! It is also important for regeneration as without the flames and fire, some species of gum tree can’t germinate and the deadwood isn’t removed from the trees. These flame-survivors either have really thick bark which shields them from the heat, or lose their bark altogether (the ‘stringy-bark’ trees), to try and avoid it catching altogether. Their oil also burns well, which is supposed to be useful – not sure how, but it obviously works given the number of gum trees in Aus!
We stop in Glenbrook for morning tea –where I paused with my dad for the same thing a few years ago – it is still exactly as I remember it, but a little sunnier! We all stock up on water and snacks. We find a little bakery where we find biscuits and things… I take a gingerbread man for later and cannot resist the temptations of a lemon-iced mini-donut and a caterpillar-shaped meringue… Well, it was looking at me! And it is very tasty…
;)
We sit awhile in the sun and nibble our tasty things before filling water bottles at the water fountain in the park and heading back to the bus. Before we leave, we are shown a Mountain Devil plant by our guide; so called because it has seed pods like little horned faces, pointed leaves like tridents and flowers the colour of hellfire… Very imaginative. The local native children are excited by these whenever they see them and suck the nectar out of them like sweets, bush sweets – though there is also the risk of slurping in a beetle and an ant or two if you do that, as they love it too!
Towns are small here, as they sprang up only as a result of the early settlers passing through to get to the other side. They tend to support themselves, and each other, so there is only one Macdonalds in this area – Hooray!
We bundle back in the little bus and head on. We are promised kangas on this short leg of our trip and Simon our guide takes us on an interesting drive to get to them. We enter a ‘U-valley’ with a little creek at the bottom of it. It is the colour of tea, though perfectly drinkable; the colour is merely tannin. There are some lovely overhangs of rock, pitted like the innards of a Crunchie bar… We leave the trailer with all our luggage and bags in it at the bottom of the valley just before the creek and as the bottom of the bus scrapes threateningly along the road as we enter and emerge from the water, it is easy to see why! As we head up the other side of the valley, through the gum trees and ferns, we emerge into the sun again and can see the overhangs on the other side where we have just been – it is an impressive valley – but the best is yet to come! This part looks a little like Corsica, but far larger, with gum trees and frighteningly blue, wide-open skies. The trees here are silver and black under the foliage. We are 35 miles for Sydney now and the air is fresher and cooler and there is amass of Sulphur-Crested cockatoos fussing and screeching on the grass and in the trees. They are very confident, noisy and bright.
We set out from the little bus and follow Simon trustingly – he has promised us kangaroos after all! He leads us a merry chase behind the parking area up through a meadow and into some trees. We are looking for the Eastern Grey, one of the larger of Australia’s macropods (‘big-feet’). They are very fast and can live up to 20 years old.
Finally, we spot a male ‘roo! He is quite skinny and a little wary but not too shy. He is grazing at the moment, head down, powerful tail and huge feet supporting most of his weight, just a forepaw on the ground for occasional balance or when he raises his head for peering around. Kangaroos use their tails for balance and as a fifth leg; the forepaws are rarely used for walking. The front paws, however, are very useful when the male ‘roos are fighting over the girls for the best harem. They have hideously sharp claws on the toes of their big feet. When you see how long and sharp these are, the humble ‘roo ceases to be an object of any kind of amusement. When they are fighting, they appear to box – this is actually each male trying to get sufficient grip on the shoulders, head or paws of his opponent to enable him to lift his back legs, supported by the muscular tail, and make a slashing kick with his rear claws, winding, wounding or even partially disembowelling the loser. When they’re not fighting over the girls, male roos stick together in what is known as a ‘mob’.
Male kanga’s bits are also vulnerable, though more in day to day life than fighting – they hang low to the ground, so they can be completely retracted for hopping purposes as Mr. Roo bounds through the prickly undergrowth and brush. Mrs. Kanga has her own problems to worry about – no bits to dangle, but a joey to care for. In fact, not just the one – she may have up to three inhabiting her pouch at any one time – varying in age from a half grown teenager of up to 12 months, right down to the tiniest of baby joeys, no larger than a jellybean.
Kangaroos are, amusingly, probably not actually called that at all… When the first white people landed in Australia, they communicated rather haltingly with the local Aboriginals. This led to the misunderstanding of:
White man: ‘What’s that?’ (pointing to ‘roo)
Aboriginal: ‘Eh?’
White man: ‘Oh, right, thanks!’
Aboriginal: (shaking head despairingly)
‘Kangaroo’ actually translates roughly as ‘What?’
We see lots of birds on this little exploration, a yellow-headed mynah, which I think is the little yellow-eyelined, hoppy starling lookalike I keep seeing everywhere, Crimson Rosallas, Lorikeets, cockatoos – both sulphur-crested and yellow tailed blacks – and a kookaburra, flapping past earnestly on a mission of its own bearing something large in its beak. We head back down again to the bus – it is too rough much higher up for kangaroos; then you get wallabies.
We pick up the trailer from where it wad left and labour out of the valley again. We wend our way closer to the centre of the Blue Mountains through interesting places, past interesting things in the sun. We pass through Springwood, the first mountain settlement, which has a railway running alongside it. There are ultra-blue flowers clinging to an escarpment here, they are a cross between a hibiscus and a convolvulus flower, very pretty and the kind of blue you can’t keep your eyes on because it is just so rich. On the railway beyond the escarpment are workers with wide brimmed hard hats with neck flaps – they are very sensible, but quite funny too.
The road and the railway both follow the ridgeline; the railway here connects with the one which goes to Perth – you can go from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean via the Nullabore. A very dull ride by all accounts – ‘Sand, sand, sand…. Zzzzz… Oooh! A bush! Zzzzz…’
Bush rangers used to abound in this area, waylaying honest travellers and sheep and being generally lawless. They were rarely the Robin Hood type, more often than not they were just highwaymen with bushcraft – One particularly notable example was Ned Kelly.
We stop at Lawson and head out for some real bush!
Simon takes us out to Wentworth Falls from a view point. It is a nice little walk – not too short, about 20 minutes, but not too taxing either; it wends prettily among enormous cycad-like ferns, down steps, by soggy muddy pathways and along dry tracks. Simon finds us a blue-tongued lizard, which we all see, eyeing us suspiciously from beneath a gum tree. It darts off, heavily, just as the last of us lumbers up and Simon obligingly crashes after it… he reminds me a little of Steve Irwin with his willingness to leap after beasties and his excitement and exuberance at each critter and plant we pass. We see spider ants and squiggly gums under his careful eyes, and he spots a little stripey skink for us on a rock while making white ochre for his little band of merry wanderers to wear (on top of the orange he has already made), trailing after him through the bush. A squiggly gum is a particular type of gum tree which is munched on by a certain moth larva. The moth lays eggs just beneath the bark, where they hatch and larva will chew about happily in squiggles for a bit. This doesn’t seem to hurt the tree and when it loses its bark, as it will do eventually, there are lots of little brown squiggles on the pale flesh beneath. Early settlers tried to interpret these as they thought they were Aboriginal writings… They didn’t get very far!
It is an exciting walk, for me at least, with so many things to see and examine and ask questions about.
The falls themselves are amazing – a hollow in the hills, far below, with the water crashing even further down into a huge basin, surrounded by green. A patch of interest in the vastness of the gum-clad rolling hills. It is hot and peaceful here, despite the persistent flow of tourists… The sky echoes the earth here and it is clearly free and wild, and unfettered, mostly even unexplored, by man. This place is humbling and glorious.
We head back the shorter way to the bus and Simon takes us on to the next walk he has planned – a slightly longer one out to Witch’s Leap fall and the Three Sisters.
The terrain is much the same as the previous walk – including little bridges and waterways, glorious vast blue views and interesting points. The best parts about this walk were the Witch’s Leap falls (a steady fall of water over some glowering brown rocks, one section of which looks almost exactly like an elderly face peering out greenly from the water. I think it looks more like an orang-outang personally, as do the English couple who are striding along at the front with me). On our way to the Three Sisters, we pass a lovely big overhang too.
This is the bush telephone.
Simon yells into the green void ‘Coo-Eee!’ (used to mean hello in this context), which comes back, as clear as glass, as a perfect echo. Amazing… We are all impressed.
He then gets us all to gather under the big overhang, all 23 of us, and yell coo-ee into the green too… We get nice echo from that ourselves, and a response from some large-lunged tourists on the other side! The beauty of this overhang, though, is that it amplifies… So the last time we do it, he has us all face the wall and yell coo-ee at that instead… the noise is almost deafening as it passes the 23 of us at ear-level and bounds off exuberantly into the valley, echoing impressively as it goes…
That was how mum would get dad and the kids back from hunting when she was slaving over a hot cooking pot and they were out in the sun…
Bush Telephone!
We walk onward to another viewing platform over the Mountains. The blueness of the mountains is really clear here, and there is the stark contrast of the three gigantic protuberances on the mountain to the left. Apparently, the Three Sister were turned to stone by their doting father when they were all being chased by a bunyip who wanted to kill the father and eat the girls for tea. The father escaped by hiding in cave and turning himself into a lyre bird when the bunyip wasn’t looking. The bunyip got bored waiting for the man to come out of the cave so he chased the bird instead for a quick snack, then spotted the daughters. He set off after them instead so the father turned them to stone with his magic bone (he was a witch doctor you see), but then lost it when the bunyip chased him again. To this day the lyre bird scrapes and scratches around in the ground looking for the magic bone, and when he finds it, he will turn himself back into a man and his daughters he will restore to their beautiful selves.
We reach the finale of our walk, which Simon has promised us – a railway. What he didn’t tell us before we got there was that it was a funicular…
Not just any funicular. One of the steepest funiculars in the world.
Eek.
We wait eagerly and when it arrives, descending through the bush and trees, I am apprehensive, seeing just how steep it really is. As I get in, the seat throws me back and I feel rather as though I am sitting in a shallow bucket as it rattles and we are hauled backwards up what feels like a nearly sheer cliff. I understand the tilted seat now – it still feels uncomfortably tilted the other way, despite the safety of the enclosing mesh around the front! It is fast and rattly and passes speedily through the trees and up into a cleft in the mountain, where the light peeps through dank holes before disappearing altogether. We emerge into the sunlight and the carriage slows, letting us get out, wobbly-legged and exhilarated. I think that was today’s scary thing quota achieved!
Glad we didn’t have to walk back up though – it was a long way!
We arrive in Katoomba, where Simon, the perfect tourguide, retrieves a spread of food for lunch, including plates, glasses and drinks. Once done, I am dropped off at the YHA. It is VERY nice – I can heartily recommend it. It is well-situated, clean, tidy, friendly and very well furnished and equipped. We decide to get tidied up and go for a wander about Katoomba to plan tomorrow.
The tour company we booked with messed up a bit, as they had promised us a trip out to Katoomba via the mountains today, followed by the Jenolan Caves tomorrow and then a ride back home to Sydney.
Nope.
The cock-up here is timings – the trip to the caves gets back an hour after the bus we are due to be on leaves for Sydney. Not helpful. The YHA are cross on our behalf and do all they can to help, which leaves us with a couple of suggestions – a different coach tour of the caves, or hiring a car. Both of these options mean a train ride back to Sydney – but we want to see the caves and have the night booked here to do so, so we’re blinking well going to!
But we’ll worry about that tomorrow. For now, we head into Katoomba where we find the Parakeet Café, which serves us cake and drinks – I have caramel shortcake and try a Strawberry Spider… It feels just like a 1950s milk bar and is rather quaint. We spy out places for dinner and breakfast tomorrow too… We also succumb to a spot of shopping… There are some nice little places in Katoomba to poke around in, and we also do some car-hire research, there are a few places, so all is hopefully not lost!
For now, we settle for dinner at a little Chinese restaurant. I then head on, alone, to a ceilidh I have heard about at a local hotel. It’s either going to be fun or dire, but I decide it’s worth finding out…
It turns out to be fun!
I discover I can follow Irish country dancing relatively well when well led and the band, Wheelers and Dealers are very good. It feels very Irish ad there is a good mix of people there – locals, visitors, tourists, dancers, people just out for a laugh… I am ‘adopted’ by two vintage people, one a gentleman called Tom who hasn’t been here very long and who dances very well, and his friend, Lyn, who has also not been here very long and also dances well. We chat and dance the night away and I meet some other interesting people – Steven, who is a local bishop’s son and Mick, who is helping on the door and gallantly looks after my wallet each time I get asked to dance… without being asked.
There is a nice atmosphere here tonight – it could be anywhere in the world and yet it would feel the same. Music is a great joiner of people I think, especially fun, Irish stuff! Lyn and Tom give me a loft back to the YHA, which is very kind of them, and even tell me about churches in the area, one of which I hope to go to tomorrow… what a good start to the Mountains!
;)