The Blue Mountains

A two-hour train journey takes you from Sydney centre to Katoomba, the basepoint for the Blue Mountains, so called because of the haze given off from the eucalypts surrounding them. Still with memories and some scars from the hard walking we did in Wilsons Prom, we were apprehensive about dusting off the walking shoes so soon. There was an extra-lazy option of paying for a hop-on hop-off bus system which we avoided, though, and still made the effort to see the mountains by foot. Perhaps fortunately, unlike the Prom where you have to work hard in climbing to see views and walking across hard sandy terrain, the Blue Mountains gives you the views pretty much on a plate. Not surprisingly, then, there was less hardcore walkers around and a lot more Japanese with cameras.

The first thing you see on the way to the visitors' centre is the Echo Point panorama which is quite a spectacle in itself. This meant that when you started your walk it was almost like it was in reverse to any other walking we had done on our trip, ie we started off up top and headed down into the undergrowth below the mountain peaks. So we reluctantly walked down into Jamison Valley via the Giant Stairway - over 800 steps of it - past the Three Sisters. We then passed through Katoomba Falls where we had some food and enjoyed the scenery, before we knew we would have a hard climb up - a slightly different way than we came down but still steep. We chose not to take the 'Scenic Railway' or cable car which takes you from the bottom to the top in a glass enclosure, and sweated it out on the staircase. At the top the Prince Henry Cliff Walk took us back to the starting point and back to our train home.