Rachel and Mike in Australia

The Blue Mountains are situated about ~100 kilometers (~70 miles) west of Sydney.  Many Sydneysiders regularly escape to the Blue Mountains for bushwalking (i.e., hiking), rock climbing, seeking cooler weather, or just going for a scenic drive.  We have been meaning to make it up there, and when an impromptu celebration was in order, it seemed like the right place to go.  I got the fantastic news of a job offer on a Friday afternoon, and Mike was due back after 2.5 weeks at sea the following evening, so to celebrate my job offer and Mike’s return, we spent a couple days exploring the Blue Mountains.

Blue Mountain Vista

The Blue Mountains get their name from the bluish tinge of the mountains when gazed at from afar.  The trees in the Blue Mountains are mostly eucalyptus.  Tiny droplets of oil coming off eucalyptus trees scatter sunlight giving the hillsides a blue appearance.  Eucalyptus (a.k.a. Gum) trees abound in Australia.  There are over 90 species of eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains and more than 700 species of eucalyptus found in Australia (compared with only ~15 that occur outside of Australia).  Eucalyptus leaves are the main food for koalas, who are particular about what eucalyptus species they eat, though the species they prefer varies depending on what region the koalas live in.

Wentworth Falls

We drove to Katoomba, which is the main town in the Blue Mountains.  The name Katoomba derives from an aboriginal word meaning ‘falling waters.’  Hundreds of millions of years ago, the Blue Mountains were a shallow sea, until the area was uplifted to a plateau about 170 million years ago.  Since then, rainfall and rivers have carved deep gorges and canyons out of the mostly sandstone rocks.  The carving power is still apparent in the many modern waterfalls in the area.

Nice view!

One of the main tourist attractions in Katoomba is the Three Sisters rock formation.  Legend has it that long ago there were three beautiful sisters of the aboriginal Katoomba Tribe.  Three brothers from a neighboring tribe fell in love with them.  Tribal law forbade marriages outside the tribe, but the brothers were determined to marry the sisters.  A fierce battle ensued.  To protect his daughters from the fighting, their medicine man father turned them to stone.  He planned to turn them back once the battle was safely over; however, he himself was killed in the fighting, so the sisters remain in stone (let this be a lesson to fathers that want to be over-protective).  There is some dispute over whether the legend of the Three Sisters is a true Aboriginal Legend or one made up by those in the tourist trade in the first half of the 1900’s.  Certainly hard to say since Aboriginal history was kept orally, a tradition which no doubt suffered from Australian government policies (thankfully now defunct) of removing Aboriginal children from their families.

Mike and the Three Sisters

Another major tourist attraction in the Blue Mountains is Scenic World.  Scenic World is a theme park focused on the beauty of the Blue Mountains and has 3 rides that allow you to experience the Blue Mountains without breaking a sweat.  We thought it was a pretty bizarre concept and were expecting a lot of annoying kitsch or anamatronic koalas.  With so many good hikes in the area, it seemed silly to experience the beauty of the Blue Mountains packed onto a ride with 50 strangers.  But, after a day of hiking that included walking down many, many steps along the steep gorge to get to the trail head, we were quite happy to hop on the Scenic World railway to take us straight to the top.  And I mean, STRAIGHT to the top.  This is not a winding switch back choo choo train.  It was originally developed for hauling coal from the mine at the bottom of the gorge to the top.  Katoomba’s scenic railway is the steepest incline railway in the world and is not for the faint at heart.  Particularly since Australian safety standards are not the same as those in the U.S.  There were no safety harnesses, no safety belts, not even a safety bar.  I was nervous going up and would have been screaming my head off going down.  All in all, Scenic World was a lot better than we expected.  It allows people that wouldn’t otherwise have access get down into the gorge and had some interesting information about the history of mining in the area and the geology of the mountains.

Luckily the medicine man statue did not turn Rachel to stone.

Having now seen them in person, we can attest to the blue haze that blankets the mountains.  Thankfully, the haze didn’t make us blue at all—it was hard to keep smiles off our faces as we soaked in the warm winter sunshine and gazed on the gorgeous hillsides.