Day 33: Blue Mountains

This morning we picked up our car for the start of our road trip. We said goodbye to Sydney, our last major city for a while, to head inland to the Blue Mountains.

We booked ourselves a room at a hostel in Katoomba, the main town in the BMs. I was unfairly expecting a cut off, backward little town with very little going on but it was actually buzzing with life and had everything and more that you'd need - three major supermarkets, train station straight to Sydney, lots of little shops of cafés (with people actually in them) and a lot of locals out and about. We had a little too much fun in the massive fruit and veg store... Such a lot of choice!

We walked the half hour to Echo Point, the main lookout for the BMs and where most of the main walks start. The distance itself was doable but we did not take into account the huge hills that the main road followed... We were out of breath before we even knew which hike we were going to do.

When we arrived at Echo Point, we already had an amazing view of the Three Sisters, three naturally occurring rocks worn down into a very striking and now very well known formation looking out over the entire national park. I'd obviously seen the photos before I left but I was blown away. The photos can just not get across the sheer scale of it. 

Our breath back, we started our three hour hike which started with the Giant Stairway, a precarious and never ending steep staircase made up of steps chiseled into the rock and installed metal stairs that you could see through to whatever was beneath. It wound its way through the three sisters themselves to the valley floor. All I can say is, I'm glad we weren't walking up them. Afterwards, we followed the valley to the bottom of the Katoomba Cascades, a towering waterfall of which at this point we could only see a tiny trickle of water. As we began the climb up (not as bad as the giant stairway I terms of gradient but a challenge none the less) we got to see more and more of the falls until we reached the lookout at the top.

From there we followed the cliff top all the way back to echo point, only to find out we have missed the bus by 2 minutes, the last bus at 5.25pm... I'm definitely out of the city now... And so began the final walk home up and down the hills back to the town centre and our hostel.

Someone was looking down on us though - the hostel was having pasta night so we didn't have to cook, had a feast (or 2 in my case) of pasta and got to meet the other residents. We ended up staying awake chatting until the early hours with a couple of polish guys ("please help us - what is the difference between sheeeet and sheet"), a couple of guys from the UK, and a young Californian who was travelling in the hope he could find himself and achieve 'greatness'.