The Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves

First of all, we need some help from everyone reading this. We keep getting asked what a “uniquely Canadian” food or dish is… So far we have only been able to come up with "Poutine" (quite a sad example). We are looking for some other answers to this question. Are Canadians that boring with food?? Or have we been away from home so long that we can’t remember?? So if anyone has any idea’s you let us know ok?!

Well it seems like forever since we’ve been outside of Sydney city limits but we finally managed to get out to the Blue Mountains last weekend. We decided to book a daytrip exploring the Blue Mountains and the Jenolan Caves. Our tour group was a good one – nice and small – consisting of 18 people in total (including John the tour guide). Our tour departed the city at approximately 8 am and we didn’t return back until around 730 pm. So we definitely got a good days worth of exploring out of it!!

The Blue Mountains are a couple of hours west of Sydney and were formed around one million years ago and got their name because of the distinctive blue haze that surrounds the area. Since the area is densely populated with oil bearing Eucalyptus tress, the atmosphere is filled with finely dispersed droplets of the oil, which, in combination with dust particles and water vapor, scatter short-wave length rays of light which are predominantly blue in color. Hence the name, The Blue Mountains. Feel smarter now? If not, here it is simply, the oil from the gum tree's make a mist which looks blue when the light hits it. got it?

Our first stop was a lookout point to see the Three Sisters. Wow!! What a sight!! The Three Sisters are 922, 918 & 906 meters tall, respectively. They are absolutely gorgeous and our pictures do them no justice. There is legend behind them that three sisters fell in love with three brothers from another tribe but tribal law forbade to marry. It’s a long story so if you’re at all interested you’ll have to do the research yourselves. Looking down from the lookout point made my stomach turn a bit because of how high up we were. That would be one scary fall if I slipped…. so I held on to the railing tight. We had only a certain amount of time to get as many pictures in as we could because we were off to go on the 3 scenic rides!! First off we went on the Scenic Skyway. This was a glass pod that basically moved us across wires and took us across the mountains. The floor was glass and you could see everything right below you – all 900 meters below that is. I prayed that the cables wouldn’t snap!! Next stop was the Scenic Railway. This is the steepest incline railway in the world. It took us 450 m down to the floor of the mountains. That was something else because 250 m of it in a complete vertical drop – oh and no seat belts I might add. I thought I was going to go flying out the top of the thing!! I mean we went straight down!! Once we reached the bed of the mountains we went on the Scenic Walkway. Basically its a trail through the bottom of the Mountains, with a fancy name. After we wandered around there for a bit we jumped on the Scenic Cableway which hoisted us back up the Mountain via some wires. Similar to the Skyway but a little less stable. Since most of us went on these rides our tour guide gave us 1 hour before meeting back at the bus. We had to get a move on because we still had to drive to the Jenolan Caves!! Of course we all can’t be on time so we ended up waiting approximately 20 minutes for a couple girls from Perth. We were all considering leaving them because we can only wait so long otherwise we’d miss out on a lot of stuff. Finally we found them and we headed for the Caves.

The Jenolan Caves are just outside the Blue Mountains National Park and are formed from limestone. They really are like a whole underground world!! As our tour ventured into them, we actually had to take our backpack off at some spots because the spaces to move through were a bit tight. Dad W you definitely would have had your head gashed opened many times because there are spikes and spears from limestone all over the place. I guess there are so many areas of the caves that haven’t been explored yet and they still have no idea just how many chambers there are within them. You can do more in depth tours where you strap on a suit and helmet with a light and you go crawling through the smallest of spaces. Our tour lasted just under two hours, and at the deepest point we were 180 meters underground!! Some of the other caves go even deeper and have freshwater rivers flowing through them.

After the caves our journey was to get back home. We stopped at another lookout point at the Blue Mountains on the way but unfortunately missed out on the Boomerang presentation. Seems like only Nathan and I were interested in seeing our guide show us how to properly throw a boomerang. This annoying lady from North Australia piped up and said nobody was interested in seeing that. We didn’t realize until after we were back in the Blue Mountains that John wasn’t going to do the demonstration. He said that the park authorities have banned him from throwing boomerangs in the national park because it’s dangerous… did you know you can kill somebody with one of them?? Damn Darwin lady… when she piped up he didn’t hear us. Too bad… would have been nice to see one thrown by an expert. This lady from Darwin was one of those know it all types, she was actually arguing with John about whether or not HE rode a motor bike in the outback… um I think he would know best… retard. For the rest of the 2hr trip home we put on our iPods to drown out Darwin lady, reclined our chairs and dozed off until we got back into the city. It was a nice end to a long day.

We hope everyone is doing well back in Canada, and that everyone has reclaimed their cars/pets/children out of the massive snow banks from that freak snow storm that hit last week. Bye for now!

Erynn & Nate.