Pilthirn to Blue Mountains National Park
[ Main Index ] [ Previous Day ] [ Next Day ] [ Photo Gallery ]
We allowed ourselves the luxury of sleeping in this morning. A couple of long driving days and lots of exertion at Manly Beach yesterday and we were pretty wiped out. We hit the road around 10:00 and headed into the Blue Mountains.
A short ways along, we stopped at a rest stop and Les cooked breakfast. I used the time to write a few postcards. Then it was off into the hills again. It was clearly becoming mountainous. Well, that’s a stretch. Mountains in the sense of the Oregon coast range, not the Rockies, but certainly the highest above sea level we’d been so far. We were headed for Katoomba because the guide book said there was a sky tram there that looked interesting.
Before we got there though, we saw a sign for Wentworth Falls and we decided to go have a look. There was a waterfall there but it turned out to be a much bigger deal. This is one of the main Blue Mountain scenic areas (lucky us) and is a big river valley framed with cliffs. A very dramatic vista from the first place we looked. The river that forms the valley, the Jamison River, cascades down the side of one of the cliffs, forming Wentworth Falls, then off into the distance down the valley.
There were hikes that went along the cliff face and down to the waterfall. So we went to have a look. The path went down and down before we came to the Weeping Rock, a little waterfall before the big one. A very pretty spot. The “weeping” is caused by water seeping into the soft rock that makes up part of the waterfall edge and coming out in unexpected places. In fact, the whole area is caused by a combination of soft and hard rock that makes up the mountain. The soft rock erodes, causing big chunks of the hard rock to break off, causing the cliffs.
We continued past and came to the edge where Wentworth Falls drops off in dramatic fashion to the valley below. It’s hard to see a waterfall from the top so we continued down along a cliff wall a little ways where we could see it. There wasn’t anything to give an indication of how large the drop was but as you can see in the pictures, it’s big. Probably 300-400 feet. Being summer there wasn’t a lot of water coming off it but it was still pretty impressive. I imagine in the winter after it’s been raining there’s a much bigger flow. The rock pools at the top certainly suggested it.
There were plenty more trails but we had to start heading back. It was all downhill so far, now it was all uphill. But not as bad as I thought it might be. Even with tired legs from Manly Beach.
We continued into Katoomba and found the tram. It was at a place called Scenic World. An amusement park of sorts in the making, so it seemed. A lot of it was under construction and maybe because of that it gave off a Jurassic Park sort of feel. But there were multiple trams to ride and we bought the full package. Tram #1 went across a gorge where you could see the Katoomba River on one side and the Three Sisters and another rock formation on the other. It was 200-some meters (over 600 feet) above the valley floor. But it only went halfway out and came back. A pretty short trip.
We were feeling a bit like maybe we’d been tourist-trapped but went on to take the second tram. The second tram takes you down to the valley floor. It’s the steepest tram in Australia. It’s quite a drop and a pretty fun ride down.
Down on the valley floor they had built a series of boardwalks through the forest. Quite an elaborate series of them actually. There were signs along the way that explained the flora and fauna a bit and described some of the history of the area (mining was the original reason people were there). It was a great way to wander through the forest because the walking was extremely easy but you still felt like you were right in the middle of it, which of course we were. We wandered around down there for a good hour or more. The air was very cool but we weren’t cold. Kind of like being in an air-conditioned room. We saw Acacia trees, gum trees and turpentine trees. The turpentine trees of course are where they get turpentine from. They extract the sap and through an elaborate process… no, not really. They actually look a lot like cedar trees, at least their bark.
The two best plants in my opinion were the rough tree ferns and the five leaf water vines. The tree ferns can grow to 20 or 30 feet high. They look like palm trees except the top is a fern. We had seen these before but not this tall. The water vines grow in all kind of crazy directions, way up into the canopy and around trees. Some were maybe 4-5 inches in diameter and hundreds of feet long.
To get back up from the valley floor, we took a “train”. It’s two connected cars on a track but it goes almost straight up. I forget the name they called it but it’s the steepest one of its kind in the world. You get into it almost lying on your back but you’re sitting vertically on the way up.
We declared the day a success with the only drawback being we’d only gone about 60 km. So we decided to try to get another 100 km down the road. The plan is to continue through the Blue Mountains, actually heading back toward Sydney and hook up with the New England highway to start heading north to Brisbane. We had to head west to catch the road that headed back, going as far as Lithgow. Lithgow of course was named for John Lithgow, the actor, who bought the town as an investment… no, not really.
To get to Lithgow, we went through a series of little towns that really had a New England feel to them. Kind of quaint and arty nestled in the pseudo-mountains. We crossed the Victoria Pass and stopped at what appeared to be an abandoned rest area where we could stand on the edge of the cliffs and look out.
We found the road we were looking for and headed back into the park. It was getting towards camping time so we were keeping our eyes open for a place to sleep. We passed up a couple of promising rest stops since we thought we could go another half an hour. We got to the town of Bilbin where the very artistic, but not to scale (or very accurate) tourist map suggested there was a place to camp on the other side of town. The “other side” turned out to be about 20 or 30 km away, where we came to the other copy of the sign saying the campsite was just up the road. We looked in vain, passing back and forth in front of a mechanics garage 4 times to the amusement of the 3 or 4 guys standing there.
Finally we gave up and continued on, but we were on the stretch of road that was not in the park. It was residential. Darkness was falling fast and we were going to be parking in someone’s driveway. But we found an area that didn’t have a house and had a dirt road leading off the main road a bit. People had obviously been using this area as a dump. We found all sorts of things, including windows and other building materials. But it’s a place to sleep and apart from the junk heaps, no worse than the rest areas we’ve stayed at. Actually better since people won’t be coming through. We’ve learned our lesson and are going to start looking sooner and not try to eke out that last hour of the day. Caravan parks are clearly not as plentiful here in the east.
[ Main Index ] [ Previous Day ] [ Next Day ] [ Photo Gallery ] [ Top ]