The Blue Mountains

Now the first thing I need to mention is that the mountains aren't really blue. The sun and the mist in the air makes them appear a little blue but that's about it.



To see the Blue Mountains properly you really need to go on a hike around, which did not seem like too much of a problem after the 20km hike we did with Samantha's relatives on Sunday before arriving here.

Anyway back to what we saw. The first stop on our walk was Echo point where we saw The Three Sisters, three large rocks that come out from the side of the canyon. Until it was explained to us some time later I thought the name was a bit sexist, why are these things always named after women, why was it not called the three blokes from the pub. It was actually associated with an Aboriginal legend about a group of sisters that wanted to marry outside their tribe so the tribal wizard turned them to stone (pity he wasn't around when I was younger I would have had him turn my sister to stone).

We then thought it was a good idea to walk down the steps into the canyon except there was a lot of steps and by the time we got to the bottom it looked like more of a bad idea. We were then faced with a choice of the steapest railway in the world or a cable car to get back to top. Samantha didn't look too thrilled with either but after hearing that if anything goes wrong the train would stop in three seconds (hitting the bottom!), we opted for the cable car. Luckily the cable car was the smoothest I ever been on and Samantha was ok.

With sore feet and blisters on our blisters, our walk back into Katoomba turned into a mountain climb as the hills we had walked down eariler seemed to have grown whilst we were on our walk.