Sydney 2009 - Day3

Today was our trip to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. We more or less did the same things as I did on my own in 2007.

At Central Station in the morning after getting our tickets we went to the Krispy Kreme outlet at the station. Even though they are everywhere, I have never tried them, and never really intended to. Today however I bought a raspberry jam filled chocolate coated doughnut. I fail to see what the fuss is about, it just tastes like any other doughnut. I don't get it?

The best way I have found to get to and see the area around Katoomba is a Blue Mountains Explorer Link ticket, which includes both the rail fare and the explorer bus fare. On Saturday when we first arrived at the airport station we both bought a weekly purple travel pass, I told the man in the ticket booth that we had these, and he gave us tickets from Emu plains to Katoomba. The fare was a bit less than normal, but not by much much.

The 2 hour trip from Central to Katoomba went fairly quick. Once at katoomba we got our proper bus ticket (a booklet with map, timetable and description of the attractions along the route). The Blue Mountains Explorer is a hop on hop off bus that does a loop around Katoomba and Leura that takes about an hour for each run, the buses come around about every half hour. We got off at one of the first stops and walked along the top of the cliffs to Scenic World. there we stopped for lunch before doing the rides.

Scenic World has 3 rides, the most famous being the scenic railway. However, first we did the scenic Skyway, which is a cable car that goes across part of the valley and back again. It is a bit like the edge at the Eureka Tower in Melbourne in that part of the floor goes clear. After surviving the glass bottom cable car we descended on the Scenic Railway into the valley and did the short forest walk to the Cable Way station. Along the way we were overtaken by several large tour groups and so got on the Cable Way with a large group of rather pushy Indian tourists ( I guess that's how things work in India?). After exhausting things to do at scenic world we got back on the bus and went around to Echo Point.

Echo Point is the classic lookout for viewing the three sisters. I seem to recall my uncle threatening to throw me off here when I was about 6 years old. Good to see that the girls are still there, but by now I began to realise that I had way too many photos of the valley.

Our final stop on the bus was the Gordon Falls lookout. The waterfall was more of a trickle, and there were yet more views of the valley, yawn. The second last bus for the day soon came around the corner and took us back to the metropolis of Katoomba. We gathered some snacks at the local Coles supermarket for the 2 hour journey back to Sydney, and trekked back to the station where our train was already waiting.

Back in the city we stopped at KFC to get some take away and returned to the apartment for the night. After dinner I sat down at the computer to catch up on some blog posts.