Blue Mountains

We are now in the Blue Mountains west of Sydney and my goodness, they are blue and they are spectacular! We had a somewhat interesting time getting here; after leaving Zoe’s friends, we tried to buy a new cell phone which took a while and then we tried to navigate the Sydney toll payment system. Our campervan people had made it sound so simple - they gave us a list of places (gas stations, convenience stores) that we could go to and just buy what we needed. The reality was somewhat different. We went to a couple of gas stations and they looked at us as if we had 3 heads - no idea what we were talking about. And although we were now the proud owners of a new cell phone, it had to be charged up and activated before we could actually use it. Eventually we found our way to the vehicle registration office and the lady there told us we could just call the phone number that we saw as we entered the toll road and that would take care of things. Being suspicious souls, we double-checked that, once our cell phone was working, by calling a toll-free number (bad joke!) where I spoke to the most wonderful man who took my credit card number, vehicle registration # and told me that all would be well. So we’ll see …… The system certainly is not set up for tourists, a lot of whom don’t speak very good English. We were parked next to a young Dutch couple the night before we came to the mountains and we asked them what they had done about paying the tolls. The husband hadn’t really understood the piece of paper that he had been given, so he had just thrown it away! They were very grateful that we had talked to them about it, as if you go through without paying, there is a hefty fine which is sent to your rental car company who then ding you on top of the fine.
Anyway, we are here now and again, it is very hot and windy. We drove into Katoomba which is the tourist hub for the Blue Mountains. The thing that everyone wants to see is Echo Point which is an amazing lookout over fantastic rock outcrops (see photo). We also “did” the Three Sisters which is close by, but we couldn’t take anymore tourists (!) so we drove about 15 km out of Katoomba to a nice quiet camp site where we stayed for a couple of nights.
Day 2 in the mountains saw us driving further west to the Jenolan Caves (thanks Andrea!). The drive itself is quite an adventure - amazing views on the winding way up, up, up and then an extremely narrow, windy road (even by my English standards!) for about 8 km to the caves themselves. Luckily we didn’t meet anyone coming the other way, You actually drive through a cave to get to the parking lot at Jenolan! We did a very well produced self-guided tour of the Devil’s Coach House and Nettles Cave. You had a little telephone-thing that told you about the different things as you went, with extra commentary if you wanted it. There are hundreds of caves, but only a few are open to guided tours. We chose to do an easy one in the morning, the Imperial Cave, which took us down to a subterranean river. There were some beautiful formations, but nothing like the tour we did in the afternoon to the Orient Cave. The stalgmites and tites there were quite fantastic. You run out of superlatives to describe some of the enormous chambers just full of incredible shapes and colours. One photo is of “Lot’s wife” and the other is the famous elephant head-dress which is the logo for Jenolan caves.
On our way back from the caves, we stopped at the historic village of Hartley (how could we miss it?!) There was a little tourist place which had a “Closed” sign on the door. Opening hours were given as 10 - 12 and 1 - 4:20 (?!) My watch said 4:19! Anyway, the lady must have heard us as she opened the door, thrust a pamphlet in my hand and slammed the door again! Hartley used to be quite the up and coming place - there were 2 churches, a Court House, a hotel and a service station. People used to stay there on their way to the caves from Sydney (a journey that now takes about 1 ½ hours). We wandered around and John took lots of pictures of the old buildings. We also went to the graveyard, but not a Hartley was to be seen. All the names were very Irish, but we couldn’t find anything that told us why the village had been called Hartley in the first place. It was a nice little side-bar!
And now we have to give the campervan back. I’m not sure how we would have managed without Mabel (John has christened our GPS lady). She was endlessly patient with us when we changed our minds and only once did she put us in not quite the right place (the landfill when we had asked for the old airport!) I chose to disagree with her once when we were driving down the coast, heading for the beaches. It looked to me as though we could do a nice “detour” off the main highway through the town of Newcastle. Unfortunately, the map that I had wasn’t very accurate, and we found ourselves on a peninsula with nowhere else to go except out to sea. So we switched Mabel on and she took us her best route which just happened to coincide with the annual bikers toy run (for the uninitiated, every year at Christmas, local motorcycle clubs collect toys for kids and do a “run” on their bikes). There had to be several thousand bikes and suitably dressed (Santa hats, tinsel on the bikes) tatooed and mustachioed bikers and chicks! So we joined them for a while (of course John took pictures!)
We’ll spend the next week in Sydney and there is SO much to see and do! John is quite exhausted just listening to me go on about what we’re going to do befo