Blue Mountains

The Blue Mountains are not quite mountains and weren't very blue, but they were a beautiful expanse of lush, rolling hills. I did a Blue Diamond tour with friends a couple weeks ago, which picked us up in the city and drove the 1.5 hours or so to the Blue Mountains. This tour company was great and personal as we only had 11 people and it’s run by a husband and wife team – would definitely recommend it for anyone! It was nice not having to worry about logistics and all that jazz.

The weather looked ok in the morning but started to rain the minute we got to our first destination - Flat Rock. Next, after getting a bit cold and wet, we were all happy for our morning tea stop, where we had coffees and delicious scones with jam. 

Scones here are really more like biscuits. Biscuits here are cookies. Confused yet?

We reached the scenic area after tea, where we rode a few funky rides to see views of the Three Sisters and the rainforest. Despite the rainy weather, we were really lucky that the fog was confined to grazing the hills rather than engulfing the whole scene.

Here are some photos of the Three Sisters and the fog.

Here’s a bad picture of our guide walking us through the area that demonstrates the old coal town of the Blue Mountains. 

We walked through this beautiful rainforest – no better time to see it than when it’s raining!

This picture came out really dark, but shows the awesome twisted tree branches.

Waterfall.

Here’s me and Kali (our first picture together!) at Echo Point with the Three Sisters in the background.

Next, we went to an aboriginal centre where watched aboriginal men dancing and singing – it was great but unfortunately we couldn’t take any photos of the performance.

For lunch, we went to a sports club which is kind of like a country club of sorts but without the golf course or tennis courts or whatever. I had fish and chips – but forgot to take a photo.

After lunch was possibly the most horrific part of the day. We went to Featherdale Wildlife Park, were there are areas that they let kangaroos and wallabies roam free and have food you can buy to feed them. These aren’t the big kangaroos (as they would probably really attack you) but small kangaroos however it was rather scary having essentially large rats swarm you for food. 

Ahhhhhhhhhh!

Here's Daniel feeding a cute wallaby.

The best part, however, was seeing some of the kangaroos with joeys in their pouches. So cute!

The wildlife park is actually pretty cool as it has only animals indigenous to Australia. We saw a few other animals, including wombats, little penguins, dingoes and koalas. The dingo ate my baby (literally)!

Sleeping koala.

They took photos of us petting a koala, which is pretty special considering people aren't supposed to touch koalas in New South Wales – it’s against the law. Here's a photo of my koala photo.

This was a really nice day, great company and lovely getting out of the city into the fresh hill, er, mountain air.