Blue Mountains

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Originally uploaded by theslaad.

Just an hour and a half's drive from Sydney are the beautiful Blue Mountains. We decided to stay near to the biggest town in the area - Katoomba which also has the biggest tourist attraction in the area - Scenic World (more about that later). We visited the supermarket to stock our new kitchen, filled the esky up with stubbies and ice and made our way to the campsite. We can park our van and stay the night at a variety of places, some free and some not. The site in Katoomba has showers and plugsockets so we paid for a couple of nights.
After parking our van we got our first Australian wildlife experience - a Kookaburra flew into a nearby tree and let us get quite close to look at the lovely little fella. He even gave us a little laugh - very cool.
We still had a few hours of daylight left so went for a walk. We went a few minutes down the road to Katoomba falls and then took the sign posted walk around the cliff edge to Echo Point. There are lots of lookout points along the way that give stunning views, but make your knees go a bit wobbly. We saw and heard some more interesting birds along the way including some rainbow lorikeets, crimson rosellas and some big white cockatoos.
We enjoyed being able to cook for ourselves for a change, and spent a cosy first night in our van.

The next day we woke up to the sounds of cricket and Chris enjoyed watching them play while we had some brekkie. We walked along the road to Scenic World - a place where you can view the mountains & rainforest from 4 different perspectives - a railway, a cable car, a walkway and a glassbottomed cable car. It was quite cool as it took you through the rainforest which is quite difficult to get to otherwise and the views form the skyway (glassbottomed cable car) were pretty amazing.
We spent a bit of the afternoon shopping in Katoomba as we were getting worried that we had no adaptor for our plugs and the camera was running out of battery. Later, we explored a bit further afield and went to Wentworth falls. We walked down quite a few steps (and hence back up them again) but it was worth it.

The next day we left Katoomba and drove about 4 hours to the Hunter Valley - a wine growing area. It was bendy and bumpy and invloved lots of quite steep ascents and descents. We were again really impressed by the scenery, but a bit worried when we drove through areas that had clearly been badly burned at some stage. Unfortunately our next wildlife spots weren't very alive anymore. We saw the weirest dead wombat at the side of the road that looked like it had just died of old age! It was very fat! We also saw a few poor Roos.
We stopped in at a couple of Vineyards for a spot of tasting and bought a couple of bottles before continuing our journey to the Pacific Highway and the coastal region of Myall Lakes.
We spent the night in an unusual campsite that had been marked in our map book as being full of facilities but it just had some toilets with no lights and lots of flies.
On the subject of flies, for those of you that have read Bill Bryson's Down Under, we've experienced flies like he experienced. They land on your mouth and near your eyes and don't go away when you flap at them. It's definitely the worst thing about Australia, that and the constant fear of Redbacks & crocs!