Well, if you ever wondered what it's like to drive down the wrong side of the street in the midst of oncoming traffic in a busy city, here's what it looks like:
We picked up our car today and headed out to Katoomba, about 75 miles west of Sydney and the Blue Mountains Scenic World in the Blue Mountains National Park. The Blue Mountains are one of the areas that have been burned over in the last few weeks, and the fires were reportedly within about 20 miles or so of the Scenic World site itself. But, we didn't see any fires, although we did see some hazy smoke off in the distance.
The Blue Mountains themselves are about 3500 feet high and the gorges that have been formed in the area are about 2500 feet deep. We only saw a small part of the National Park, but it was very pretty.
Here's a pretty good shot of the gorge:
This rock formation is called "The Three Sisters" as seen from the Cableway that crosses over the gorge:
This is a picture of the Cable Car that we took across the gorge to get the picture above:
We took an inclined railway down into the gorge. This particular inclined railway has a maximum inclination of 52 degrees, reportedly the greatest such angle in the world. Here are some people exiting the railway car at the bottom:
At the bottom of the railway, there was a walkpath that wound around the bottom of the gorge over to another cable car that took us back up to the top. Along the way, we passed a pretty massive landslide that had taken out about 100 feet of the walkway about 6 months ago:
You can also get some idea of the depth of the gorge, although we're nowhere near the bottom of the gorge itself.
Anyway, it was a lovely day in the Blue Mountains in Katoomba, New South Wales. Prior to leaving Sydney this morning, we walked through the Queen Victoria Building on George Street in Sydney. The building was built in 1888 and has been restored and is now full of shops and cafes. It's just beautiful inside:
We're driving down to Canberra, the national capital, tomorrow. We'll be driving along the coast so we should have some beautiful views of the shoreline and the ocean. Canberra is about 200 miles south of Sydney, but we'll be taking the coastal route, which is going to be longer.
More tomorrow!
