Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves

Saturday November 19
I woke up to my alarm at 5:30am and got ready for our day of adventuring in the Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains, both of which are about 1.5 hour to 2 hours away from central city Sydney. We got our bus in front of the Sydney Central YHA which was about a 30 minute walk from our hostel. After eating a peanut butter sandwich I dozed off for a little while until we got to the Jenolan Caves.

Prior to our tour we had a few minutes to explore the area. We saw the blue pond, which is blue because there is limestone dissolved in it, and some very colorful birds that really wanted to be fed. Some of the birds we’ve seen here are very determined to get our food. One bird even landed on Julia’s knee the other day and tweeted/squaked at her. We left the birds to their scrounging and met up with our tour guide to begin our 1.5 hour tour of the cave.

 

This cave is definitely the biggest cave I’ve seen. I had been in smaller caves in the south (in the U.S. somewhere in Virginia area) and I had been spelunking with the Westover Outdoor program but I have never been in a cave where the walls literally many stories high.

We learned about stalagmites and stalactites and columns and a lot about the caves history. We also saw another blue pond which is deceptive to the human eye because it seems incredibly shallow but is in fact over three meters deep. At the end of our tour we walked through a part of the cave that had rainbow lights installed and it made it look like the cave was tie-dyed.

After eating another peanut butter sandwich (Julia and I really had nothing else) we were back on the bus to drive to the Blue Mountains. One of the first things we saw at the Blue Mountains was a waterfall with rainbows in them. There was two streams of water and each stream had a rainbow. DOUBLE RAINBOW ALL THE WAY.

Then we saw the three sisters, which are three big rocks in the mountains. The story of the three sisters is that once there were three sisters that would sneak into the mountains to talk to the boys on the other side. One day the sisters’ mother found out and said that she would no longer let them go out. The men on the other side waited and waited but when the girls did not show up they decided to go find them. They geared up with their armor and swords and rode into town looking for the sisters. From a distance, the sisters’ little brother saw the soldiers riding towards their home and ran to tell their father. The father knew what the men were looking for so he temporarily turned his daughters into stone in order to go talk to the men. The men killed the father and he was not able to turn his daughters back into human form, and thus, the three sisters are still stone.

We ventured farther into the forest, stopping at a few look out points, mostly to see the waterfall and three sisters. I would have liked to stay longer and actually hike to the bottom to walk around the path to see everything else but we only had an hour and it was 1000 stairs just to get to the bottom, the start of the walk. I figured that walking to and from Brecon is about 200 stairs so the entire way to the path and back is like walk to and from Brecon 10 times. Believe it or not, I probably have walked to and from Brecon 10 times in a day… during Customs Week. Anyways, we did not get very far before we needed to turn around, but the Blue Mountains were beautiful. You may be wondering why they are called the Blue Mountains. It is because there is a blue haze that lingers around them that is caused by gases released by eucalyptus trees.  I don’t know the exact science behind it, but the cooler the day, the more blue the haze is. He pulled off some eucalyptus leaves for us to smell, which was cool, but I was rather familiar with it already as just a couple of days ago I was basically swimming in a eucalyptus forest with koalas. I also got to smell some lemon tea tree leaves.

We did not drive all the way back to Sydney since there would be traffic. Instead, we were dropped off at some station where we watched our guide throw a few boomerangs before taking the ferry back to Circular Quay. The ferry was nice and we went underneath multiple bridges including the Sydney Harbor Bridge. I also probably took another hundred pictures of the opera house along the way.

Later that night we went out for dinner at an Indian restaurant called Holy Cow. It was delicious, especially after eating peanut butter sandwiches. I don’t think I can eat peanut butter for a long time after returning to the U.S. I never really ate all that much peanut butter but for the last month it has been a staple food in my diet. So many peanuts. Anyways, I had pistachio chicken, which I’ve never had before and it was delicious.