Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains

Our little group’s next day trip was to the Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains. This is a pretty popular tourist destination since it’s an easy drive out of Sydney. A lot of times people will make this a weekend trip, however, given that it was the Holiday season, everything was booked, so we packed it all into one day.

We got an early start on the road, but since our car was pretty no frills and had no hookups, we were forced to listen to the radio the whole way. By now, Greg and I were used to Aussie radio and its limited variety, but it was all new to Marc and Dan and by the end they were begging us to please keep the damn thing off. Complaints about the radio were only exceeded by their constant frustration with limited access to the internet in the house. Again, this was a phase Greg and I had already passed through, but it was new torture to our two techie friends. Since my internet access stick was the only one with gigs left on it, they’d pretty much commandeered my computer and I rarely saw it again before the end of our stay in Sydney. But I digress. Other than the complaints about the super repetitive pop radio and its constantly static-ey reception, we had an easy early morning drive.

We spent the first half of our day in Jenolan where there’s a network of caves around which they’ve created a bit of an underground theme park. They offer a variety of tours to see the different caves that you can pick from depending on your level of comfort and adventurousness. Given my fear of heights, we went with the basic tour, but they do have some pretty cool sounding tours that involve crawling through small spaces and up and down ladders into caverns.

I had to hold on tightly to rails even when just walking on the built-in bridges. However, all those stalactites and stalagmites were quite impressive.

One of the bigger caverns known as “The Cathedral” is sometimes used for events like concerts because of the excellent acoustics. They did a little demonstration of lights and music, which was simultaneously cheesy and kind of impressive. Note Greg’s excellent camera work complete with special effects:

Here's the slideshow of our morning:

In the afternoon we made our way to the Blue Mountains. The famous rock formation in this area is the cluster of the Three Sisters.

The mountains really do look blue as you look off into the distance.

Leading a away from the viewing platforms there was trail. It runs along the cliffs and has some very pretty views.

We followed up to a small waterfall and spent a while climbing up its rocks.

Greg might have nearly lost his wedding ring and slipped on his bum while retrieving it, but we had a great time splashing around. And the best part . . . no leeches this time!

After we got done goofing around, we headed back along the trail just in time to see the sun set over the Blue Mountains.

And here's the slideshow:

And here's a random little add-on. In our travels we came across this bird call a few times -- I just thought it was kind of crazy:

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