What time is it there?!

Saturday began with another early start, as we needed to be at Hobart airport by 5am for our flight to Sydney. It'’s a hard life this travelling business!

Our early arrival meant that by 9am we had collected our hire car and were on our way out of the city for the 90 minute drive to the Blue Mountains. For some reason, probably because of our American experiences, I had expected that this would involve a big wide highway leading out across uninhabited plains before reaching the mountains. In fact, after a few miles of 'motorway'’, the road becomes a windy single carriageway road through an almost unbroken string of small towns (everyone of course wants to live in the mountains!).

After the anti-climax of the journey we reached Katoomba, the main tourist town in the area and our home for 3 nights. At first glance it seems to be a typical tourist town (tea shops, gift shops etc.) and, since you haven'’t really seen any mountains yet, you begin to wonder what all the fuss is about. However, after driving through the high street and into a nice residential suburb you suddenly come to a dead end where you can see that a lot of people are gazing over a railing at something you can'’t quite see from the car. Once you have eventually found a parking space then you too can wander over to the railing, and then you understand why everyone is there.

This is no doubt very geologically inaccurate, but it looked a bit like the Grand Canyon, although a bit smaller and very full of trees. Of course, the Grand Canyon rim is 60 miles from the nearest town which in turn is about 100 miles from anywhere else, but this is literally on the edge of town and there are houses on the other side of the street. We didn'’t check, but our guess is that property at this end of the street is quite pricey.

TIP: If you have a good view from your house and don't want anyone building a housing estate on it; have said view designated as a World Heritage site, that will certainly kill off any planning applications!

Once again we managed to come up with many convincing excuses for not doing the really long hikes in the area, but we did do the 2.5 hour 'Great Round Walk'’. This basically involves taking a cable car between two points at the top, clambering down the 800-odd steps of the '‘staircase'’ to the valley floor, walking back along the base and then catching the '“steepest railway in the world'” back to the top. (We'’re finding it increasingly entertaining to see the range of '‘inappropriate footwear'’ selected by other people on these walks. Note: Flip Flops are not what the guidebook had in mind when it mentioned '‘sturdy shoes'’!).