The Blue Mountains are the Topps

Ok - so that's a bit of a cheesy title.  Hmmm - so that's a really cheesy title.  That said, Adam and I were truly blown away by the Blue Mountains.

Imagine if when the Rockies were discovered there had been a race for the tourist trade - and if people had then built trails up and down cliffs, and through waterfalls, and in between overhangs and underhangs...and if the tops of the cliffs seemed to have an entirely different ecosystem from the bottom (well, I guess that's true anywhere).

The point is, the Blue Mountains are a complete phenomenon. We've never seen anything like them.  Millions of years ago they were pushed up from the land around them, and then erosion started doing its thing.  Now - the mountain edges are sheer cliffs - kilometres of them on both sides- down to lush, temperate rainforest.

Fern Canopy

It was truly jaw-dropping.
 We could have easily spent our entire holiday there, even though we had to put on jackets...actual layers of clothing...in Australia...

Now there's a stair workout for ya!

We'll let the pictures tell the rest of the story.

One of the overhangs

And up...and down...

                                

The Three Sisters, Katoomba

Happy Days

Hanging over at Wentworth Falls...

...just like in the old days!

Finally, before we caught the plane back from Sydney to Brisbane, we went out to Botany Bay, to the first landing sight of Captain Cook. It was a mixture of sad and beautiful:  landfills, oil refinery and the National Park, with plenty of reminders of the Aborigines who were displaced.  We've just added a couple of the beautiful pics.

Botany Bay at Low Tide

Sea Art

xoxo J