Blue Mountains

Wed 21
We took a walk with Jane and the dogs down to the local reserve (basically a park) with a beach on the harbour, a brief walk along the beach was followed by us standing in the shade whilst the dogs bolted around. 10am and already so hot.
By 11am all our farewells were said and we packed up the car and made our way (with some difficulty due to a complete lack of signage) out westwards to the Blue Mountains. We were suprised just how close they are and within 2 hours we had stopped at Glenbrook to visit the Information Centre.
We bought a couple of very large scale ordnance survey maps and then took our first trip into the Blue Mountains National Park. A half hour drive along a rough road took us into the bush and to a dead end at the start of the Red Hands Track. Here we took a circular path through the bush visiting a couple of aboriginal sites along the way. It was clear that we were the only people to have passed that way that day because we kept on walking into spider webs across the track, and for the whole hour and a half that we walked we only saw two other people.
The Red Hands Cave hand paintings are dated to be between 40,000 and 10,000 years old and the grooves in the rocks where axes were sharpened have a similar date though I don't know what techniques you can use to date grooves. Each hand painted represents a different person who visited the cave and there were clearly two different techniques used. The first was the spraying of the red ochre paint over the hand, the second was to paint the cave wall red first and then spray a white paint.
The bush was strangely silent except for the occasional screech of a bird, hardly any of which we saw; it was a very calming, peaceful, daydreamy sort of a walk with unusual and unfamiliar plants all around - beautiful.
On our way back towards the park entrance we took a small detour to a campsite known to often have kangaroo visitors but we didn't find any. Instead there were loads of birds, cockatoos, kookaburras, rosellas, ducks and magpies. The cockatoos came abegging when they saw we had apples and ripped our offerings apart to get at the seeds.
Finally, just before we left the park we took a short walk down to Jellybean Pool, a waterhole that is just as I imagine a waterhole to be; jagged sandstone cliffs with a waterfall and a pool surrounded by the scraggy native bush. A quintessential waterhole.
It starts to get dark early here now, around 5:30pm so we decided to go and find somewhere to stay and found a motel a few miles further up the road.

Thurs 22
We drove to Wentworth Falls and stopped to have a full fry up breakfast before heading out to do 'Darwin's walk' - the walk that Charles Darwin did when he visited here; unfortunately the path was closed due to landslides so we just had to go to the end of the walk in the car and be amazed by the views over a sheer drop to the forest below and the sandstone cliffs in the distance. The photos could never do the place justice - just magnificent. We walked for about an hour to get to the falls along a thin path that wound its way along the side of the cliffs (probably about 30m down from the top) and into cave areas. Once we had crossed the top of the falls it all got too scary for me as the path went out onto these really thin ledges, and, although there was a fence at the edge, my vertigo would not permit me to pass that way. Tristan said it made his knees a bit wobbly too and so we turned back!
On our return journey we saw some rarer black cockatoos but failed to get a photo of them, they are beautiful birds with red flashes on their wings.
We drove further West to visit Sublime Point Lookout past houses perched on the edge of the cliffs. The lookout had more fantastic views from a rock that just seemed perched out in the middle of it all. The was a fantastic large boulder with intricate weathering on it that I wouldn't have believed was natural unless I had seen it myself (see the photos); unfortunately some people have decided to carve their names in it (a modern form of the red hands?)
Next we took a walk down into Lyre Bird Dell and to visit the Pool of Siloam on a circuit through a gulley near Leura. More fantastic bush and rocks and waterfalls and bird screeching!
By 3pm we had checked into the local YHA hostel; we did some shopping; cooked an early supper and then made our way to the local cinema that shows a film about the area on an enormous IMAX type screen. Within the Blue Mountain park they have found 40 adult specimens of a tree thought to have been extinct for over 65 million years since the time of the dinosaurs. It is a type of pine but has fronds like a fern and its bark is made up of a sea of buds. The film was full of amazing images from helicopters and from a pair of canyoners, people that abseil down waterfalls and into cave systems in the park, fantastic places to go, just not the right method of getting there!
Celso and Tris then decided that they needed to stay at the cinema to watch 'Clash of the Titans', and so I was able to return to the YHA, write this and load my photos!