Blue Mountains Interlude

This post will be a bit difficult to type, as I am attempting to navigate around the medium-sized dog parked in my lap and resting his chin on my right forearm.

I got up early and caught the bus to the Blue Mountains. The driver was a charming Aussie bloke who offered to take any pictures I wanted for me because I was traveling alone. Bless.

We drove through the city a bit to pick up more passengers (I was lucky, the pick up point for me was the second to last one, some people had been on board for an hour already), then headed out. ...and then the bus promptly broke down somewhere in the suburbs. Fortunately, we weren't delayed for too long. This was the view for the wait, up the retaining wall by the highway, taken when I wasn't sure if I'd be seeing any further wildlife.

Once we were back on the way, the driver assured us that he could shave off the time lost and keep us on schedule.

The drive up was lovely, the mountains aren't particularly tall, but the range itself is very old and very long. There are a lot of small communities clustered around the main road, but once you get a little away from them there's a whole lot of unexplored land - just two years ago, some hikers discovered a tree in a forgotten valley that had, up to that point, only been seen in fossil form. This tree strain dates back to the Jurassic period. There are a lot of cliff faces throughout and valleys that dead end, so the only way through the mountains is along the ridge line.

We stopped at Echo Point, which is just outside of the resort town of Katoomba. The view was stunning. The Blue Mountains get their name from Eucalyptus trees, the oil of which has a blue sheen under the sunlight. 

There are three limestone formations here called the Three Sisters. Legend has it that a gunji (medicine man) was out with his three daughters, and while he searched for plants for his ceremonies, the girls threw rocks off the cliffs. This had the unfortunate effect of waking a bunyip (a local bogeyman creature). The bunyip threatened the girls and the gunji used his magic bone to turn them into stone to protect them. He then had to run from the bunyip, but couldn't get out of the valley. He turned himself into a lyre bird, which made it so he could escape, but in the process he dropped the magic bone so none of them could be turned back.

The views really were fairly spectacular.

There was an Aboriginal cultural center at the first lookout, and the tour company paid for our tickets to watch their cultural performance by way of apology for the delay. I found the legend of how the didjeridu (as spelled in the display) was discovered. A young warrior named Yidiki was out walking one day and heard a strange sound, and he soon realized it was the sound of the wind going through a hollow log. He picked up the log and blew it to the sky, and the sawdust and termites that came out created the Milky Way. He went back to the village, but after a few days they kicked him out as initially he was only blowing directly through the log, which created only one sound over, and over, and over. Eventually, out in the bush, he learned the loose lip technique (which allows for variations in pitch and rhythm) of playing by trying to mimic the animals he saw. He was eventually welcomed back to his village.

From there, we continued on to the next leg of our tour, the Jenolan Caves. Tune in next week, for a whole bunch of pictures of, well, that.