Blue Mountains

I have a great week full of activities behind me and now I´m facing the fact that I have to write about everything, which is gonna be tons of work! I´ll start today and keep doing when ever I´ve got time this week... I hope you do read my blog so I´m not wasting my time with all of this writing. So it´d be nice to read some of your comments :) You have to register to write comments but you needn´t create your own blog. Oh well, I´m also writing this for myself so I´ll have a kind of journal of my exchange year. I used to write my personal diary (a traditional notebook) regularly but I haven´t done it properly for the last couple of years now. And anyways I write more about relationships, imporant (?) conversations, my thoughts etc... This is more like a trip journey!

Well, I guess I´d better get started... I had booked a trip to Blue Mountains with OzTravel for Monday. A bus picked us up in front of Geegal at 7:30am and cruised around downtown Sydney for over an hour picking up participants from different hotels. I didn´t mind it since it was a good tour of some areas I hadn´t seen before. Our tour group consisted of 21 people from different countries. Our guide was this man who liked to joke about everything. He did know some interesting real facts, as well, that he kept telling while we were driving. So, when we finally hit the highway we drove to this picknic area close to the mountains to have morning tea. Then we did a quick stop (all of our stops were quick - between 10 and 30 min) to see a kangaroo shaped engrawing some Aborginals had made years before. Our guide also told us about some plants. There are many different kinds of eucalyptus but picky koalas like only a few of them.

Our next stop was finally at the Blue Mountains, at Evans Lookout. We were at the second highest point and the view was amazing! I think pictures tell more than words so I won´t start describing how it looked like. We did this long, exhausting walk of as many as 2000 steps (sarcasm) to see Wentworth waterfall. At this point of the tour Silja and I had already began pretty unsatisfied because we were just taken from one bus stop to another and weren´t given any time to walk around. If we had known the tour consisted mostly of just sitting in the bus we would´ve taken a train there and done our own thing.




Wentworth waterfall

Anyways, after the walk it was time to sit in a train for a little while, which was probably the best part of the tour. We went to see the famous Three Sisters and were told the story behind the name. It was something about a witch doctor having three daughters who he ended up changing to stone so that they wouldn´t get married with these three guys. We took a scenic train to the floor of the canyon and walked a bit in the rainforest before taking a railway back up. The railway was originally built to take up coal from the mines but later it was turned into a transportation for people. It´s the world´s steepest inclined railway of 51 degrees!

The three sisters

We had lunch at the garden village of Leura. Silja and I found a nice market to buy some salad and fruits. The guide had been repeating we should hurry to do everything else so we´d have plenty of time to see kangaroos so I expected to spend some time seeing them. We drove to this park (and on our way there spotted a couple making out in the water in some pond) to see kangaroos. Since it had been half cloudy for the last couple of hours they weren´t too tired but were hopping around, eating and licking themselves to clean up. It was nice getting to see them so close! We were told kangaroo moms can have 3 joeys (baby kangaroos are called joyes, not sure about the spelling, though) at the same time, one of them living in the pocket. And if it´s pregnent but there isn´t enough food around it can stop the development of the baby for up to one year, until the food situation improves. I think it´s pretty amazing!

A kangaroo

Our last activity was driving through the Olympic Park. I think I´ll be introduced to the park more closely during one of my subjects, called the Olympic Games. We were dropped off at a ferry station there and took a ferry to Circular Quay. On our way on Parramatta River we some really posh houses. After the tour we went home to take a shower and met for a dinner in Darling Harbour. We felt like having some dessert, as well, so we went to upstairs at the mall there. We ate these huge pieces of carrot and tiramisu cake (worth $8 each) and had a nice chat with the owner of the cafe. He couldn´t believe we eat reindeer in Finland - after all, it´s Santa´s little helper :P

A posh house on Parramatta River