Writ­ten and pho­to­graphed by Francesca. All rights reserved.

DAY ONE

We set off for the moun­tains hav­ing grown tired of city life even though Sydney had treated us well and was as excit­ing as we had always hoped it would be. We checked out of Eva’s, which was com­fort­able and a little more ‘our cup of tea’ shall we say than the Jolly Swag­man, a little earlier than usual whilst grabbing a quick bowl of Kel­loggs we heaved our way back to King’s Cross Sta­tion. The short walk was now well known to us hav­ing spent two enjoy­able lunches at Joe’s café in Vic­toria Road. I was not sad to be mov­ing on and the com­muter train only reminded me of the life we had so dili­gently planned to move on from. We made it to Cent­ral in plenty of time and so grabbed a naughty Krispy Kreme and watered J with his morn­ing cof­fee. Cof­fee in hos­tels is not made of the right stuff to kick-start the day.

We piled onto the train pack­ing four seats with our packs and ourselves. I was excited to have time to sit and read my Canon 40D manual and J was quickly tap­ping away on the laptop to keep ahead. The train was a double-decker (as I fondly remembered from my Ams­ter­dam days) with a win­dow seat I was happy. Our jour­ney was exactly two hours which whizzed by as my pages turned my shut­ter clicked. At each stop the smell of the brakes filtered into the car­riage which was quite pungent.

We arrived to a beau­ti­ful blue sky at around mid­day and found our new abode down the steep high street and decamped again. The YHA was large with an ‘en mass’ or fam­ily scale to it. We were intro­duced to our first ‘twin-double’ room, which was a double bed with a single bunk above. The room was sparse, as slowly the lux­ur­ies of an en-suite, fridge, microwave, basin or safe that we had enjoyed had gone. We decided to make the most of the fine weather and go for a walk along Prince’s Henry’s Cliff path to the fam­ous ‘Three Sis­ters’. We took half a hour to nour­ish ourselves in a won­der­ful if not quirky eat­ery across the road. We think if was run by Mor­mons as the men were all sport­ing beards and the women looked very whole­some. The pump­kin soup was deli­cious and J even agreed des­pite his dis­like of soup in general.

The walk began from an almost hid­den path at the corner of the road. There was a breath­tak­ing view even before we had begun of the tree covered land­scape. The walk was both easy and enjoy­able and I for one was glad of the free­dom to roam with barely a sole to dis­turb us. As I prac­ticed my new found know­ledge of the 40D, this walk was chal­lenge indeed. Par­rots in the trees, shade and dappled light along the path broke out into enorm­ous vis­tas across the Blue Moun­tains. Our walk was littered with romantic out­looks in this breath­tak­ing land­scape where gen­er­ous tour­ists offered to take our pic­ture together, but some­how made them look as though we were super­im­posed on a stu­dio background!

We got to the ‘Three Sis­ters’ shortly before sun­down which was a beau­ti­ful light and I was enjoy­ing the moment to show what this cam­era can do. Sadly I made a school­girl error and had the cam­era set to por­trait rather than land­scape. A small thing you may think, but it made a great deal of dif­fer­ence to the vibrancy of the blue col­our. I dis­covered this only in the last few moments there and man­aged to shoot a few face-saving shots to come away with, phew! The Three Sis­ters were some­thing to behold, even though the trap­pings of tour­ism were all around us, the scale of this view before you is dif­fi­cult to fathom. We saw the sky­way (that Uncle Richard had men­tioned) con­trol­lable plum­met down the face to the moun­tain rock to the bot­tom, as the cable car straddled from one side to the other.

We moved on, happy to share our day with only ourselves and not be drained of our dol­lars or to be sur­roun­ded by moneyed tour­ists out to do everything on the Blue Moun­tains must do list. The walk took us all the way to the Katoomba Falls, which by the time we reached them the sun had fallen behind the blanket of trees for another day. We headed back to the hostel proud of our accom­plish­ment and mused that if Daddy had been with us he would per­haps have been back and in the pub already with drink in hand! Day fell to night and after a sup­per of fish-fingers, rice and peas we dis­cussed and booked our next day’s excur­sion and quickly ven­tured to bed.

DAY TWO

We were up early, but with a spe­cific pur­pose in mind. We had to sort out a packed lunch for an Abori­ginal Walk­about! We went out to Coles (the local super­mar­ket) in the fresh morn­ing moun­tain air and stocked up on high energy food and rolls for lunch. Por­ridge and soya milk set us up for the morn­ing as we made our way to the 9:25am train to Faulken­bridge. There we met our walk­ing group and Evan our guide. Our group was of four ‘Ozzie’ girls (of which one was of Ger­man ori­gin and the other Chinese) and a couple from San Fran­cisco. Evan asked that we intro­duce ourselves by name, nation­al­ity, favour­ite animal, reason why, and by name again. He explained his ori­gin­a­tion and asso­ci­ation with Abori­ginal cul­ture and assured us of his authen­ti­city. The priv­ilege was ours as to step into these lands without an abori­ginal guide would be impossible.

Our walk­about ini­tially took us to a cave where we were enlightened on how the abori­gin­als used euca­lyptus leaves rolled and placed into your nos­trils to sooth cold symp­toms. Mod­ern life still swirled in our minds and raced through our veins as we listened to the slow rhythm of Evan’s voice. We were lead safely into a med­it­at­ive state, known as ‘Dream­time’ to get rid of our ‘bad spirit trouble’. We shared our exper­i­ences together. For me I real­ised that I do have the capa­city to put my stresses of mod­ern life aside and stop think­ing when I’m in a tran­quil place. For years I had spoken of want­ing to just “sit in a field” to be able to let go and be at peace with myself again, this came close. Once free from our ‘bad spirit trouble’ we were invited by Evan to visit a sac­red Abori­ginal sight. We saw here a carving in the rock of a wallaby, roo killed by a spear by ‘D’ and the ‘Rain­bow ser­pent’ and the begin­ning of the walkabout.

Our walk was very enlight­en­ing. We were shown how abori­gin­als looked at life through stor­ies, both spoken and carved into giant rocks on the forest floor. The spent their days per­fect­ing what is called ‘dream­time’, a heightened sense of aware­ness achieved by get­ting rid of ‘bad spirit trouble’ through med­it­a­tion and through cre­ativ­ity in art, dance and singing. Chil­dren lived with the women until puberty when they lived and learned from with their own sex. Men were trained to be hunters and women nur­tur­ers and pro­tect­ors (includ­ing deal­ing with snakes). Matur­ity was acknow­ledged in stages and achieved by com­plet­ing tests set by the eld­ers. Abori­gin­als knew the law of nature and how to use this resource to sur­vive. They would settle for only a couple of week before mov­ing on and would listen to the forest to tell them what to do. They would eas­ily walk four time the dis­tance we did in one day!

The walk for me how­ever was done at the per­fect pace, but was also chal­len­ging. There was a large amount of rock climb­ing and using of our hands, which saw my cam­era quickly squirreled away for pro­tec­tion. We saw only lim­ited wild­life (mainly small birds) as the winter was a chance for the snakes and spiders to hibern­ate, thank­fully. The flora was mainly ferns, but there were also small del­ic­ate white, purple and yel­low flowers dot­ted around. We saw and used euca­lyptus, tea-tree and tur­pen­tine leaves and use col­oured rocks (okra, black, white, yel­low, brown) to make Abori­ginal paint­ings. As the sun moved through the trees the dappled light was beau­ti­ful and wel­com­ing, just how forests should be. We dipped in the dark damp depths of the val­leys to see water­falls and sunned ourselves in cave-like out­crops above the tree can­opy. You could really ima­gine how life was for these people; as fit for pur­pose, highly skilled and inspir­a­tional human beings. It was sad to remem­ber what even­tu­ally happened to these people and how white man influ­enced their fate.

Over lunch we dis­cussed nat­ive people and nation­al­ity. The Aus­trali­ans remarked on their national iden­tity crisis say­ing “We are neither European nor Abori­ginal, so we have yet to identify what it is to be a white Aus­tralian” Our Amer­ican friends talked about how the Amer­ican Indi­ans suffered a sim­ilar fate. We, as the Eng­lish con­tin­gent really had no com­par­ison with our cul­ture. Our iden­tity crisis is more closely linked to mass immig­ra­tion and our pro­mo­tion, pro­tec­tion and accept­ance of other cul­tures before our own. Edu­ca­tion­ally we hark back to stone, bronze, iron age archae­ology and roy­alty. Rabbit-proof fence is my only real under­stand­ing of the tor­ture put upon these people by their invaders. And there were many moments when ‘Last of the Mohi­cans’ played on my mind.

Ulti­mately our day was magical one and it was real priv­ilege to be able to be shown this most secret of cultures.

And abruptly our walk­about ended as the con­crete world envel­oped us again. Evan lead us to a pub I expect he fre­quents daily dur­ing the sum­mer months. We gathered and chat­ted about the day and our lives fur­ther afield. The girls had all done a tour-guiding course and had ideas to be open for busi­ness from Sydney to Jamaica. We drank Guin­ness and ate bar snacks until our muscles relaxed into a more famil­iar pos­i­tion. The girls left for their train only to return shortly after­wards, hav­ing watched the train to Sydney leave the sta­tion for the next hour. We enjoyed their com­pany and it was good to share time with new and inter­est­ing people, some­thing I think is such a won­der­ful part of trav­el­ling. More please…

Kelly and Bob, the San Fran con­tin­gent had decided to stay at Katoomba for the night and so trav­elled with us back there. Lucky from them that we did as on our arrival the heav­ens opened and with the already bit­ing wind added to the drama. James gave Kelly his dis­pos­able poncho and I used mine to cover my day sack as my cam­era was pri­or­ity num­ber one. We trudged our way via the ATM to the YHA and said our good­byes. Sup­per was simple and repet­it­ive of the night before, but hit the spot.

Our cheeks were rosy and that was good enough for me. Sleep took us quickly.

DAY THREE

Re-hydration was the name of the game and luck­ily was had decided to have today off so to speak. We checked out at 10am and spent until 5pm on the Wifi sort­ing accom­mod­a­tion for that night in Sydney and 3 nights in the Hunter Val­ley for some wine tast­ing. I finally made time to edit my pho­tos ready for upload onto Flickr, but the broad­band was play­ing games and so as yet this has not be pos­sible. I hope we can sort this on Sunday in Newcastle.

James and I are learn­ing how we travel together and are learn­ing to accom­mod­ate each other’s needs. We’ve real­ised I’m more par­tic­u­lar on where we stay and J is par­tic­u­lar on hav­ing the fol­low­ing night booked. So I’m going to look for the accom­mod­a­tion and J is going to book it, sor­ted. We lunched at ‘Fresh’ a lovely organic café that did deli­cious look­ing and tast­ing Moroc­can chicken flat­bread sand­wiches. We made our first with­drawal at the ATM of AUD$300 which should last us 2.5days. Now we are also online with a local OZ sim that J has got work­ing, though texts seem to not be send­ing yet.

Finally we had to make a run for the train, before the weather came in again. So at 5:20pm we were back on the train to Kings Cross, Sydney. The jour­ney was a little rough as the car­riage door would not shut and put a con­stant draft through the train. On this jour­ney that we both saw a rev­el­a­tion in train travel. Near­ing the end of our jour­ney a pas­sen­ger took hold of the hand on the side of the seat across from us, and moved the seat back to the front of the seat, chan­ging its dir­ec­tion and cre­at­ing a four seat area from a two. James and I watched in amazement our jaws hit the floor. It was just like we had been shown a whole new world!

And as quickly as we had left the city, we were back again. We stopped here on our way to the Hunter Val­ley as the Rover Coach from Sydney Cent­ral at 8:30am is the easi­est route there.

It was strange to me that we seemed to know our way around Sydney after such a short period of time, but we did. Ori­ginal Backpacker’s on Vic­toria Road was to be our stop for the night. It was a means to an end and the first room where we felt the need to do a spider check and keep our shoes off the floor. I’m sure it was the wooden floor boards that gave us this vibe, but none the less I’m glad it was for only one night and the Hunter Val­ley waits.

Regards Cesca

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