Australia – Sydney and the Blue Mountains

 

After landing at Sydney airport and taking the train downtown, we climbed the stairs up from metro tunnels at the Circular Quay Station to a bit of a culture shock. There appeared to be more people out enjoying the beautiful Saturday afternoon in Sydney Harbour than we likely encountered in all of our time in NZ.

We stayed at the Pier 1 Hotel, a restored 20^th Century warehouse on the wharf right beneath the iconic Sydney Harbor Bridge – an ideal location with the best breakfast buffet ever, a foodie heaven each morning.

Sydney and the Rocks District were both metropolitan and charming at the same time. The highlights of our days in Sydney include an epic game of hide and seek in the Royal Botanical Gardens early one morning, a visit to the Museum of Contemporary Art, many wild Cockatoo sightings, the native animals at the Featherdale Widlife Park and a fast ferry trip to Manly Beach.

After our stay in Sydney, we traveled by train to Katoomba, a gateway to the Blue Mountains.  Our time here definitely exceeded our expectations.  The land just opens up to seemingly endless valleys from precipitous drops.

In Katoomba there was modernized tourist attraction that has been around for 80 years called Scenic World consisting of various view points and access points (trams and trains) into the valley. One morning we took the Mountain Devil train from Scenic World to the base of the Katoomba Falls.  This train is billed as being on the steepest (52 degrees) pitch in the world and it was pretty cool to feel gravity’s pull as we descended into the valley from above.