Port Macquarie - Katoomba

So after leaving Port, we travelled to Katoomba via an overnight stay in Sydney. In Sydney we had a pretty poor hostel experience including when they gave us a room that already had someone asleep in it! So if you are coming to Sydney, don't stay in the "Wake Up!" hostel - unless you want someone to "Wake you Up!" in the middle of the night.

Anyway, leaving Sydney and bad hostels behind us, we arrived in Katoomba and a nice little hostel called "number 14". We also managed to turn up a gem of a restaurant in "Niche Nosh" - but more on that later.


Katoomba - for those unfamiliar with the place - is a small mountain town with easy access to the Blue Mountains National Park - and various other smaller national parks nearby. The jewel in the crown of Katoomba is the "Three Sisters" - a rock formation of three sandstone spires said by the local indiginous population to be three beautiful maidens turned to stone for all eternity (they're always beautiful, these maidens in stories. Noone bothers turning ugly maidens into stone pillars...). Anyway, the views across the valley are stunning and there are many scenic walks and hikes around the cliffs and valley.



Katoomba is also the site of the world's steepest railway - an impressive 52 degrees to the horizontal. There's also one cablecar (with a transparent floor!) stretching over a gorge and another which decends into the valley itself.


Yesterday we hiked to the "Ruined Castle", a rock formation in the middle of the Jamieson valley. It gets its name from a series of rock spires that jut out into the sky looking like ruined turrets of a medieval castle. From the top of these spires are stunning views of the valley and the surrounding cliffs.


To get to the "castle" we had to hike for 3 hours through fern draped rainforest and rocky scrubland. The place is alive with birds of various types, from lorikeets and parrots to lyrebirds and brush turkeys. Tracy keeps calling me a brush turkey. You make your own mind up.



One of these pictures is me and the other is a brush turkey. Which is which?

Niche Nosh is a small veggie cafe in the middle of Katoomba. We have eaten there pretty much every day because the food is so good - and so cheap. I'd like to thank Gordon Brown for the strength of the pound against the Aussie dollar because we can make our money go pretty far over here. They have such delights as polenta squares, tamale tart and colcanon pie. All their food is so good is hard to choose, but with today being our last day, we only have time to grab lunch before we have to leave.

Today we head back to Sydney to look around there for a few days before we start a long migration West.