The Blue Mountains

Australian place names – at least those that don’t come from Aboriginal words – have a habit of being obviously, even brutally descriptive. See a big hill somewhere, and the chances are that it’ll be called ‘Big Hill’.

The Blue Mountains are no exception to this rule: they are indeed very blue. You can’t actually smell the sweet scent of eucalyptus when you’re up in the mountains but the blue haze for as far as you can see is your first indication that the forests, north of Sydney, contain such a high density of eucalyptus trees that the air is blue with tiny droplets of eucalyptus oil, rising from the trees.

Ok, so I'm told they're not actually mountains, but uplifted plateaus with vast forested canyons below. No bother, they're still blue, you can't argue with that.

This wasn't the Australian wilderness I had pictured before arriving here, I'd imaged miles and miles of sun-baked, red dirt leading off into the sizzling horizon. For the most part, I was right, but the Blue Mountains offers a whole different kind of wilderness.

Med and I were joined by George and his friend Kev, who has lived in Sydney for a year and has never seen a kangaroo (sorry Kev, if you're reading). We pulled up on the slow, lurching train from Sydney to Katoomba on a Friday afternoon, into the mist. It was freezing, and we were ill-prepared. And so we did what any hardy trekkers do in this sort of weather...we went to the pub.

The Blue Mountains are vast and were once the scene of many ill-fated expeditions by the British as they tried to cross them to see what lay on the other side. To give you an idea of their hugeness, in 1994, some botanist went out for a walk and stumbled on a species of tree long presumed to be extinct. They were Wollemi pines, stout and imposing trees up to 130 feet tall and ten feet round.

We set out early the next morning in sunshine and headed to Echo Point for a view of the Three Sisters, an impressive rock formation with three peaks. The views from the many lookouts were breathtaking, with a rich blue haze reaching right into the distance.

As the bus loads of tourists were herded in, we escaped by hiking down through the canyon for the next few hours, plunging deeper and deeper into the depths of the Blue Mountains and hearing nothing but our own echoes. We then hiked upwards for a dizzyingly spectacular perspective from the Ruined Castle. We nearly missed it, stopping about 100metres shy of it to climb a rock and telling another group of tourists that yes, this was the Ruined Castle. Oops.

Thankfully, we saw more hikers climbing higher and stumbled across a huge rock structure (nothing really like a castle but good enough to sing "I'm the king of the castle!" from). After walking around it a few times, we found a route to clamber up to the very top onto a rock just big enough to fit us all on. And, boy, was it worth it! We were rewarded with a 360 view of the Blue Mountains - it was pure exhilaration to be this high up and surrounded by such an enormous landscape. Never mind being king of the castle, we felt like we were kings of the world at that moment!

We hiked back, returning tired and dirty nearly 9 hours after we set out. We didn't stop there, the following morning we went out for another 3 hour hike to the Katoomba falls and experienced the Blue Mountains as the mist rolled in, white against blue.