“To know the road ahead, ask those coming back”
-Chinese Proverb
About 2-3 hours west of Sydney lie the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains are densely populated by oil bearing Eucalyptus trees. The atmosphere is filled with finely dispersed droplets of oil, which in combination with dust particles and water vapor, scatter short-wavelength rays of light which are predominantly blue in colour.
This was the first time in over 2 months that I had to wear a coat. I was now in the sub tropics. Unlike Canada where traveling north gets colder, here it’s the opposite. You can see in the pictures that I’m cold even by Canadian standards. I stayed in one of the nicest hostels of the trip, the YHA in Katoomba. It was fabulous. Katoomba even had a decent Thai restaurant.
The highlight of my stay in the Blue Mountains was my hike to see the famous rock formation, the Three Sisters. This hike was not for vertigo sufferers. My stomach gets a little queasy at times as I gazed out from various lookout points along the trail. I came back to the hostel almost frozen and warmed myself up drinking a one-half bottle of Bundy rum.
Most of all I can remember the wonderful drive up to the Blue Mountains, with Tangerine Dream tunes cranked up. It’s one of those lasting time and place memories that will last me my lifetime.
The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters, ‘Meehni’, ‘Wimlah’ and Gunnedoo’ lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe. These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry.The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle.As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come. – Blue Mountains Tourist Site
