If you go to Sydney, you will be told by everyone you meet that you just have to see the Blue Mountains. It’s obligatory. For someone like me, who lived in the mountains and redrock canyons of the American Southwest for many years, it was a bit underwhelming, but interesting nonetheless.
Tectonics has determined the position of each continent. And they are all in constant motion and battling with each other for position. But Australia sits on a solitary plate that only moves about a centimeter a year, making it the most stable continent. And without tectonic plates smashing and subducting, there are no volcanoes or earthquakes, or mountains. That makes the Blue Mountains something of a rarity in Australia.
Basically, it’s the Appalachian Mountains made mostly out of red sandstone, all covered with a dense forest cover of asparagus-looking eucalyptus trees. It’s pure Jurassic Period, and the time of the dinosaurs. The Blue Mountains also have three of the oldest plants on earth: Larry, Moe, and Curly.
The blue color of the air comes from the oil being excreted by the eucalyptus trees, which turns blue in the refracted sunlight and gives the Blue Mountains their name.
The lush eucalyptus forest of the Blue Mountains also filters the air well, blessing Sydney with some of the cleanest air in the world for a large industrial city of five million people.
The Blue Mountains also provide Sydney with 95% of its water. It takes two weeks for the runoff to get to the city through a series of large dams.
We decided to go with the highest-rated tour company, a small family-owned and operated outfit called Anderson’s. Our guide was Jay Evans, a professional landscape photographer, IT programmer, wilderness instructor, tour guide, and jack of all trades. He was like a stand-up comedian pretending to be an encyclopedia. He had us in stitches for the entire 10-hour tour.
Yes, that sounds like a long time. But it came in bite-sized mouthfuls. Three hours of that time was spent driving to and from the mountains in the white short bus, and the roadside attractions were endlessly amusing. There was a very tasty sit-down lunch at the historic Grand View Hotel. On the way back from the Blue Mountains, we also had a very entertaining 2-hour stop at the Sydney Zoo. And the final hour was spent on a relaxing ferry boat cruise down the lovely Parramatta River from the Olympic Village to Circular Quay in downtown Sydney.
Jovial Jay was full of all sorts of interesting fun facts. Sydney and Banff, British Columbia are the only two major cities in the world completely surrounded by world heritage sites and national parks.
As we drove west out of Sydney toward our destination in the Blue Mountains, we encountered quite a few long tunnels. They are quite popular along Sydney’s motorways, and they will soon encircle the entire city. And won’t that be fun?
Jay boasted that Sydney’s public transportation network is exceptional. It’s cheap and easy to get anywhere you want to go. There are buses, trains, and ferries galore. And there is surprisingly little motor traffic except at rush hour. In fact, some of the major streets in Sydney, like the wondrous George Street, only accommodate modern, Acela-looking streetcars. The latest buzz is all about the new driverless trains.
Soon, we passed the eye-catching Glebe Silos. The 32 red brick towers stand 96 feet tall in two neat rows. They were built in the 1920s to store sugar and cement. The first billboard was placed on the top of the towers in the 1990s as part of Sydney’s bid for the 2000 Olympic Games. It was only supposed to be permitted for ten years, but the owners keep getting extensions. Many Sydneysiders consider it extremely tacky, but the advertisement is seen by hundreds of thousands of commuters who cross the ANZAC Bridge each day, and money talks. KFC is currently leasing the space for $250,000 a month.
And right near the ANZAC Bridge sits the Sydney Fish Market. It opened in 1871 and is the third-largest fish market in the world.
The modern history of Australia followed the basic European colonial model of feigned friendship to the natives at the start, followed by rapacious and insatiable greed enforced by criminal ultraviolence.
Captain James Cook was the first European explorer to discover Australia. He landed in 1770. It reminded him of his home country of Wales, so he called it New South Wales. Sure, the trees were all eucalyptus, a tree completely alien to Britain. But who cares? He was probably drunk or high on laudanum. What was most important to Cook was that he only saw a few natives, so he thought it was an empty land and just ripe for the picking.
The British were in the process of losing America, and they needed some comparable place to loot. There was much rejoicing when they learned of the potential riches awaiting the British Empire, and the game plan was to initially colonize the continent for farming. So, the English started gathering boatloads of convicts, soldiers, and settlers to farm the hell out of this new land. Farmsteads soon went up west of Sydney, and the unsuspecting and spear-chucking Aborigines were annihilated quite rapidly. The convict laborers built roads and provided slave labor for the farms, eventually earning their freedom and becoming loyal homesteaders for the Crown. Next came the ranchers. And a mere sixty years later, trains were steadily hauling goods from the Blue Mountains to Sydney and expanding the boundaries of commerce. Mining and gas exploration were quick to fuel this westward manifest destiny.
By that time, the poor Aborigines were either dead or in hiding, and Australia still remained a well-kept secret to most of the world. But that all changed when Charles Darwin sailed into Botany Bay aboard the “Beagle” and rode his horse up into the Blue Mountains to witness firsthand the area’s unrivaled biological diversity. He wrote several scientific papers about the many marvels he encountered while roaming around the Blue Mountains, and wealthy Europeans soon started to take notice of this strange and bountiful land.
Darwin was essentially the first travel blogger. And his published diaries soon became the talk of Britain and beyond. Thousands of “bushwalkers” were thus born as the touron elite started sailing to Australia so they could hike the spectacular passes through the mountains.
And the rest is history.
Last year, 8 million visitors came to hike the many trails around the Blue Mountains, making it the most popular destination in the whole country. Imagine that!
But Australia was not born as a nation, but rather, a bunch of separate countries. It wasn’t until 1901 that it became a federation of territories—technically a Commonwealth—but still subject to the Queen of England. Then, each region began arguing about where the capital should be. Eventually, it was decided that none of the territorial capitals would be selected. Instead, they put the national capital in the nowheresville city of Canberra. Most Australians didn’t even know where the hell it was. And to this day, a lot of people look down their noses at the “Bush Capital”.
By the mid-1800s, the farmland between Sydney and the mountains began to get scarce, and the Blue Mountains were a natural barrier to what lay to the west. So, the local farmers living in the eastern mountain valleys befriended the Aborigines and tricked them into showing them the trails over the mountains in exchange for tobacco and cheap metal goods. And, boy, what a bargain that turned out to be, because on the far side of the mountains was a magnificent grassland ideal for farming and ranching. Australia was off to the races and never looked back.
The Aboriginal culture is referred to collectively as the First Nations. The Europeans had no idea how vast and varied those native peoples were. It turned out that Australia was composed of over 350 different tribes, speaking more than 1,000 distinct languages. The Aborigines had spent a lot of their existence fighting, usually invading the neighboring tribe and stealing their women. They were the first ones to claim Australia as their own, but they were essentially savages, and every bit as brutal as their British conquerors. I’m not trying to justify the brutality of the Europeans, but they were not strangers to violence.
Probably the most well-known symbol of Aborigine culture is the didgeridoo, a four-foot-long, decorated wind instrument played by vibrating the lips over the top of a eucalyptus branch that has been hollowed out by termites. The sound is a unique, high-pitched drone, and when played by an expert, it can be made to sound like birds and other critters. Only men are allowed to play the didgeridoo, which has been around for over a thousand years. Each region of Australia has its name for the instrument. Didgeridoo is a made-up Anglo word that First Nation people find both silly and mildly offensive.
On the way to our first destination, Scenic World, we passed through several picturesque towns with small, tidy houses. Australians are not showy folk, and their homes are modest and well-tended.
Near the western suburb of Penrith, we passed an expansive area where developers were busily building “Aerotropolis”, a brand new city that will service a new international airport.
As we crossed the Nepean River and began climbing up into the Blue Mountains, we passed the “Colony of Oaks” in the town of Falcon Bridge. Every Australian Prime Minister plants their own personal tree there. For instance, the revered former leader Bob Hawke, who led the country from 1983-1991, and is probably the only Australian PM Americans have ever heard of because he busted our balls when the Aussies won the America’s Cup, has his own tree. Imagine that!
A few miles further, we came to Leura. The ”garden village” is a popular place for Sydneysiders to escape the heat in their cooler summer homes. According to our guide Jay, the Leuralites are a very toxic cafe society of whiners. The town has always been a repository for the elderly insane, and many of the care facilities are encircled by barbed wire fences.
“Scenic World” is in the village of Katoomba, which is part of the Jamison Valley. It was a massive coal mine that fueled most of the commercial expansion in New South Wales. It was the industrial engine of Australia for sixty years. And when the coal ran out, it became a touron magnet.
We were the first tour out of the gate on what was going to be a very busy day, being the end of summer, and a warm and sunny Saturday.
Our itinerary indicated that we would be taking a wild ride.
“Experience the wonder of the Blue Mountains from above (and below!) with our Scenic World passes, permitting us access to three amazing sightseeing rides and a guided boardwalk through the rainforest! Discover the thrill of a 52-degree incline (128% incline) riding the steepest passenger railway in the world, the Scenic Railway. Glide between cliff tops and gaze at the rainforest canopy through the glass floor of the Scenic Skyway! Suspended 270 meters above ancient ravines, the Skyway provides a unique thrill. Enjoy the Scenic Cableway, a 545m journey descending into the Jamison Valley. The Cableway’s fully enclosed cabin is a unique vantage point for viewing the Three Sisters, Orphan Rock, Mt Solitary, and Katoomba Falls. Disembark at the bottom station to access the Scenic Walkway and stroll through 2.4 kilometers of Jurassic rainforest.”
They really worked the Dinosaur angle hard at Scenic World, with animatronic dinosaurs that roared and snapped their jaws. There was Dinosaur Valley, Dinosaur Village, the Dinosaur gift shop, and the Dinosaur train plunge.
The highlight of the park is three sandstone columns that jut out perpendicular in a line from the 600-foot-tall canyon walls that run for hundreds of miles. The sandstone pillars are known as the Three Sisters and those wild and crazy Abos have a manly legend about this iconic rock formation that has nothing to do with wind or erosion. And it goes like this: Once upon a time, there were three sisters named Meehni, Wimlah, and Gunnedo, and they belonged to the Katoomba tribe. They fell in love with three brothers from the nearby Nepean tribe, but tribal law forbade marriage between the tribes. So the brothers captured the three sisters, and that led to a major battle. A witch doctor from the Katoomba tribe turned the sisters to stone to protect them. This was supposed to be a temporary fix, but the witch doctor got killed, and no one knew how to turn the sisters back.
And I think that just goes to show that the song remains the same, no matter the people, time, or place.
