Blue Mountain Adventure

Wednesday, July 4

Day 3: Getting closer to adjusting to the new time zones. Slept in til almost 5am Australian time!

Had a 10 hour tour, so today's blog will be more pictures, less words.

Starting with - here is our tour bus:

It picked us up at 7:15am. We then went to Olympic Park.

Thats the un-lit olympic torch. Then we went to a small town called Leura (pronounced "Loo-rah"). It had a sweet candy shop. Here is a picture of a chocolate from a chocolate shop next door.

It smelled awesome. Then we went to the Blue Mountains (the Grand Canyon of Australia). We took a 2 gondolas, an unbelievably steep (52 degree slope) train that used to be used for mining, and hiked through the mountains. Here are some pictures.

The bottom picture is one of the most famous locations - it is a grouping known as the "Three Sisters".

We then had lunch in town, drove to some more lookout sites, took more pictures, and went to the coolest location of the day - Featherdale Wildlife Park, where most of the animals roam free between open cages, allowing them to walk through the park with you, and you to pet them. We only got one hour - we could have spent the whole day there.

We saw wombats (which apparently bite so you cannot touch them), wallabys (smaller kangaroos), kangaroos (and one mamma with a baby joey in the pouch), and so many others! In some of the pictures, we're holding ice cream cones with kangaroo food.

We took a ferry back to Circular Quay (pronounced "key"), walked the 15 blocks back toward our hotel, while it started to lightly rain, and grabbed dinner in a vegan thai restaurant by the hotel. Got back finally around 8pm.

Long, but awesome day. Heads up - this may be our last post for the next week - tomorrow we fly to Cairns for a week of scuba diving and living on a boat. We'll see what happens and keep you updated when possible.