Thursday, October 19, 2006

My Life In Sydney - Part III

The Blue Mountains is a popular tourist attraction in New South Wales, situated approximately 100 kilometres west of Sydney.

To go there, my collegue and I joined a day tour. It costs about AUD80 including lunch and a ticket to a wildlife zoo. The coach picked us up in the city at about 8am and then we headed to our first destination, Sydney 2000 Olympics Park.

















The Telstra Stadium















the Games Memories Poles - a forest of interactive poles inscribed with the name of every volunteer of the Sydney 2000 Olympics.


There was nothing much to see and we only stopped for 20 minutes.

We then travelled for more than an hour before we reached Katoomba, the most visited town in the Blue Mountains. At the Katoomba Scenic World, we took Scenic Railway, the steepest railway incline in the world into the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area rainforest.
















Photo taken from the Scenic Railway, of course this bald guy is not me.

From there, you can see the Aussie Grand Canyon.
















Aussie Grand Canyon

We had a short boardwalk through the rainforest before going back to the Scenic World by Scenic Skyway.

After lunch at Katoomba, we continued the tour to Echo Point and on the way we stopped by to take a closer look at the cliffs. Echo Point offers a spectacular view of the Three Sisters.















The Three Sisters

From the nearby Echo Point, we took the bushwalking trail which leads to the Three Sisters and down to the valley floor via a set of well-maintained steel steps.















At one of the 3 sisters

After visiting the Blue Mountains we then went to our last destination of the day - the Feather Dale Wildlife Park. At the park, you can find almost all the Australian wildlifes, including kangaroo, koala and wombat etc. Btw, Wombat is a marsupial, so it has a pouch just like kangaroo and koala.















A sleepy koala

The tour ended with a ferry trip back to Sydney. During the tour we got to know two friendly french girls Daphine and Nedege who were travelling around the world. They had left France 10 months ago and visited India, Nepal, Indonesia, Thailand, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore before they came to Australia. They were going to continue their journey to New Zealand and South America. According to their blog, they should be in Panama now.
















Nedege, Partha and me

2 comments:

Selba said...

Did you have a chance to touch the Koala? I was quite surprise when I realized that the furr wasn't soft at all like those koala toys, hahaha...

kaywin said...

Ya, took a photo with one but don't want to show it here...