Song: "Landslide" by Fleetwood Mac (no cover versions accepted)
March 29th
Today, Hilde and I decided that we would go on our first bushwalk through the university's bushwalking club. What is bushwalking you ask? Well maybe I should tell you what the bush is.
The Bush, according to Wikipedia's definition: A term that describes any wooded area, generally where eucalypts are present. Honestly, I'm not sure what eucalypts look like, but I can normally smell them.
So let's do some song translation:
Kookaburra sits in the old gum tree, (Awesome bird (see zoo entry) sits in eucalyptus tree)
Merry, merry king of the bush is he, (King of the forest)
Laugh, Kookaburra, Laugh, Kookaburra, (Laugh, awesome bird, laugh)
Gay your life must be. (Your life is happy.)
Congratulations! You now know some of the meaning behind an Australian song for kids.
Anyway, to go on the bushwalk we had to be at the bus station by the train at 7:30am. After last night's adventures, this was difficult, but we made it.
We met our trip leader, Matt, who is insane. In a good way though, I guess. We made it to Katoomba, which is the train stop closest to the Three Sisters section of the Blue Mountains where we were going to be walking. We hopped on a bus and went to Scenic World. I enjoyed this title.
Once we got there, we checked when the last railway from the bottom of the hills was so we wouldn't miss it and have to climb all the stairs. This was very useful information. For the first part of the walk, I was really confused. I thought we would be bushwalking, like in the bush. We were hiking up a road. We even stopped at the scenic lookouts along the road.
The Blue Mountains look blue if you're far enough away from them.
(I think this is a eucalyptus tree.)
I took much better pictures of the Three Sisters (a rock formation with an aboriginal history) later so I'll just put those up later. One of the lookout points was called Hilda's Point. Hilde was excited about this. Here's Hilde on the lookout at Hilda's point. (Pronounced the same, but Hilda is the more German spelling.)
We finally made it to the Golden Stairs, which actually was in the bush. Yay!
We went to all the places on this sign. It was quite a hike.
Hilde walking in front of me:
The Golden Stairs were a lot longer than this (all the way down the mountain) but here's a section:
Going down.
Big cliffs, tiny Hilde.
Giant termite mound
After the Golden Staircase we made our way to the Ruined Castle climb. It was crazy steep.
Here's the hole we climbed through to get to the top. I did not think I would make it, but I did.
This part of the trip was totally worth it. It also was where we ate lunch where I had the best sandwich of my life, only because I had worked so hard to get it. I went to the top of the "castle," which the Germans noted was definitely not a real castle, and found this little guy on the way. I think this lizard was about 4 inches long.
This bird also stared at me while I walked up.
The view from the top was phenomenal.
Right below the tallest point, sneaker shot:
I switched rocks halfway.
By the time I got to the second rock, I was really tired. I actually took a little nap on the rock.
We finally dismounted from the castle and made our way to the foot of the golden staircase again and then back down a path we hadn't traveled before through the Landslide area. Apparently, there had been a landslide which hit the mountains in this area awhile back throwing the rocks at the bottom into a configuration that was hard to walk through. The cliffs were gorgeous. I'm beginning to think I have a thing for cliffs.
From below the cliffs we could also see where we had walked earlier in the day at Ruined Castle. Yeah, wayyyyyy over there in the middle of the right hand side. I felt pretty proud of myself.
Here's a picture of Matt (far right) our fearless trip leader (not tour guide, as he would mention many times). Matt liked to tell us stories of things that aren't real like
Drop Bears, a terrible creature that looks just like a koala but jumps down from trees and kills people. It is fictional, very very fictional and despite us knowing that, it did not stop Matt from retelling us of the perils of any encounter with a drop bear. Matt also knew a lot about D.C. from playing the video game Fallout 3. Like, he knew the entire layout of the National Mall essentially. This was eerie, but it was fun to test my memory of the city against his Fallout 3 knowledge. I missed D.C. a lot then.
Also, the Blue Mountains have a lot of coal in them but it can't be dug up any longer because it's a National Park. There was some coal in our trail.
Ok, back to the Three Sisters. My first pictures were too sunny and didn't turn out well. I think this one's my favorite:
We luckily did not miss the last railway up to the top, and it was totally worth the $10 to ride up the hill instead of having to climb the stairs. Matt wouldn't stop telling us that this was the steepest railway in the world. He wasn't joking.
Don't leave your infants loose, people.
Hilde on the rail:
It was incredibly steep.
When we finally left scenic world, we ended up missing the train back to Sydney by about 5 minutes, so we had to wait another hour. Hilde and I decided to go get some food. We went to a little Greek place and had tzatziki and spanakopita. Delicious.
We boarded the train with the rest of the crew in Katoomba. I liked their signs.
Why this sign is in feet instead of meters, I may never know.
We caught the train and rode for 2 hours or so and through a series of misguided suggestions, made it home to Macquarie. Essentially, Matt told us to catch a bus in Paramatta and it would take us to the mall near campus. We missed the last bus so we had to get back on the train and get to campus that way. Then when we got to Epping station, we missed the last train to campus, and luckily, oh so luckily, we caught a bus from Epping back to uni.
We initially thought the bus wasn't in service, but we were hopeful it would turn into the bus we wanted. The driver was laughing a little at us as he turned the sign on.
Public transportation home was exhausting, especially considering we were already incredibly exhausted, but we made it home, and I went straight to sleep, despite having a lab report due the next day.
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