Blue Mountain Blues

 When we first tried to book a rental car on our arrival in Sydney, all the main rental companies refused to rent cars that we could take on the ferry to Tasmania—for which we had booked in advance.  Only one—TravelWheels, which mainly rents campers—was willing to rent us a vehicle we could take to Tasmania on the ferry—a large station wagon. We picked up the car—a Ford Falcon—on Saturday January 8 at about 9.30 am at a remote location near the Sydney airport that even the taxi driver found difficulty in finding. The office was staffed by a charming young girl from Hungary and a young lad from Eastern Europe with earrings, tattoos, and an accent that was difficult to follow. However, I did get from him instructions as to how to cope if the car overheated: he showed me how to check the oil level and advised me to do so from time to time: and he explained some of the subtler points of Ford engineering. I noted that the car had 285,000 or so kilometers on the clock.

         Joan, meanwhile, was being logged in on the Internet to the New South Wales Motorway system so that tolls (they do not have cash lanes) could be debited to her credit card under the “E-Pass” program—they photograph the cars as they go through.

         And the final send-off was a dire warning (a prohibition, actually) DO NOT DRIVE AT NIGHT. Puzzled, we asked why. “Kangaroos” was the answer. “You can easily write off a car if you hit a kangaroo.”

Oh, and there was the suggestion we should wash the car before we brought it back, which prompted us to quote the famous economic dictum—“nobody ever washes a rented car.” Apparently they wanted you to do it so they could see better if you had dented or scratched the ancient vehicle. They had some justification: on a previous vacation in France, we successfully smeared mud over a rather large scratch in a rented car and escaped undetected.

         The car had virtually no gas in the tank and the instructions to find the nearest gas station were incorrect: so we waltzed around from free-way to motorway to thru-way and through tunnels, garnering loud hooting from cars as I tried to sort out by U-turns where we needed to go.

         But eventually all was sorted out, gas in the tank, and we drove up into the Blue Mountains to our “Eco” lodge, where we had a two-story cabin complete with pot-bellied stove and kitchen facilities; the only ‘eco’ feature was a loo that required no flushing and created compost.  Although there was no apparent environmental connection, we were warned that we’d be charged $25 if we didn’t wash our dishes before departing.

         As we will want to turn this blog into a book—which we did last year with our New Zealand trip—we do need to put in a few travelogue pictures. On the afternoon we arrived, we walked to Bridal Veil Falls and viewed the great canyon of the Grose River Valley—a Grand Canyon filled with rain forest—from Govett’s Leap.  A documentary suggested that this is what Australia might have looked like 60 million years ago.

We also encountered our first snake—a BROWNIE, one of the 23 most venomous snakes in the world. He was slithering around on a sunny rock at a viewpoint called Evans Lookout, a short walk from our cabin. The tourists were giving him a very wide berth. We did too: “they’re awful fast them brownies,” said one Australian lady, “I don’t like’em.”

         On the next day, the rains came. They did not spoil the daily bird feeding at the lodge, when a whole gaggle of different parrots assembled to be fed at 8.30 am sharp. It was a major event: they ate sunflower eeds from our hands, and they sat on my hat and shoulder. Sometimes I had two perched on the same hand. Unfortunately, we did not have our camera, and so photos had to wait until the next day, when it was pouring with rain. 

On our first day it was just misty and foggy—no possibility of seeing the couple of sights that get in all the travel books. So we skulked around in the rain and fog, visiting Katoomba, a town that is the centre of the Blue Mountains tourist trade, and Leura, a smaller place that gets described as ‘charming’, which did have some good art galleries and craft shops.

         And then suddenly there were patches of blue in the sky, and for an hour or so it was possible to return to Katoomba. With a jostling crowd of tourists descending in the sun to Echo Point, digital cameras busily clicking as they fought for a place to take a photo of—what else?—the Three Sisters which, aoording to legend, were turned into stone by their father to prevent them making ill-advised marriages, and then he went off and died and so the recipe for bringing them back to life was lost. So forgive us the one iconic, guide-book photo.

         And through the night it rained and rained and rained and rained, rattling on the corrugated metal roof of the cabin. With the forecast suggesting it would continue all day we packed up, attended the bird-feeding in pouring rain that clearly discouraged a good turnout by the demoralized parrots, and left the Blue Mountains to head for Canberra, with one diversion along the way at Fitzroy Falls, located in Morton National Park in the Southern Highlights, which poured off the plateau into a gorge some 600 metres below.

Will the rain ever stop?