The heat had gone during the night and it was refreshingly cool by 7am when I got up. I made up some cereal for breakfast - corn flakes mixed with cocoa pops. I also had enough time to make some rolls for lunchand then headed to the Glasgow Arms Hotel where I was to be for the pickup for the tour.
When I was picked up by Jason, the tour guide, he asked where I was from, and I proudly stated Scotland, and the jokes were made that he should have been able to work it out based on the pick up point.
There were 20 people in total on the tour, which was a nice number, as we could get to know each other throughout the day.
We drove out of Sydney along Parramatta Road, making me think of Steven's concept of Paramatter, a substance that surrounds objects and hides them from us so we can't find it until we make ourselves look stupid. The name Parramatta should have been Urramatta, which ranslates as Eel Creek.
Our first stop was by the Nepean River, where we were given juice and cookies and Jason sorted out payments due and ticket options for the Scenic View park (an optional extra).
The first stop off was the Scenic View park, which entailed a cable car ride over a steep canyon, looking across to a rock feature known as the 3 sisters.
The story about their formation is that a father went hunting, and told his daughters to stay at the top of the canyon and not move or make a noise lest they disturb the Bunyip, one of the creators of the land.
The daughters got bored though and one sent a rock crashing down in to the valley, which of course woke the Bunyip up.
It was about to reach the daughters, when the father, who had a magic bone, used it to turn the daughters in to stone so that they could not be found. This angered the Bunyip further, and the father turned himself in to a Lyre Bird, so that he could not be found. When he did this, he dropped the magic bone, and then hid in a cave until the Bunyip gave up looking for the humans.
To this day he now is searching for the magic bone as the Lyre Bird, so that he can turn everyone back, and will continue searching the valley until it is found.
I took the gondola down to the rain forest area for a jungle walk, where I bumped in to Mark, who was sat beside me on the bus. We walked around on the medium length walk, and we enjoyed the forest and finding old coal carts and discovering that they were made in Leipzig.
We didn't see very much wildlife in the area, unless you can classify the youths running around screaming (thus probably scaring the rest away!), but it was informative none the less.
We took the train back up to the top of the slope, which was billed as one of the steepest in the world. At the top we were a little too early yet for getting back on the bus, so wandered around the gift shop, which was horrendously over priced. An example of this was the fact they were selling bottles of the blue mountains air for $18.80 a bottle!
We set off in the bus for the lunch stop, until someone noticed that we were missing a passenger, and we had to turn back to pick them up.
After that excitement, we made it to Leura for lunch, where I ordered a Kangaroo pie from 'The Bakehouse on Wentworth', despite having a packed lunch with me. It was pretty delicious, like very rich venison!I located a nice park to sit and eat the lunch, though I'm not sure where everyone else stayed.
After lunch, we headed towards Wentworth falls, where we saw a sulphur crested cockatoo fly by, and were given lots of information about the local plantlife by Jason.
One particular plant he described was the tea tree, which has properties such that if you burn the leaves on a fire, the resulting smoke helps with your aches and pains, though he re-told a story about how he had tried it when camping with his wife, and she was still there after the smoke cleared, so it didn't work.
On the way back from the view point overlooking the falls, we spotted a crimson rosella. It was just sitting in the trees enjoying taking the nectar from the flowers surrounding it.
We then headed on to Lincoln Rock, named after the mountaineer Lincoln Hall, who was left for dead after reaching the summit of Everest, only to be found the next day alive and well, changing his shirt, with no equipment, 8600m above sea level. He died from Mesothelioma a few years later. The rock we were visitting used to be named Flat Rock, but his widow campaigned to get it changed to honour her late husband, and given his achievements and contributions towards mountaineering, it was agreed.
The last blue mountains item we went to see was some petro engravings of a kangaroo, made by aboriginal Australians in the last century.
The last part of our tour over all took us through Olympic Park in Sydney, where we hopped on a boat that took us to Circular Harbour, where the Sydney Opera House is, and then back to Darling Harbour, close to where my hostel was.
I sat by the quayside and enjoyed my lunch rolls for dinner, and lcocked that the red beaked seagulls were also interested in the rolls. They were fended off for the most part by me, but then they got sneaky, and one distracted me by edging closer and closer, while another blind sided me and took a bite out of the roll from behind my right shoulder!
I messaged Stephen, the marathon guy, to see if he still fancied meeting, and we agreed on a walk around the harbourside. We caught up and talked about travel plans and goals, and our experiences so far. It was good to catch up and meet with someone who we had already met with. His next destination was Thailand, and he has been training each day in Sydney to keep fit for the event.
When I got back to the hostel, I met new room mates Karoline & Juli from Norway. They had been studying at the Gold Coast for 2 months, and were now heading to New Zealand for the next holiday, but staying a few days in Sydney.
I got a reply back from Di who advised what dates things were happening, so managed to arrange that we would meet on the 6th or so of January. This allowed me to work out how to space out the rest of the stay, ready to go to the information center to book it in the morning.
My uncle in the meantime had commented on a Facebook post I had made, regarding the opera house and that I should go to an event in it - so I looked up something to go to and discovered that Copellia was showing, performed by the Australian Ballet company - that seemed like a no brainer to me, so I bought a ticket for that, then retired to bed.