Do you like to walk? A lot? I don't mean do you love to walk but do you like to walk far? If you do, the tour we took was for you. We were picked up at 7:00 in the morning in front of our hotel and there were only 5 of us so Rod, our guide (Nice Aussie name, eh?) decided he had enough time to take us to some more out of the way places he knew. Some of the roads were so bad I thought the van would break an axle. The views were spectacular. The Blue Mountains are not really mountains as you might think of them, but a number of ridges which have had the center or middle washed out by erosion. They get their name from the blue mist which is eucalyptus oil, secreted by the trees, mixed with mist that rises on the air currents.
We had beef pie for lunch (very delicious) which you eat by holding it in your hands, but we sat on the high point of a ridge, gazing out over the edge of a cliff at an unbelievable panorama. I said to Rod, "This beats eating lunch in an office," to which he replied, "This is my office."
We didn't see any koalas or kangaroos here. Apparently, the soil is too poor to provide enough nutrients in the eucalyptus leaves to sustain many koalas and it's not the best type of terrain for kangaroos. What we did see were quite a few cockatoos. The babies are dark so they can more easily hide from predators, but they really squawk when they get bigger to urge their mothers to bring them food. Mature cockatoos, as you know, are white.
We spent the entire day trekking through the Blue Mountains, walked about 8 or 9 miles, but it was all worthwhile.
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