Day 3 of the Great Walkabout - Blue Mountains & Featherdale Wildlife Park

Well, for starters, having learn our lessons in the 2nd day of the Great walkabout, we woke up really early on the 3rd day and waited in front of Gemini Hotel like 10 minutes before the scheduled 6.45am pick-up time. And this time round, we managed to catch the pick-up coach, and it went round and round the city to pick up other passengers as well... After that we alighted at the Star City bus terminal to transfer to a coach that is setting out for the Blue Mountains. Yupe...Blue Mountains here we come!

And so we travelled westwards about 2 hours to a town, Leura, where we were allowed to take coffee breaks/snacks for about half an hour. Well, Leura did look like a sleepy deserted town, but then again we might just be seeing only one side of it. Anyway, there is a candy & choc shop in the Leura strand arcade, which is full of candies and chocolate! LOL... ok ok, of course it has to be full of candies and choc if it is a candy & choc shop huh!? LOL... Bought a packet of candy 'french fries' from the store, together with some chocolates as well... yum yum... Will definitely go back to the store again if I ever go to blue mountain again.

Now comes the part that really made us, as well as the rest of the passengers bewildered with anguish. After leaving Leura and travelled for another 10 minutes we reached the Scenic World, Blue Mountain, and that was where we were supposed to tour the Mountain and had our lunch! For some of the passengers, they just had their snacks/tea 10 minutes ago, and now they have to eat lunch! How could they fill so many food in their stomach? The driver should have known better, and told us that the Scenic World was like 10 minutes drive away and that we'll be having our lunch there. In this way, the passengers wouldn't eat so much during the break, and thus be able to truly enjoy their luncheon by the Blue Mountains. What was the driver even thinking?!

And so there we were in Scenic World. I had originally wanted to take all the 3 rides in the Scenic World to see the Blue Mountains, the skyway, cableway, and the railway. But, Limin was afraid that the queue would be long, and we wouldn't be back to the coach in time and so I had to give up the skyway, which I really wanna to be in! Argh... I'm gonna try the Skyway in future, that is if I ever go back to Blue Mountains.. =( But I must say, the railway is so cool!! It is on an extremely steep slope (in fact the steepest in the world according to the Scenic World) which made the ride seems so roller coaster-ish! Alas the ride only lasted about a minute, and by the time I grab hold tightly to my free-falling bags and overcome the initial shock of having free-falling kinda feeling from the ride, the ride came to a stop... argh... I guess this is something which I will definitely try again the next time round!

So, the Blue Mountains and the Three Sisters. Basically these are the two main attractions - that the mountain ranges has a bluish hue to it, and three sharp peaks on one of the mountains respectively. Well, I personally thought that there is no big deal about the mountain and the three sisters after seeing it from the Scenic World. I mean, no matter how you look, it's just those three peaks. The first minute of your view would be the same as the what you would see, say ten minutes later. So I felt pretty bored of looking at the three sisters after a while..

But the scenic walkway is much more interesting, at least to me. I get to see the lush flora that grows on the mountain, and is quite an eye-opener. For instance, some of the trees have been hit by lightnings before, and one can observed that part of their bark/truck have turned into charcoal. And amazingly, these trees are still surviving despite the lightning strike! In another example, there are these two trees that grows very close to each other since juvenile. Therefore, their trucks are intertwined, and the portion of the bark/truck that touches each other become fused as they grow larger. This is so cool! Never know that such stuffs could happen. And so as you would have gathered by now, I enjoyed the scenic walk much better than the Three Sisters. =)

So, after Blue mountains, our next stop was Govett's Leap. Well, if I'm not wrong, legend has it that this guy called Govett leap over the gorge while on his horse, as he was pursue by the authorities for stolen some stuffs. Well.. who in the world would survive that fall? Well either the legend is fake, or the person died of a horrible death. But I must say that the scenery is amazing.

And finally, we visited the Featherdale Wildlife Park to mark the end of our trip for the day. The wildlife park was great - get to see lots of animals such as kangaroos and wallabies up close, and even get to feed them and pet them too! And of course, the famous kookaburra! And oh man, are those birds big!! Every time I see a picture of them on the web etc I would have thought that there are prolly like the size of a small crow, but I was wrong!! And it even amazes me to see a kookaburra that is albino as well! In fact, not only are the kookaburra albino, there are albino wallabies and peacock as well. Well, I think what they lack is an albino koala bear... LOL...=D Overall, time at the wildlife park was quite enjoyable, though it was pretty rush as we were given only an hour to browse through the park. Would have been much better if we are given at least half an hour more.

Oh well, that's how tours are. You get to see lotsa of attractions in a day, but you don't get to spend quality time in each attractions. And so, these concludes the day 3 of the Great Walkabout!

PS: The koala bears are so smelly!! Yuck!