A Trip to Australia and New Zealand
Katoomba & The Blue Mountains
The third day in Australia we decided to leave sweltering Sydney and go up into the Blue Mountains for a couple of days. We left half of our luggage at our hotel and headed out with what we thought we might need for our excursion. We caught the city train in the neighborhood station, transferred to the Blue Mountain Line in the Central station, and then, because of a track outage, transferred again to a bus before arriving in Katoomba a couple of hours later. (The rain of the century had developed because of a hurricane to the north and the rail track had washed out.) We were registered in the Carrington,
a grand old nineteenth century hotel not far from the train station, and walked to it easily. After taking a quick walk around town we purchased two tickets on a local bus line that serviced all of the main tourist sites in the Katoomba/Leura area. From a tourist's point of view, the weather was definitely cooler than Sydney, but it was also rather dismal and it did not change during the entire time that we were in town. (We also discovered that we should have brought another layer or two in the way of clothing.)
Because of the foul weather, we literally saw very little of the countryside so we contented ourselves with some wandering in the shops and a couple of tasty "Devon Cream Teas" followed by some superb Australian beer during the day. The first evening we ate excellent Australian beef and discovered some delightful Australian wine in our hotel and the second evening had an adequate pizza in a nearby bistro style restaurant. Assuming that we are able to get back to Australia at some point in the future we will have to try to see the Blue Mountains again. This time, however, the mountain views were pretty much a bust - we did, however, thoroughly enjoy the charming, stodgy, tattered, creakingly classy, and very elderly Carrington Hotel. (If anyone wants the Carrington experience during your visit to the Blue Mountains, our advice, unfortunately, is that you should plan your Australian trip sooner rather than later. As the desk clerk said when we told him of the third leak that had developed overnight in our room - "yes, the poor old dear is crumbling.")
