After several months of lockdown, we finally can leave Greater Sydney. Like a horse before the race, Austin has been raring to go for weeks. So we took the first opportunity to get away. First stop was the caravan park just down the road from us for a necessary clean, pack and check. Then off we were to the Blue Mountains.

In the meantime huge rain clouds had swept in from the West and we had to imagine the “blue" and the “mountains" behind thick fog banks and spaghetti rain. This is the year of the El Niña here and we have to count with more of this kind of weather. The temperature in Sydney had been 24℃, but at 1017m elevation in Katoomba it was only 14℃ at lunchtime. Grabbing my raincoat from

 the back of the car which had laid there unused for the last 18 months it more or less crumbled into white flakes. So after acing our caravan parking manoeuvre at the Katoomba Falls Tourist Park, the first port of call was the Mac Outdoor shop for a new rain jacket (this is going to be an expensive holiday!). By then it was time for a nanna- nap.

Day two and the rain had increased over night. This didn’t deter us from the pre-booked Scenic World experience. The famous “steepest train ride” plunged us at 52° into the Jamieson Valley. Now we were below the fog and could enjoy the beautiful rainforest walk haunted by plastic dinosaurs and their unhatched eggs. The scenic railway was originally a small part of a much larger rail system built in the 19th century to transport coal and shale mined in the mountains. The mine operated intermittently until it closed permanently in 1945.

A very smooth ride on the Cablecar took us back up into the fog while the humorous conductor explained what we could have been seeing on the way up. 

From there we glided in the so-called Skyway gondola between clifftops high above the valley to the fantastic Katoomba Waterfalls which must have been somewhere behind the clouds. Our plan: to get up early tomorrow morning, when an easing of rain is promised, and walk to one of the falls look-outs.

To our surprise, we woke up to a semi-blue sky. We took advantage of the break in the weather and went for an early morning stroll along the Katoomba Falls walk. The many look-outs enabled us to view what we missed out on yesterday: the Witches Leap, a smaller fall, the larger Katoomba Falls, aswell as the imposing rock faces, the Three Sisters and the solitary Orphan Rock.