Jenolan Caves and the Blue Mountains

January in Sydney is very hot so to get away to a cooler area we decided to head to the Blue Mountains.

But before going there we continued on towards the Jenolan Caves, the best known limestone caves in Australia. They are located approx 175km west of Sydney, and the last part of the road is very, very interesting due to the fact that it’s very narrow and there’s a huge drop on the side of the road.

Reaching the Jenolan Caves we first drove through a big cave to reach the car park….funny! At the car park the parking attendant told us that the parking was full and that we had to continue on uphill towards the next one. He did say that we were lucky though since we would reach the car park before him and therefore we wouldn’t have to pay for parking…..a very good start to the day!

When we reached the ticket office we had a look at which caves were having tours that day, there are 10 caves that are open to tourists and you must be accompanied by a tour guide. We chose the Lucas Cave, it’s one of the most popular ones and the ticket seller told us that if we were only seeing one cave, this should be the one.

Reading the description we found out that the Lucas Cave contains 910 steps, is that a lot? We had no idea, but we were going to find out.

The Lucas Cave turned out to be really good, the tour took around 90 min and in that time we got to see the normal stuff that you see in caves such as beautiful stalactites, some of them all white but we also got to the the area known as The Cathedral. This is a large area inside the cave that is more than 50 meters high. This area has been used for weddings and concerts, among others, the Vienna Choir Boys. While we were in the Cathedral the tour guide turned on the music and it was just great, really great to hear it. The acoustics of the place is amazing!

At one point of the tour the guide wanted to show us how dark it is inside a cave without the lights. So she first turned off the internal lights of the cave and then told us to switch off all of our lights, even the small one’s coming from digital cameras. So, most people turned off their equipment but there were a few that still had the cameras on, so the other people were telling them to turn them off. Still there were some people with the cameras on…..what they were trying to capture I don’t know. Finally the last person turned off their camera (even if you are Asian and don’t speak the language, how hard is to figure out what to do?!?) and we were engulfed into darkness. We could not see anything at all!!

It was quite nice to reach the outside again, even though it’s very beautiful in the cave it’s never going to be as nice as the outside. We walked back to our car and headed back towards Katoomba, the touristic centre of the Blue Mountains.

At Echo Point we were able to look out onto the magnificent Three Sisters rock formation. We also had a few photos of us taken in front of them. One thing that’s very typical here in Australia are the flies, in the summer they are everywhere. But it’s not the quantity of them that’s annoying, it’s the fact that they are persistent little buggers. They fly and land on a spot on your face, you smack them (sometimes you can even hear them scream) and then 2 seconds later they are back at the same place…. So standing still while getting a photo taken is a real pain!

We ended our day by sitting down in a café in Katoomba where we had the best cheese cake we’ve ever had….