Hello, hello, hello!
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| The top portion of the cylindrical building in the rear rotates for a 360 degree view! |
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| Wikipedia tells me that there is actually little evidence to support the hoof-position to the manner of the riders' death... |
Okay, sooooo... when did I last post? The zoo! Right. The weather in Sydney was supposed to be pretty gross for the whole of last week, but it wasn't... until about three days ago - and when it rains, it pours! So due in part to the weather and in part to my general dislike of cities (who am I kidding... if it had been sunny I still would have left :p), I got back on the train yesterday and headed back up to Katoomba. Why Katoomba, and not somewhere new? Firstly, there were still plenty of things here that I wanted to see (and after today, I realize that you could easily spend a good week or two exploring up here :p), and secondly, after the less than spectacular hostel I was staying at in Sydney, I wanted to go back someplace I knew was good. :)The Blue Mountains look pretty cool in the rain and cloud and fog - though I would probably have been hugely disappointed if I hadn't seen them in the sunshine, already, because the fog was so dense that you couldn't see the length of a soccer field.
Anyhow, yesterday afternoon found me sitting sleepily on a sofa munching on a Timtam (delightfully tasty cookies ... that feel unhealthy as you eat them, they're that bad haha). I initially dismissed a faint roar in the distance, but it got closer... the roar of a sizable hoard of 8-9 year old school kids. Uh-oh. They came into the hostel... dun dun dun... such began my night of little sleep.
(You will see the pictures have nothing to do with me complaining about noisy children - this is a promise of a non-complaining part of the post to come!)
These kids were OFF THE WALL! For the evening they were sort of secluded in their own lounge area - you could hear them, but whatever - kids will be kids, and they'll go to bed and we will too and life will be lovely! :) Right? Ha. So wrong. Due to the whole fending off a cold thing, I went to bed around 9:30... So did the kids. Or that was the idea. In reality they were running around shrieking and screaming and pounding up and down the halls and laughing raucously and pounding on each others' doors then dashing off giggling; slamming the doors shut just so they can use they're magnetic card to swipe it open again. I'm pretty sure that was their first trip out not with family for most of them. But again, I was going to bed pretty early, so I didn't really care and figured that they would settle down in a half hour or so. 
Not the case. The adults in charge clearly had no control over them, and combined with the screaming laughs etc, it actually sounded like they were doing canon-balls off the top bunk in the room next to ours - it was physically shaking our beds! How can such small people make such a big thump??? This went on until... 11:30 at night. Really???? Miss Bailey would not approve. (For those of you not from home, Miss Bailey was the school teacher at Fort Steele in the 1890s ... and did not put up with any nonsense. If they had been in the hallway instead of their rooms, Miss Bailey may have given them a piece of her mind...) Finally we went and found their teachers downstairs and got them to shut them up... sort of. :p If any of us had dared make half as much noise as they did when we were little, our whole class would have been banned from field trips for the rest of the year at least...  |
| In the "Cathedral" Cave The electricians use these ladders to change the lights... it is very high... Fantastic acoustics - the Vienna Boy's Choir has even sun here :) |
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| oops... |
Long story short, I ended up getting up rather earlier than intended.
None of you will probably believe me when I say that this entry was not actually meant as a complain-about-the-loud-kids session... I was just so appalled that after mentioning it I rambled on for a few paragraphs.
The real substance of this entry? Caves. Ancient, crystalline, fossil-filled caves across the Blue Mountains in an area known as Jenolan.
The entrance to the caves is near an enormous limestone arch - really more of a huge, winding tunnel, and technically a cave in its own right... just one you can drive a bus through. :p The caves were discovered in the early 1800s - the natives in the area knew about them but wouldn't go inside. One of the early convict settlers, though, found them and moved in. Then he started stealing cattle from the nearby farmers (Sydney was a growing city with limited farmland. As such, new sources of food were needed. Several expeditions tried, and failed, to cross the Blue Mountains (vertical cliffs can have that effect) but eventually a few people made it and found a huge valley on the other side perfect for farming. Thus came the farmers!) The farmers didn't really approve of this, so they got together, called the police, and tracked the thief back to his cave-lair. After hauling him back to the nearest town with a courthouse for sentencing, a few of the people who had tracked him down headed back to the caves to explore. And what they found was an immense cave system, mostly interconnected, and all filled with crystal (real crystal, not just the shiny, sparkly stuff. Lots of it is brown and opaque :p - but there was white and sparkly stuff, too haha). |
| 18 metres down to the water, which is 5 metres deep! |
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| This was the lighting-scheme in the 1970s ... I never would have guessed :p |
Ladies would go on these tours, too, in their full length skirts - and one of the original methods of descent involved grabbing a potato sack, sitting on it, biting your candle holder in your teeth, and sliding down a 30 metre long chute of rock until you the big rock at the bottom... at which point you needed to turn right, because left led off a rather long drop. Then they'd have to climb back up. This is why I mentioned the skirts. :p There are stairs now! ;) |
| When this one lit up, it was like staring at the mouth of a huge jack-o-lantern |
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| Platypus Pool! The colour comes from crystal either dissolved or suspended in the water, I haven't checked which... |
From tiny, bizarre shapes growing sideways out of the walls, to tangled webs made of stone - the longer you looked, the more you saw! There were even huge waterfalls, except formed over millions of years and solid rock! Which must weigh a huge amount, but since the water drained out of the caves, none have broken under their own weight. If you could somehow speed up and control the deposition process in the formation of the crystal, it would be cool to see if you could grow/build structures that way - because that would be ridiculously awesome looking and apparently relatively strong.  |
| An old bolt-ladder |
Apparently these caves are one of the safest places to be during an earthquake. The limestone they're eroded out of absorbs all the movement - there is no evidence of anything having ever broken due to shaking inside the caves; all the broken stalactites on the cave floors have grown into the floor, i.e. are millions of years old and left over from when water was still pulling out clumps of sandstone.
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| a bit of scale... it is wider than I am tall, and its hanging from the ceiling... |
On a completely different note, the term for a resident of Seattle is a Seattlite, which sounds amusingly similar to a satellite.
More cave pictures up on Flickr!
Tomorrow, back on the train to Sydney for my last (???) night! (On the ground, at least haha - I guess technically there will be a night on the plane. Though I think I skip night and go from day to day over the international date line. But that is a minor detail. I will almost inevitably be sleeping on the plane, so in my brain, its night :p ).
This trip has flown by... I'll do at least one more post before I get home, though.
For now, I'm going to give going to bed early another shot, since the horde of children departed this morning (after disposing of their sheets and an alarming series of non-linen materials barely short of classmates down the laundry shoot).
- Marysa
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