During our visit to Sydney, we took a day tour to the Blue Mountains National Park, which begins at the western edge of Sydney. It’s an expansive mountain range with surrounding canyons that are majestic and beautiful. Its vast scale invites comparisons to the Grand Canyon. While the Grand Canyon is larger and deeper, the Blue Mountains are similarly awe-inspiring.
Terpenoids emitted in large quantities by the abundant eucalyptus trees in the Blue Mountains cause the blue haze for which the mountains are named.
On the way to the Blue Mountains, we stopped at the Featherdale Wildlife Park. It’s unique among zoos in that it only houses animals that are native to Australia. And there are plenty of them! Featherdale was particularly enjoyable because visitors could get much closer to the animals and, in some cases, feed them.
When we visited Rottnest Island, just off the coast of Perth, we were introduced to quokkas. These small, adorable animals are marsupials, like kangaroos. Just like on Rottnest, they fearlessly scampered among the people, hoping for food. (Sound is not necessary for any of the videos in this post.)
We were able to get some good close-up views of koalas.
And of course, there were kangaroos, including some young ones.
There was one albino kangaroo.
These are dingos. The caregivers in the picture spent time petting and feeding the dingos, which they seemed to enjoy, but apparently dingos are more independent and don’t form the kind of loving, devoted bond with humans that dogs do.
When we visited Oamaru, New Zealand, we enjoyed watching blue penguins coming ashore at night to sleep. We were happy to find blue penguins at Featherdale, where we could get a closer view.
Blue penguins are the smallest breed of penguin, and they are found only in New Zealand and southeastern Australia.
We didn’t note the names of the birds in the following pictures, but they are representative of many of the beautiful species on hand.
After about an hour at Featherdale, we ate lunch in a cute town named Leura, one of several villages near or inside the park.
When we arrived at the park, we visited an enterprise called Scenic World, which offered a gondola ride across a valley, a steep cable car that took us down to the canyon floor, and an even steeper railway that hauled us back to the top. Here’s the gondola we rode.
This video was taken during the gondola ride.
This is the cable car that transported us to the canyon floor.
The canyon had a boardwalk that allowed us to walk among the trees in the rainforest and catch occasional views of the mountains surrounding us.
This is the railway that transported people up and down from the top. We rode it up, so we were ascending backwards. Note that just beyond the loading platform, the track angles steeply upward. Riders can adjust the angle at which the seat reclines, but we were still leaning onto the handrails and looking at the scenery through the glass roof during our quick ascent.
The Three Sisters is perhaps the most famous landmark in Blue Mountains National Park.
The view from Echo Point Lookout.
Our tour bus drove us most of the way back to Sydney, but dropped everyone off at a dock near the site of the 2000 Olympics, where we boarded a ship that would take us the rest of the way into Sydney Harbour. It was a beautiful way to approach downtown Sydney and end our day.
Visit this post to see photos from the rest of our time in Sydney.