view from Hassans Walls
While visiting with our daughter and her and family in Australia one day a couple of the extended family took us out for the day while Sheri’s immediate family were all at work or school. We went up to the Blue Mountains, but to places locals know and tourists don’t always go. Not that the touristy places are bad because they are great, but it’s nice to see some lesser known and uncrowded places too. We’ve already seen main tourist attractions like Katoomba with Scenic World and the Three Sisters as well as Jenolan Caves, which are the major tourist attractions there. Not to mention a previous visit to another way out of the way spot at Glowworm Tunnel.
Blue Mountains Botanical Garden
We set off up the mountain toward Lithgow on back roads to avoid traffic on the highway. One hill is called Bell Bird Hill, or at least that’s what the locals call it because of the birds that live there who make a sound like the ringing of a bell. We have heard them before, but none were talking this visit.
view from a terrace at the visitor’s center cafe at Blue Mountains Botanical Garden
We made a stop at a lookout point where we could see all the way to Sydney. Smoke in the distance came from a small bush fire in the grass at Londonderry, which had burned about 65 hectacres. It is near Penrith, but not in the area of it where we have gone. The previous day’s record heat of about 100 degrees F and high winds left dozens of small bush fires burning around the state with about 10 still going the next day. Besides the distant fire, the other bad thing at that lookout was all the garbage people had thrown over the railing even though there were garbage cans at each end of the small viewpoint. I don’t know what is wrong with people that think they need to throw their garbage everywhere, but it certainly happens in most areas of the world.
shade canopy tree
We made a short stop at Blue Mountains Botanical Garden at Mt. Tomah, which would be a nice place to spend more time and explore. It has quite a lot of gardens and a visitor’s center with a little gift shop with some interesting merchandise and a little café. The terrace out back of the café has a view looking down the mountain and across a valley to more mountains. The shade roof of that terrace is made from branches of live trees growing up from the sides of the terrace and spreading out through a structure above.
echidna
We took some country lanes and dirt roads out to where we had seen some emus in the wild on a previous visit, but didn’t spot any emus this time. We did see a couple camels in a cow pasture, but they were too far from the road for photos. On a little dirt road we saw an echidna running along the side of the road and stopped to take some photos of it. It did not want anyone to see its face and kept that hidden other than too brief of a glimpse to get a photo, but we did at least get some echidna pictures. Apparently it is rare to spot one in the wild so getting to see that was a real treat.
main walkway at Hassans Walls
We made a view stop at Hassans Wall, which has a little picnic shelter and some viewpoints. It is the highest lookout in the region. The main walkway is a fully fenced paved walkway out to a viewpoint with a picnic table and views overlooking the surrounding area.
where the main pathway used to go out farther
From there you can see a fence where it used to go out farther, but they have made it more contained in order to keep people from jumping off to commit suicide which was a problem in the past, though if somebody really wanted to climb over it they could. From that path you can also see a fence by a smaller less obvious path that isn’t as noticeable from the parking lot as the main one.
parallel paths on the small trail
The smaller less obvious path is a natural trail that looks like it was partly made from water rushing over stone. Part of it has couple of little parallel paths that are both stone and dirt with sort of natural stairsteps in some of the stone. They join together and lead out to a rocky prominence with a little hole in it.
hole in a big rock
If you go through the little hole you end up in a small cave with a big view. It has a fence across the view side which would otherwise be a direct opening to a very long way down for anyone who took one step too many. The inside of the little cave had a lot of graffiti. People have no respect for nature.
coming into the cave
From inside the cave you can see the paved pathway if you look off to one side.
view of the main pathway from the cave
We had lunch at a little Chinese café in Lithgow. It’s a nice clean town now, but in the past it was a coal mining and railroad town choking in coal smoke. The oldest houses are small, but there are bigger newer ones.
view from the cave
Other interesting things near Lithgow include the zigzag railway, once a mining track, but now a tourist attraction with steam trains, Blast Furnace Park which was once a steel production facility, and Black Fellows Hands Reserve which has aboriginal rock art believed to be thousands of years old. Lithgow also has some museums. Lithgow is the last stop for Sydney’s electric passenger trains Blue Mountain line. There are trains that go farther, but not the electric trains that serve Sydney and its suburbs.
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