Yesterday, Ted and I had a 9-hour excursion on shore. We traveled almost two hours west of Sydney to the Blue Mountains. The mountains got their name because there are many eucalyptus trees in the forests. The trees produce so much moisture through transpiration that a mist forms over the rainforests. The result looks a lot like the Great Smoky Mountains in the U.S. When the sun hits the mist, it reflects a blue color; thus, the Blue Mountains. We saw shrouded mountains, but not because of the blue mist. Large wildfires are burning west of Sydney and the air was filled with smoke. Sometimes we could even smell the wood burning.

We drove from sea level (Sydney) to about 3,500 feet in elevation and saw beautiful mountain scenery. Our destination point for the morning was Scenic World–a privately-owned operation set in the Blue Mountains. My closest analogy would be licenses for the private tour boats, etc. that take visitors through the Wisconsin Dells, which is not private land.

Scenic World begins with a Scenic Skyway tram taking us to the Scenic World Top Station. My limited creative juices urged me to take a picture of the incoming tram through a knothole.

We had free time to spend at the top of the mountain and enjoyed many pretty views. The most famous is the Three Sisters.

The sisters’ father was a witch doctor of the aboriginal Katoomba tribe. (There were over 200 aboriginal tribes in Australia.) The girls fell in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, but tribal law forbade them to marry. The brothers didn’t want to accept this law, so they decided to use force to capture the sisters, causing a major tribal battle. The sisters’ lives were endangered, so a witch doctor turned them to stone to protect them from harm. He intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, but he was killed. Since only he could reverse the spell, the sisters remain in a magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle. There are other versions of the story, but they basically follow the same pattern–sisters turned to stone by witchcraft and destined to remain in stone because the one who cast the spell died before he could reverse it. The Three Sisters are the group of three rock formations in the center of the picture below.

Proof that Ted and I were here.

Here are some of the pretty views from the mountaintop. Remember: that’s not mist; it’s wildfire smoke.

The mountain area in which Scenic World is located was once a rich coal mining field. To reach our next destination in Scenic World–the rainforest–we took a modernized version of a mine car called the Scenic Railway (several connected modern mine cars) to the bottom of the mountain. The incline down the mountain was at 52 degrees. Look at the seats in the picture of the original mine car; then look at the people in the front seat of the modern car. The position of the seats in both cars is the same. When we got into the car, we felt like we were reclining (we were!), but going down the hill, we were sitting upright because of the steep drop.

After arriving safely at the bottom of the mountain, we followed the Scenic Walkway through a rainforest. Ted and I have already visited two rainforests in much greater depth than this, so I’m only including an interesting rock formation we saw that reminded both of us of the Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire. It might even look a little bit like Abraham Lincoln. (The NH old man lost his nose a number of years ago.)

When it was time to return to our starting point to drive to lunch, we took the Scenic Cableway back to the mountaintop. In case you didn’t notice, there’s a running theme in the park’s name and its forms of transport.

We had a delicious lunch at a hotel in Leura, a small mountain town. While we were eating, we noticed that the smoke outdoors became much denser and even reached a point at which we could see no farther than the hotel patio outside the dining room windows. The waitress told us the firefighters were doing a back burn, trying to stop a nearby wildfire.

Driving east back to Sydney, the smoke density decreased, although Sydney’s skies are brown and the sunsets feature a bright red ball of sun in a hazy sky. We passed the park in which Sydney hosted the 2000 Olympic Games. It was easy to find the park from the highway because it’s marked with a huge athlete that towers over the landscape.

It was an interesting day, but after nine hours, it was good to come “home” to our ship.