Blue Mountains, Bloody Fog and Doritos

Leaving the Palms was wierd - its like leaving school. You say you'll keep in touch, but how many people would you actively correspond with in a few years?? I did make some very good friends, though, including someone who might be doing England next year and I might meet up with.

Saying goodbye to the homeless people outside (response: "got $2?"), I headed for the Blue Mountains, my next stop, and renowned walking/scenery/backpacker thing to do.

I was wearing my jeans that day due to them being the largest thing to pack; I was greatful that I was wearing them when I arrived in a temperature in which I could see my own breath condensing before me... Checking a digital thermometer on a chemist (every country has these outside chemists except the UK, no??), it was 10.5C. Yay, I was back in Blighty. A cheeky bonus to the cool clime, the large weather system that was due to infect the whole of the South East coast was leaving an inpenetrable fog over all of the town, and most of the mountains, as I discovered the following day.

Walking around Katoomba, the hub of Blue Mountain Activity, I felt like I was in another time warp - people had mullets, perms and backwards baseball caps covering rat-tails on the back of their head. Young women were going around in Granny-made cardigans and I got a feel that no one liked the Gays that infested Sydney.

Being white, and pretty non-descript (is that an oxymoron?), I hobbled to my home for the next few days without being glared at too extensively, and did some shopping for some tucka. I reckon I can still live on around $25 a week for food... a 5 pack of instant noodles is 99c you see and inhumanely produced eggs are 6 for $1.40. Plus the communal food shelf is always worth a pillage - managed to wrangle a beer and half a bottle of wine on top of the spaghetti and tatar sauce.

Making chums with an Israeli, a hair metal dude, his mate and 2 Yanks called Paul and Matt, I set about watching some films on the Hostel's rear-projection TV. 'Moment' is a good watch if you're into a little bit of reverse-structure plot filmage.

The following day I set out with Paul to go walkies. Turns out that his career in Philladelphia (sp?) is to photograph Tama drumkits and Ibanez guitars and the musicians his employer sponsors. Interested me, anyway!

Again the weather was poop - the mist was still lingering with some malevolent force, though we thought we'd just see what we could see. Walking to the first few lookout points over the valley, the most we could see were a few trees 100m below; everywhere else was white. Bummed out, we took to looking for the spiders that created the 100s of webs on the cliff faces to our side, to no success.

We got to see a few quite cool cascades and waterfalls, which seemed to clear their local area, which was cool, reminding me of Jurrasic Park - mist, huge valleys and small rivers and streams, sans man eating beasts.

By the early afternoon, we'd reached a point that apparently looked right down the valley, and the info board prooved this with a gloating picture of what we should have been seeing. Suddenly big holes appeared in the mist; we could see the adjacent vertical cliff faces! Albeit for no longer than 15 seconds at a time. Being amazed by this luck and the beauty of those glimpses, we stayed for a while longer, frantically snapping away at every widening hole in the mist. I deleted all of those earlier pics, because within 15 minutes of being up there, the whole valley had cleared, like we were moses, the mist that river.

What a sight! I'd seen pictures before, but of course they did it no justice. Imagine the grandcanyon, then half it in size and add loads of unspoilt green trees. With the namesake blue haze above (which comes from the Eucalyptus oil vapout that fills the valley), of course.

Snapping away, we trekked a multitude of other kilometers, almost getting caught out taking a Number 1 once by some fast walking old people (we reckoned they ran to catch up with us).

We got to an area where there's a lot of famous 'icons' to see/do. Seeing a challenge, I forced Paul down the Great Steps (all 900 of them in total), which isn't one staircase like some Aztec temple, but a very narrow, windy and high set of normal steps. Passing the '3 Sisters' (wikipedia that or something for the aboriginal story about it and it's origins, if you're interested), 3 great peaks 300m above the valley floor, we trekked for another 2km to the 'steepest railway in the world' - and at 55 degrees to flat, who's going to argue? Going up and seeing the ground infront of you was quite cool, despite it being very easy to slip and probably fall to your death.

Good day in total, but not as good as the cuppa tea when I got back!

That night we played scrabble, having watched Jerry McGuire, which is fairly good as far as chickflicks go. Only Matt the Yank was drinking, for some reason. He got into the dorm an hour after we did, getting into bed and turning off his light. He started to eat the dorito pack that was next to him, which I thought was odd, but not outstounding. When he started to eat handfulls of the crisp with gaps of half a minuite between each and stiffled mumblings filling the gaps, I came to the assumption that this was a case of Sleep Eating! He came up to me in the morning and asked me if he'd seen where the rest of his doritos were...