Helen and Randall on the road

On the way back we called in for lunch with Julie’s family in Springwood:

Bushwalk before lunch out the back of their house.

Family snaps!

Back in Sydney, while Randall was recovering from the effects of the 24-hours-out-of-the-fridge-potato-salad that he had eaten for breakfast, I went out with Aine who was passing through between teaching English in South Korea and working on the Gold Coast. Not much photographic evidence of this sadly, although much wine was consumed in Betty’s (where an aging wanabee-screenwriter tried to pick up Aine) and in ‘The Peel’ at The Slide Cabaret on Oxford Street.

Early start the next morning for a full day train journey to Melbourne!

Katoomba in the Blue Mountains, only 2 hours on the train from Sydney, is a somewhat peculiar place. I imagine that in season when it is buzzing with hikers and tourists it is probably a quaint and slightly bohemian mountain town, but when we arrived and walked down the main street it rather reminded me of Karlskoga. For non ex-Transcom people for whom this means nothing, imagine Twin Peaks without all the fun and interesting stuff.

Still, it’s the starting point for some amazing Blue Mountains hikes and home to the ‘Three Sisters’, some spectacular rock stacks:

The information place was pretty good so we managed to get a hike in along the Prince Henry Cliff Pathway to the Leura Cascades before repairing to Aldi for supplies and our hostel for dinner. The hostel only increased the Twin Peaks ambiance…dark, 1970s retro decor (not the stylish kind of retro), mysteriously opening doors, and swirling mist past the windows….ooOOOOOOOoooooooo!!!

The next morning after making our sandwiches and having breakfast with the Catalan student staying in the hostel we headed out for a long walk, down to the Three Sisters, on the way to which we saw:

Don’t get me wrong, there is nothing inherently funny about expired avian life, however after that there was only one way the conversation could go…

We made it down the Giant Stairway,

to the Leura Forest then along the ‘Federal Path’ at the bottom of the valley…

..as far as the ‘Touristy Bit’ where after looking at the fantastic views, the information about the old mining communities, and the old funicular railway that was used by the mine but opened for curious visitors at weekends:

we took ‘The World’s Steepest Funicular Railway’

back up to the visitor’s centre on the cliff path, where we ate our sandwiches while watching coachloads of Japanese tourists photographing each other doing culturally insensitive things with the bronze sculptures of Aborigine tribespeople.

Sunday was a wandering around Sydney day, checking out the architcture and bizarre signage:

if you pay peanuts?

Answers to Michael. Really?

Lovely Metro apartment building next to our Hostel, and alightly less lovely but entirely adequate backpacker hostel where we spent Thursday to Monday::

Where are we..?

Dandelion fountain in the square next door:

Emu Oil. For oiling your emu:

Early starts both mornings, with pick up by Rod of Coogee Pro Dive  under the Coca Cola Sign of Kings Cross. Friday was a guided group shore dive off Bare Island for Randall and day 1 of the PADI Open Water skills test dives for the Open Water Diver certification for me (I’d already completed my pool dives and theory), then Saturday was the Shark Dive for Randall and day 2 of the PADI skills test dives for me in beautiful Camp Cove the same as the day before:

Randall saw loads of fish and I saw, amongst other things, a baby Port Jackson shark, to the great delight of my instructor as apparently it’s quite rare to see them.

In the evening we went for a wander around Kings Cross. You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy:

Seriously, it is a splendid, seething, screeching mass of neon tackiness amongst which we managed to find, on Saturday night, a rather nice Vietnamese restaurant where we celebrated me passing my PADI with a bottle of fizzy booze, all the while being horrified about the price of wine in Australia (Aussie wine costs more here than it does in the UK…WTF???). We also found a Cuban bar with live salsa music played by two Columbian guys:

fantastic retro mixer!

so we drank overpriced Mojitos, attempted to dance salsa (tricky in flip-flops) and talked rubbish to some of the more inebriated clientele.

Arrived at hideous-o-clock so had to fortify ourselves with coffee in arrivals (no One World arrivals lounge at Sydney…pah!) which gave us a chance to buy sim cards and credit.

We wussed the bus ride and took a taxi to our hostel to drop off our bags in the luggage store (on the top floor,  with no lift, obviously) then went for a pootle about:

I don’t know who the purple bag lady is but she’s awfully engrossed in that Lonely Planet guide…

We rather liked this sign, spotted when walking through the park on the way back from the Opera House to our hostel:

An afternoon nap turned into a rather longer snooze than planned so the evening was a bit of a write off, except for sensible food shopping and sandwich making for our early start the next morning, although we did manage to squeeze in a controversial pizza:

I had the Libya, very topical under the circumstances.