Katoomba: A walk to remember

Well, we just got back from our latest adventure in the Blue Mountains...and yes, they really are blue. Apparently the Eucalyptus trees put off some sort of gas or something of that nature which makes the mountains look blue. We arrived in Katoomba Sunday night and after a bit of walking around, found a small little Hostel called No. 14. Mandy was the owner and she was super helpful in telling us how to get to all the great places in the Blue Mountains and even loaned us a book to guide us. Our first hike, or "walk" as they call it, was to Wentworth Falls. Instead of trails, they call them "tracks" here. It was a great hike, I mean walk, with some cool waterfalls and subtropical rain forest. The next day we decided we would wake up early and start on the 6 foot Track, a 45 kilometer walk through rain forest and eucalyptus forest to the Jenolan Caves. It's supposedly a 3 day walk but we did 35 kilometers in the first day and after a sleepless night freezing our butts off on the cold ground, finished the last 10k in the morning. Some of you stateside might not know the conversion from kilometers to miles but it works out to be about a 28 mile hike. But since we are both top shape athletes, this was a piece of cake... okay honestly it kicked our trash and left us completely exhausted but it was well worth it and we even got to feed some wild kangaroos along the way which was awesome. Some of them don't want anything to do with you, but others want to see if you have more than just shortbread cookies in your bag. They would get right up in our face and even eat crackers out of our mouth. Both of the ones we fed had little Joey's chillin with their heads sticking out of the pouch. After a quick photo shoot with them we descended down to Jenolan. Although they were a bit on the pricey side, we figured our long walk had to pay off so we took a tour through one of the caves there called the Lucas cave which had a lot of cool limestone formations. (Matt is averaging about a hundred photos a day so as you can imagine we got 5 pictures of everything) We didn't feel like hiking back to Katoomba so after a futile attempt at hitchhiking (all three cars that passed in a half hour), we found a ride with a charter bus headed back that way. He was way cool and said we could hitch a ride with him. The bonus to this was, the other shuttle driver that was full wanted to charge us 25 bucks a piece. But not Greg, he hooked us up for free. After arriving back in Katoomba we bought some hot chocolate and good food and recovered from our hike at the hostel. This land is filled with crazy amounts of birds and even during our hike we came across a wild fox. He was in a pretty deep sleep however so we just let him rest. We also had our first meat pies while in Katoomba which were pretty good. That is one of those things... when you come here, you eat a meat pie. Everyone sells them so you have to at least try one. More or less like a Stoffers Chicken Pot Pie. We are now back in Sydney and stopped by China Town today and ate some interesting food. No offence to the chinese people but that wasn't meat, I'm pretty sure of that. Since we were close by and had some time to kill, we headed to the park to feed the Cockatoos and Lorikeets one last time. You would think we were at a petting zoo of some kind and not at the local Botanical Gardens. There were times you would have 6 of these birds landing on you. We head north to New Castle on Sunday for a few days and then head farther north from there! Now for the shout outs... First up is our rug salesman friend Chad up in Cody WY. He will appreciate a good Persian rug sale. Next up is Dustin, they do have Jackaroos here.. They just aren't the ones from the Outback Steak House. And no, we haven't seen any of those here either.