Katoomba, Blue Mountains


I need to clean my apartment, so I figured I’d write something on here instead. Procrastination is smart that way, at least for the three people who read my blog. (And I know it’s only like three people because there’s this thing called Analytics and it’s kind of my job).

Anyway. Two weeks ago or thereabouts I took advantage of the free trips Opal gives you on Sundays and took the 2 hours train ride up to Katoomba in the Blue Mountains. I alternated reading Stoner and watching the scenery go by. The book was good, quietly melancholic and breathtaking, really – and the scenery wasn’t quite impressive until about an hour, hour and a half in when we hit the mountains.

So why did I go to Katoomba in the winter? Well…I forgot how much my blood had thinned and wasn’t quite thinking straight. It was cold. And windy. And there were steeply inclined roads to get places. The first thing I did was go to a cafe recommended to me by a friend run by a religious community (coughcultcough). I got the chai tea on the server’s recommendation as well as the waffle with fruit.

And just as my food came and I was about to be that hipster slash blogger and take a photo of my food….my phone died. So I have no photos of the chilling cold and awful hills of Katoomba. You’ll just have to take my word for it.

The chai tea was not your standard chai tea. It had mate in it. The mate fucked me up for the rest of the day. It was like a bad trip. But I wasn’t tripping. I was overenergised and unenthusiastic. It was overwhelming and I didn’t have the headspace to deal with it on top of the cold. So I’m a little biased against Katoomba right now. But I’ve been there.

My_Sunday_in_Katoomba_in_a_nutshell.

I ate my breakfast (which was pretty standard for waffles and fruit, nothing too spectacular other than the novelty of eating it in a restaurant that looked like a treehouse) and drank the tea that would haunt the rest of my day in the Blue Mountains.

After unsuccessfully hoping that my phone would magically find more battery and I had finished reading Stoner, I went back out into the cold after waiting to pay my bill.

I wandered around aimlessly for a bit around the bottom of Katoomba – and then for some reason decided it was a smart idea to walk down a steep road and then walk up a steep hill for a good 20 minutes. I reached the top at the end of the road and realised I couldn’t see the Three Sisters and just wanted to say “fuck it” and give up.

But I didn’t. I walked down the hill I had just walked up, and then walked down another hill where there was a sign pointing to something important somewhere. I got down to level ground and then realised if I wanted to get to where they were telling me to go, I’d have to walk some more. That was when I said fuck it.

So I huffed and puffed another twenty minutes walking back to town and hopped on a hop on/hop off bus, didn’t actually get off it to take in the sights, but saw the three sisters and it was pretty spectacular. Then I hopped off at Leura, wandered around the village for maybe 20 minutes and then got back on the train to Sydney CBD. It was a depressingly long train ride back.

TL;DR: Don’t drink mate when you want to enjoy the scenery.


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