Today I went on a day trip to the Blue Mountains with a group of international students from UOW. The Blue Mountains are located about an hour west of Sydney and are part of the Great Dividing Range. These mountains have fantastic scenery, excellent bushwalks (aka walking trails in the woods), and heaps of gorges, gum trees, and cliffs. They are called the Blue Mountains because of the beautiful blue color of the hazy valleys and ridges in this area as a result of sunlight filtering through the eucalyptus oil in the air. At the Blue Mountains, we went to Scenic World, a touristy transportation hub offering different perspectives of the mountains. We took the Scenic Railway, the world’s steepest inclined passenger-railway with its 52 degree pitch, down to the bottom out of the Jamison Valley. The railway was originally designed to haul chunks of coal out of the valley. After walking around in the valley for a while, we took the Sceniscender cable car from the valley floor to the cliff top.
At Scenic World we were able to see The Three Sisters a legendary rock formation in the Blue Mountains. The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters Meehni, Wimlah, and Gunnedoo lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba Aboriginal tribe. These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry. The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle. As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come.
Congrats to the Aussie Cricket team for their World Cup victory!
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