Blue Mountain and Featherdale Wildlife Park

For our last day in the Sydney region, we chose to take an all day trip out West of Sydney to the Blue Mountains.  We stopped by the 2000 Olympic Park, then on to the Blue Mountain. As we headed higher and higher into the mountains, it began to look a little like home in North Carolina.  The little towns of Leura and Katoomba were quite similar to some of our small towns at home. It is fall here in Australia and in the higher elevations, we were treated to the change of leaves, much like our own change of season.   We traveled on a Skyrail across the valley, took a cable railroad (the second steepest in the world) down to the floor of the valley, walked through  the rain forest and took another gondola back up to the top to meet our bus driver.  The scenes were spectacular. They call this the Australian Grand Canyon. The featured landmark is called the Three Sisters after an old Aboriginal Folk Tale. We came back to Sydney by way of Featherdale Wildlife Sanctuary. Initially we weren't crazy about visiting as we had been to Lone Pine in Brisbane. Featherdale was substituted for a visit to kangaroos in the wild as they aren't showing up in the wild enough to take us anywhere to see them.  However, we enjoyed a second visit to the koalas and the "roos", as well as many tropical birds and animals native to Australia. We came back to the Circular Quay via one of the River Cats ferries.  We ate dinner at the waterfront and completed our stay in Sidney.