Petting wallabies and discovering the famous Blue Mountains National Park
Regular contributor HENK BOLHUIS is currently exploring the wonders of Down Under with wife Rentia, and will entertain CXPRESS readers over the next few editions with his travel tales and images.
I have visited many cities all over the globe and Sydney in Australia, the state capital of New South Wales on the continent’s east coast, is certainly one of the world’s most modern and attractive cities.
The city boasts many beautiful, broad tree-lined streets, a vast number of parks and green areas, lovely rivers and the largest natural harbour in the world.
One is also immediately impressed by its incredibly efficient and clean public transport that enables you to get virtually anywhere by bus, train or ferry within minutes and at a very reasonable price.
On our first outing, after three days of jet-lag torture, we finally picked ourselves up and decided to visit the Featherdale Wildlife Park in Doonside, near Blacktown – a suburb about 40km west of the city’s CBD.
The zoo, on about seven acres of land, was originally a poultry farm but was later converted to a nursery and in 1972 became a wildlife park, specialising in Australian native wildlife including birds, reptiles and a variety of marsupials in an area populated with Australian native trees and plants.
Over the years the park has become one of Sydney’s foremost attractions, and has won the Australian Major Tourist Attraction award twice, first in 2005 and again in 2009.
We arrive together with a large Chinese tour group and, when I express my concern about there possibly not being much room to move around and see the animals, our host is quick to point out that “before you know it they’ll all be gone”.
Sure enough, within 15-20 minutes, like a whirlwind they all leave again and quiet returns to the park.
One of the key attractions of this unique zoo, with more than 2,000 species of birds and animals, is the fact that many of the marsupials such as wallabies and koalas run around free, and some are so tame that we can actually hand-feed and pet them.
Also present are the hairy wombats and a number of ugly-looking Tasmanian devils – those you don’t touch!
In the reptile pavilion we encounter a large number of Australian lizards and some of the world’s most venomous snakes.
We are just in time to watch the daily feeding of the fairy penguins, the smallest of the penguin species, being only about 33cm tall.
About an hour and a half later, and with some food and coffee in our tummies, we are ready to tackle the day’s second outing – a visit to the famous Blue Mountains National Park.
Our trip, a drive of roughly 90 minutes by car from Sydney, takes us via the M4 motorway to the Blue Mountains Grand Circular Tourist Drive, a scenic road through rocky mountains and deep forested valleys.
The greater Blue Mountains Region comprises an area of over 800,000 hectares and boasts an annual average rainfall of just below 3,000mm, something that we as South Africans find difficult to believe.
No wonder that everything around here is lush green with rivers and waterfalls everywhere.
Our first stop is at Leura-population just under 5,000 – a quaint little place and one in a series of small towns alongside the Main Western Railway Line and the A32, the Great Western Highway.
At an elevation of 985m, the mountain air is crisp and in spite of the outside temperature being just over 30C, one feels very comfortable walking the picturesque main street, the median of which has been planted with flowering cherry trees, and with all kinds of small shops lining the street on both sides.
Although by now I have discovered that in general Australia is very expensive compared to South Africa (the going conversion rate is about R10 to the Australian Dollar), I get the surprise of my life and am nearly blown away when my wife buys a single scoop of ice cream and has to pay $4.50 – R45!
Our next stop is Katoomba, the region’s administrative headquarters. Its name was derived from Katta-toon-bah, an Aboriginal term for “shining falling water”, referring to a nearby waterfall.
The town has a permanent population of about 10,000 people, 40% of whom are in some way connected with the tourist industry in this beautiful mountainous region.
‘We bring you the latest Plettenberg Bay | Garden Route news’