Boxing Day in the Blue Mountains

A busy day of walking in the Blue Mountains for us today!  Highlights include: the Three Sisters, numerous waterfalls, limestone cliffs, king parrots, a lyrebird, skinks, and stairs ... so, so many stairs.  Perhaps not so much a highlight as just a constant feature of the day.

The Three Sisters early in the morning

A view of the Jamison Valley from the Queen Elizabeth Lookout; her most Gracious Majesty.

(๑•̀ㅂ•́)و✧

(*˘︶˘*).｡.:*♡

King Parrots

Bridal Veil Falls at Leura Cascades

from Lyrebird Lookout

'Tis the season

I know it is December... but it is really hard to think of it as Christmas when it looks like this outside:

Taylor & Mossman street corner

Back yard / front yard / side yard (not exactly sure which.)

The Christmas decorations are up, of course, around town: at the Centro and the Plaza shopping malls, downtown along the mall, etc.  Not as many houses decorated, perhaps, as you would see in the US, but people do deck out their cars with reindeer-themed ornaments, which I have never seen in the northern parts of the US.

It kind of felt like Christmas was over as soon as we shipped our packages mid-November, but it does feel very festive.  Because it's summer, the atmosphere kind of feels like the Fourth of July to us.  Inside the stores, of course, it's pretty much the same as in the US.  (Only a lot--a lot--more puddings.  Christmas puddings and pavlovas are, as far as I can tell, the most popular.)

Huge Lindor chocolates ... only $25!

I don't know why I was surprised to see a Bundaberg holiday ginger beer!

Didn't take a picture of this one, but last weekend we saw limited edition Christmas Barbeque chips on sale.  I have been meaning to write a post on meat-flavored chips for a while!  We bought some roast turkey and cranberry sauce flavored ones that we'll have to try, so you can look forward to that some time in the new year. ;)

Wallabies at Wollomombi Gorge

As promised: wallabies along the Wollomombi walking track at Wollomombi Gorge and Falls.

 

 

Wollomombi Falls (Summer Edition)

November was really dry, but it's rained nearly every day this month.  We're not complaining at all -- it's been really nice and we certainly need the moisture.  Sunday was forecast to be clear so we headed out to Wollomombi Gorge to take a walk.  (Imagine our surprise when it began to drizzle when we were just 5km away.)

It didn't rain much or for very long, and cleared up pretty well (though we did take a slight detour before heading into Oxley Wild Rivers National Park and drove through Wollomombi town, which is even smaller than I had anticipated it to be.)  We set out along the Wollomombi walking track first.  There's a couple lookouts over the gorge, you cross down into the valley and back up again, and then up and around for two final lookouts.  It seemed greener than our last visit, and the clouds made for a dramatic atmosphere.

 

 

 

Second was the Chandler walking track.  It's much shorter than the first one but it's pretty steep toward the end as you climb down the hill on switchbacks and walk out along the ridge to the lookout.  While the first walk was cloudy, it had cleared up pretty well by the time we started on the second hike.

It was a great day for a walk, pretty cool at first but it warmed up when the sun came out.  We saw and heard a lot of birds: currawongs, magpies, kookaburras, crimson rosellas, fairy wrens and others unidentified, as well as three wallabies, up close.  (Will post those photos in a separate entry.)

Eastern blue-tongued lizard

Eastern blue-tongued lizard (presumably.)  It's a type of skink.

Saw this guy today at work ...  I suppose it's hard to tell from the photos, but he's a little bigger than he looks, maybe about 40cm or sixteen inches long or so.

I took a video, just for fun.  It's kind of funny how uncoordinated it seems to be.  Their legs are just so tiny!  They can still move pretty quickly though (even if this guy wasn't.)

Purple flowers

There is an interesting shrub outside our house with pretty interesting flowers.  I apologize that I can't tell you what it is.. but it's been fun to watch the buds open and the petals turn purple.

21 November

28 November 

04 December 

09 December

12 December

I would just like to say:  weed-whackers are called "whipper snippers" down here.

Rainbow Lorikeets

Summer has brought some new birds into Armidale we haven't seen here before.  This week we noticed rainbow lorikeets in the tree outside our window, picking at the green fruits.  They are generally pretty quiet, but we hear them squeaking when they all get together in the morning, pretty much only when we're trying to sleep.  The corellas have also been making such a racket lately in the mornings before we get up.. it sounds like there's a thousand birds outside the window, when actuality they might be a couple blocks away.

We've seen rainbow lorikeets on pretty much all of our travels around NSW and our brief stints in QLD: Coffs, Byron, Brisbane, Airlie.  We even saw them in Tamworth in the winter, but never in Armidale.  I assumed it must be too cold for them, but they're here for the summer!  They're a small parrot, probably about the same size or a little smaller than the Eastern Rosellas, and considerably smaller than Crimson Rosellas and Galahs.  Really pretty colors .. really beautiful.  It's still unreal to look out the window and see this kind of bird.

Another new bird for us is some kind of koel .. most probably the Eastern Koel, but I haven't gotten a picture of one yet!  They are pretty shy and while we hear them a lot, they will fly away when you spot them.

 

 

 

 

Cathedral Rock Scramble

We've been waiting for a weekend with good weather to go up to Cathedral Rock National Park and last Sunday turned out to be the day.  It's the last major National Park in our area we haven't visited and the bush hike there is touted as one of the better ones in the region.  Like New England National Park, the drive in off the highway is a narrow unsealed road through cattle pastures, a bit too pitted and rocky to be comfortable in the Berlingo.

Trailhead

The trailhead starts at the campground.  We were about five minutes behind a group of German tourists, and just a couple minutes down the walk we saw a big snake sitting just a foot off the trail in the sunny grass.  (How big, you ask?  Big enough!)  We nearly walked right by it without seeing it, actually, and we both sneaked by it nervously.  It didn't move--still asleep, I guess, in the cool morning air, because  presumably the other group walked by it as well.

 

 

 

A few minutes later and the tall grasses open up into this spongy marshland meadow ... and a minute after that we saw a kangaroo sleeping in the grass, still within sight of the parking area.  The trail then heads into a rocky eucalypt forest, surprisingly green despite a hot and dry November, with ferns along the Snowy Creek in the shady valleys and flowers everywhere in the dappled shade.  The rest of the kangaroo family bounded by, an adult with a young one in tow.

 

 

 

 

It's not long before the trail begins to steadily climb upwards with the pink granite boulders peeking out here and there beneath the moss and lichens that cover them.  The "Top Walks in New South Wales" guide book describes this hike as "Moderate [Grade] - some gentle stairs and fun rock scrambling is involved" and as soon as you take the path off the loop toward the main feature, Cathedral Rocks itself, it is pretty much all upwards-rock scrambling.  Just before the top, it turns into a bit of a maze squeezing through narrow passageways between and beneath the rocks, and always scrambling upwards.  When it feels like you've finally reached the top, there's just a little more before the true summit.  A chain is bolted into the rock to help you get up .... though we found it was even more helpful for getting down.

 

 

 

 

Going up..

 

It was quite a view from the top.  Probably the only place we've been where you can look all the way around and get a 360 view.  From the top you can see Round Mountain, the highest point in northern New South Wales, as well as some of the other rock piles we had or would walk by.  A big skink came out to say hello.. let me take a photo before hiding away again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Going down.

Reid gives a little bit of a sense of the scale of the rocks, but as always
it's so difficult to give it justice in photographs.

One of the easier rocks we had to sneak under
(some were a bit of a tight squeeze.)

The rest of the loop was a bit easier as it was mostly downhill, though it was getting close to noon and was a bit hotter.  A still, sunny day, and while much cooler than the weekend prior, it was still pretty warm.  Coming back to the start of the loop, the kangaroos were still in the grass, having an early lunch ... unfortunately we missed a rather comical picture of a kangaroo staring at us with a bunch of green grass sticking out of its mouth.

 

 

 

 

Really cute young one!

It was actually a bit nerve-wracking to be so close to the kangaroos!
The buck watched us back the entire time.

The drive back to the highway along the unsealed is always preferable to coming in because it's not the first thing in the morning.  I snapped some pictures of the grove of strangely purple-hued eucalyptus and we admired the idyllic pastures along the road.  (For some reason, despite seeing it with my own eyes, I cannot imagine Australia this green.)

 

 

 

 

 

The clouds were rolling in on our way back to Armidale, in fact it began to rain just minutes after we got home.  The last bit of interest of our excursion has to do with the fact that the cattle in this region are occasionally free-ranging outside the fenced pastures (especially, I assume, when it's dry and the grass is in short supply.  Going we didn't see any, but coming back we had to stop for a crossing. I have encountered cattle on the roads before here, but not on the 100 kph highway.  A good reminder, I suppose, of the rural area we live in.

The fields are so brown here compared to the forest.