The Blue Mountains east of Sidney

We linked up with a tour company offering a "4-wheel drive" day trip into the Blue Mountains to the east of Sidney. These mountains form the continental divide. Our tour guide was named Jenny, a Sidney native. She generously shared the geology, ecology, and history of the area. She runs this tour twice a week, and works a couple other days a week doing land maintenance work for the forest service ("pulling weeds", she says). We shared the tour with a couple from the States, an Australian couple, and a travel agent from New Zealand.

Turns out the day was mostly overcast and wet, and the windows kept fogging up in the van. The extent of four wheel driving was crossing a couple streams on concrete bridges with 4 inches of water flowing over them. The tour was over sold in this regard, but we had a good time.

A early stop was at a wildlife park. Everyone got to "pat" the wombats, koalas, and kangaroos.
[applet with dri-kanga, dri-koala, dri-wombat, erik-joey1/2, erik-kanga, erik-koala, jenni-wombat, liz-koala]

One the way back to Sidney, we stopped at a beautiful park area containing a rock formation called the Three Sisters. We walked down a trail to the sister on the left, and followed the stairs down another couple hundred steps until we realized that the trail probably went to the canyon floor (a non-trivial climb back up, even from that point!).

The Aborigine story for the Three Sisters goes something like this... A man and his three daughters lived in the area. He told his daughters to be quiet while he went out hunting, for there was a monster that lived in the valley below. Instead, they made too much noise and the monster found them. Rather than having his daughters consumed by the monster, he changed them to stone and was eaten himself. Now, no one knows the spell to release them.