WOW. When we came in 2019 we were very upset that we couldn't go to the blue mountains. You could smell the acrid smoke all around Sydney and see the huge plumes of smoke. Now when we look at how far away they are it makes you realise how bad it was. 5.5 million hectares were affected in NSW which included 71% of the blue mountains. It is amazing how well it has recovered in 4 years.
We said farewell to Peter and Jackie our fabulous hosts for the past 3 days in brilliant sunshine and that is how it remained all day. The drive was lovely. Our first stop was the Lookout at Bellbird Hill which is actually in Hawkesbury and you can see Sydney in the distance.
Our next stop was in Bilpin, renowned for their apples. Coffee and apple pie or crumble in David's case was a must and didn't disappoint, as was the purchasing of some local cider.
Our next stop was at Mt Tomah for the Blue Mountain Botanical Gardens. We were amazed entry was free but you could give a $5 voluntary contribution - why wouldn't you? I am going to be restrained and limit myself to two slides as whilst I love flowers and trees, I appreciate not everyone does! Sadly one of my favourite flowers is a rhododendron and due to the warm weather they had flowered early and a lot of their rarer species not at all, so their displays were not as colourful as they might have been.
Finally as we were walking around we could hear sawing and then we noticed who was doing it. Can you spot him - you will probably have to zoom in.
The villages are quite close together and we were surprised at how Victorian some of the buildings are. It was lovely just driving through the area. Whilst we have virtually recovered from our 4WD adventure it has made us very nervous of offroad areas and so whilst we went down a few to see the view - we stopped as soon as it got too steep.
Sadly a couple of lookouts we wanted to visit were shut so our next stop was Govetts Leap.
That left the three sisters as a must see. So off we went. WOW again. We had toyed with the idea of going to Scenic World even though their SkyWalk is currently closed for repair but after seeing it from the lookout at the three sisters there was no way we would enjoy it as we both hate heights.
Unfortunately photographs do not really do the expanse of the place justice as their are different levels of walkways and we were trying to not get other people in our photographs. Also it was 4pm in the afternoon and the light was beginning to fade. We were both really glad we came to see it - it is breathtaking.
For us we felt we needed a change and so the next day we decided to drive to Canberra still through the villages rather than the coast road as it rained. It was still a lovely drive but not suitable for photos.
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