Wentworth falls

Friday, 9/14

Tasty cheese and robber birds

     It was a chilly night in the old Coleman dome. I woke up at dawn with sore hips and back, dressed, and got out of the tent to stretch and look at the birds. Even though it was only 5:30 am we'd been in bed for nearly nine hours. There were beads of ice were on the roof of the LC, but no frost on the grass and the clear sky promised another beautiful day. As we tore down camp and nibbled on a prebreakfast of Tasty Cheese and dates we were visited by a curious Kookaburra. (Tasty Cheese is the name of an actual variety here in Oz, like Parmesan, Colby or Swiss. Evidently the Aussies have a fairly limited cheese palate, so to them, a cheddar cheese with a mid range of sharpness is quite tasty, hence the official name of the cheese, Tasty Cheese. One can also buy Extra Tasty which approaches a sharp cheddar cheese. Anyways, we bought a one kilo block of the stuff and it is in fact very tasty, and a regular part of our diet.)

'Kookaburra sits on an old fence post...'

     Driving out of the campground we saw a small herd (?) of grey kangaroos, cuteness in the extreme.

Why did the kangaroo cross the road?

Aren't we darling?

Our first camp cooked meal    

     After stopping at a hardware store to fill our two cantelope sized two kilo gas canisters, which are sold empty, we celebrated by driving to Wentworth falls and cooking our first breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. A Pied Currawong, a raven-like bird opened the bag of oatmeal for us, and a Superb Lyrebird, a Dr. Seuss cross between a roadrunner and a pheasant, scratched around in the forest leaf detritus nearby.

Ummm, coffee

Clean those oats off your beak!

Hiking Wentworth Falls

     Breakfast over and gear stowed back in LC, we took a couple hour hike.

     Of course no day would complete without shopping so we spent a couple hours in Katoomba, the Estes Park of the Blue Mountains, searching for more camp essentials and using their library for free wifi and bird book perusing.

     We camped at a private campground in town, taking long showers and sharing the outdoor kitchen facility with a nice young family from Old South Wales and a Kevin Spacey lookalike French guy traveling to Oz to run a marathon in Sydney. I made aloo gobi and lentils, and we ate in the chilly mountain air, glad at least for artificial light, big picnic tables, and a sink with very hot water for doing dishes. I sat in one of our new camp chairs and worked on the blog for an hour before going to bed, shivering in my fleece, hoodie and rain jacket.