The beautiful landscape we encountered - Blue Mountains, NSW.

Travel Date: 24^th November 2010

As part of our road-trip, Nimal and I wanted to visit the Blue Mountains; but we hadn't decided what attractions we wanted to see. My uncle and aunt suggested that we go to the Jenolan Caves, located 175 kilometers west of Sydney.

We set off at 08:00, with the initial idea of going to the Blue Mountains to see what other attractions we could see, but we got lost and found no real attractions, since we had to depend on the GPS to show us where they were (since it was a long drive, we decided to "wing-it" and use the GPS as a guide... obviously you need a really good GPS for that!) The route was beautiful, and thankfully the weather stayed nice and sunny, but then again this was New South Wales; unlike Victoria, which is susceptible to all types on weather conditions in one-day. Along the way we also noticed some deforestation, which sprang out at us unexpectedly; almost like looking at the bald patch on the scalp of a someone who has beautiful hair; it was a little sad too see.

Even though the route to the Blue Mountains was nice and we could travel at about 100km/h, the latter part of the journey was spent on narrow, winding and steep roads. To add to that I realize I made a bad call, by saying that we could manage with the petrol we had; which would have been sufficient to use for the Blue Mountains drive, but the Jenolan Caves were another 2 hours away, and our indicator needle dropped dangerously low when were half-way there... we decided to risk it and go ahead, and arrived there at 12:00.

These limestone caves are considered some of the oldest caves, which are (somewhat) accessible. There are many forms of limestone that can be found in them. Even though there almost 300 caves have been found, only about 20 of them are on display for the general public. Some of the smaller caves have self-guided tours, whilst the bigger ones have Tour Guides. Since we hadn't done any research as I mentioned before, we had to let the person at the ticket counter decide which tours we should take. Since we only had about 4 hours to do the tours they suggested we do the Chifley Cave and Lucas Cave tours. The cost of tickets (slightly cheaper than individual tour ticket prices.) was AUD $84 (in total for the both of us); which is reasonable, considering they were both guided tours and the money goes to preserving and maintaining the Caves, which is done by the Jenolan Caves Reserve Trust. We started off with the Chifley Cave tour at 12:30 and the Lucas Cave tour at 14:00, which ended at 15:30.

The tour guide started us of with some basic rules, and then we proceeded to walk throught the caves. Walking itself was not hard; but the floor was quite slippery (partly due to the underwater rivulets that managed to seep through the limestone. I would recommend that anyone going should take...

• warm clothing (think hoodies and jumpers),
• boots with a really good grip,
• cap or hat.

... I walked in with casual slippers (thongs) and shorts, and boy was it cold. Not to mention that I got slightly wet when walking through some areas that had water dripping (It wasn't all that bad, but it definetely would have upped the comfort level if I had had the above mentioned items).

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Refill at Obtron Mobil Drive in neutral

We got home at about 16:30.

The distance travelled was about 400km.