Bushwalking for the first time

Blue Mountains from the Wentforth Falls National Pass track

The whole reason I originally found out about Macquarie University was because I participated a scout camp in Canada in summer 2013. There I met a girl from Sydney and she told me about the school and she also knew a rover crew near the uni which I could join for the time I’d spend here. She also took me to bushwalking for the first time!

So this one morning I woke up early to walk to the Epping train station to catch the train to Wentforth Falls with Laura and her friends. It was the first time I walked that route and it was fairly scary as the sidewalk just ended at one point and then I had to walk on a side of a 4-lane road. Luckily there weren’t too many cars around at that hour on a Sunday morning. Anyway, eventually we reached Wentforth Falls station but didn’t make it out of the train on time as we didn’t know that it was our station. So we got out on the next stop and then returned with the next train...

Then of course we were already hungry for a piece of cake and we stopped for a coffee at a café that used to serve as a post office. Really nice old building. The walking track itself started literally in the bush an after passing few smaller waterfalls we came to the big one, which had the sign depicting that we were on the edge and below us there is a 100 meter drop.

 

The annual bushfires had burnt these

Blue Mountains are blue because the sunlight hits the oil on the gum leaves

 
 We continued descending the path to the bottom of the valley and saw really magnificent views. The day was again quite warm and all the descending and climbing up really needed some effort.

This "Black Boy" grows one cm each year and bushfires burn it, but it still keeps on going

The track ended to a café where we had lunch and then started back to the train station. At that point we found out that we really needed to speed up the pace to make it to the next train. However, after half walking fast and half running back to the train station we had absolutely enough time to catch our breath before the train came.

In the evening we had a bit more authentic Aussie BBQ with also flavors from Europe, as the girl from Spain provided us with a huge bowl of self-made sangria. It was really tasty!