Today we didn't have too long to hang around the Blue Mountains and especially didn’t have time to go off for a walk and explore them more thoroughly, but we did decide that the best and easiest way to see some of the Blue Mountains National Park on our flying visit was to head to two of the best lookout points listed in the Lonely Planet. I had to be back in Sydney city centre for around 3pm so that I could drop off my van, so needed time to check into a hostel, clean out the van a little and then drive it to wherever it needed to be.

A little info on the Blue Mountain National Park.....

The Blue Mountains National Park is a national park in New South Wales, Australia, 81 km west of Sydney, and located in the Blue Mountains region of the Great Dividing Range. The park covers 267,954 hectares, and the boundary of the park is quite irregular as it is broken up by roads, urban areas and inholdings. Despite the name 'mountains', the area is an uplifted plateau, dissected by a number of larger rivers. The highest point in the park is Mount Werong (1,215 m), while the low point is on the Nepean River (20 m) as it leaves the park.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_Mountains_National_Park

The first lookout point that we headed to after having some breakfast was Govett’s Leap and then we went on to Evan’s Lookout. I now know how people can get themselves in to serious trouble with their GPS devices as I programmed mine for Evan’s Lookout from Govett’s Leap and I followed it for a little while until it send me down this dirt track through the forest. I went down the track and then it sort of turned into something a bit more serious, where you definitely needed a 4WD to get down there. I reversed up the track for a while and found a suitable place to turn around and headed back onto the sealed road (tarmac road to us) and used common sense rather than technology to navigate around the forest to where we needed to go.

Maybe I was being a bit naive but I was expecting to see some mountains within the Blue Mountains National Park but instead the national park is made up mainly of these huge gorges filled with eucalyptus trees and I guess if you were standing at the bottom of one of these gorges, they would look like big mountains from down there. But from where we were, they were not quite what I was expecting although I must admit it, they were still quite impressive.

Our next stop was the McDonalds car park so that I could get on their free wi-fi and try to find a hostel to book into in Sydney city centre so that I at least had somewhere to head to in the van to drop off all my gear and then head out to give the van back. This way I didn’t have to carry my bags through Sydney trying to find a hostel to stay in. After a couple of phone calls, I found a cheap hostel that had a dorm bed available and I reserved one at The Strand Hotel on William Street, just close to but far enough away from the Kings Cross area of the city. If you have ever been here, you will know why it had to be outside of the Kings Cross area. This place was worse than the London area of the same name, with respect to crime, drugs, drunken people and prostitutes!

While still in McDonalds car park I packed my rucksack which hadn’t been used for 6 weeks since picking up the van in Cairns and as you can guess I had also picked up many new items which meant I had more things than usual to carry, for example, I now had a Billy pot kettle, various iPhone accessories including a charger, FM transmitter and windscreen mount, not to mention all the food, condiments and drink that I had left over in my cupboards.

The drive back down to Sydney took an hour or so and then we started to get a bit lost. The address that I had programmed in to the GPS turned out to be a residential suburb of Sydney and obviously there was no hotel in sight. What I didn’t realise up until this point was that there were many roads in Sydney with the same name which made things a little bit confusing for me and also the GPS. Eventually I managed to find the correct place and parked up just around the corner from the hotel and checked in.

As Doreen was broke and going to be doing some couch surfing (http://www.couchsurfing.org) tonight in Sydney and her host was not around until later on in the day, she decided to leave her bags in my hostel room, come with me to drop off the van and come back for her bags later. Dropping off the van was pretty painless and they didn’t really check over the van much to see if there was anything broken or missing. I asked them if they know how we could get back into the city and they directed us to the nearest bus stop and told us which bus to get and also where we should get off.

I had made plans via Facebook to meet up with Danny Morgan at 6pm this evening at my hotel, who I hadn’t seen in about 18 years since leaving Leventhorpe School in Sawbridgeworth. I arrived back to the hotel just in time with about 5 minutes spare before Danny turned up. It was probably just as easy for him to spot me in the bar as it was for me to spot him, he hadn’t changed much, just got older and I guess I looked the same too just older.

We had a chat over a couple of beers in the bar and then decided to go off out for some food. Danny took me to a Thai restaurant in the Oxford Street region of Sydney and on the way stopped at a bottle shop and bought a bottle of wine to have with our dinner. Yes, in Australia, it is quite common for you to BYO (bring you own) to a restaurant. We had a good chat and a quick catch up on each other’s lives over the past years since school and as you can possibly imagine, we had a fair bit to talk about and unfortunately Danny had to go off to a party at 10pm but was kind enough to pick up the bill for the meal. Thank you very much Danny!

It was great to catch up with an old school friend and I guess he took pity on an unemployed travelling bum!!!! LOL