Jenolan Caves

Today was my epically long journey to Jenolan Caves! To get there, I first had to spend about 1.5 hours on the Sydney train system to a stop called Katoomba. This is basically where the Blue Mountains tour really starts.

I was about an hour early for the bus ride to the caves (which I paid the ridic price of $80 for... hopefully I was correct in paying that much, grr), so I spent my time walking around the city. Guess what I found? A park dedicated to my dear cat's namesake, Smithy!

The park itself was fairly unremarkable (it is described as a "natural gully amphitheater"), and I'm not exactly sure what Smithy's connection to Katoomba is, but there you go. I looked it up and the it was renamed in 1936 from the original Jubilee Park to commemorate Smithy after his death. This is apparently one of three aviator memorial parks in Katoomba -- Dad it's your dream! The others are Bert Hinkler and Charles James (Jimmy) Melrose. You can read more about it here.

After that fun discovery, I took the bus ride to the actual caves, which was about 1.5 hours.




First, a little bit of important factoids... I have to pretend that this blog provides some educational purpose and is not just a way for me to make you jealous about my travels. :)

The Jenolan Caves are part of the Blue Mountains (about 175km west of Sydney, or 108 miles for Yanks) and is apparently one of the world's oldest known cave systems (340 millions years old). It is also the number one tourist destination in NSW (New South Wales). The caves were originally known to local Aboriginals as 'Binoomea' (Dark Places). "Jenolan" is an Aboriginal word meaning "high mountain" and wasn't used until the 1800s.

According to Gundungurra Elder (Aboriginal group living there):

"The old natives knew the caves.  They penetrated them as far as the subterranean water, carrying sick people to be bathed in this water, which they believed to have great curative powers.  Sick people were carried there from considerable distances." 

There are a bunch of different caves open to tour and the one I really wanted to go on was the River Cave tour (you can see the River Styx!!) but unfortunately it wasn't meant to be due to time constraints. I ended up taking the tour of the Orient Cave, so named because the different chambers allegedly resemble different parts of Asia (Egypt, India, Persia, etc) when they were first discovered in 1904 by James Carvosso Wiburd.

However, before even that happened I went on a self-guided tour of the Nettle Caves, including the Devil's Coach House. It was named this because a camper (Luke White) had seen THE DEVIL HIMSELF RIDING IN A HORSE-DRAWN COACH!!!!! Wooo! Haha, okay, enough being mean. It was actually a pretty cool cave and here's a picture of one the entrances (or exits):

 

Below is a picture of some stalagmites that reminded the explorers of tombstones, so they decided to call them Tombstones. Cool story. 

 

This is a picture of me on the outside of the Nettle Caves:

There was also a nature path that lead from the entrance of the caves (that cave you see in the below picture is an entrance into the park itself called The Grand Arch).

Doesn't the next picture look like something you'd expect to see little dinosaurs living in? I kept expecting this to become Jurassic Park -- thankfully the Raptors didn't come to get me! Aren't I funny? The river is blue because of the light refracting through the dissolved limestone particles.
 

On to the Orient Cave!! Our tour guide was kind of crazy. The main evidence that brought me to this conclusion were two things:
1. He had crazy eyes. You know, where you can see the tops of the irises. He was REALLY into the caves, man.
2. He told a girl to swallow her gum because it would attract rats who could smell it! I just thought that was anal. I mean, maybe I could see if it he thought she was going to maliciously stick it onto one of the millions of year old formations, but attracting rats? I guess I'm glad he didn't know I was carrying a sandwich in my backpack.

Anyway, there are TONS of pics that I will post in a photo album, the better ones were:

 

This one is the Pillar of Hercules, found in the Persian Chamber. It's the tallest stalagmite at 10m in this chamber

 

This is the "Nile River" found in the Egyptian Chamber.

 

These stalactites are in the Persian Chamber and represent the throws you can buy at a Persian Market. Too bad they are definitely not rugs.

 

Apparently the icon of the Jenolan Caves, but I'm not sure why. Or what it's called. Glad I was paying attention.

 

Cave Coral! Yeah, the tour guide was especially excited about this. Maybe cave coral just isn't my thing because I didn't find it particularly exciting.

 

"The Fairy Skating Rink" found in the Jungle Chamber (so named because Wiburd found lots of animals in the cave decorations). You can't tell but this is actually a really small opening... there was also a little Fairy Toilet too (you can bet I took a picture of that)! I wonder if the little Fairy NHL Playoffs are occurring right now as well... the world will never know! 

And that's it for today... tomorrow is a second date with the Aussie Carpenter,  so we'll see where he takes me.