Day 12: Sydney, Australia

Day 12                                7/17/05

We got up early to start our busy day going to the Blue Mountains. On the way to the mountains, we stopped at a place to see the native animals of Australia. Besides the usual Koala Bear/Kangaroo main stars, we got to see other animals such as wombats, Tasmanian devils, and echidnas. We could easily have stopped longer than our one hour stay.

Kayla Sherwood and some Cockatoos

A wallaby



Stephanie Cahoon and a Koala Bear

Tim Van Prooyen and an emu

A Tasmanian Devil

A Tasmanian Devil mugging for the camera

A Black-necked stork

 An Echidna

Dingos laying in the sunlight

We also learned that the Tasmanian devils have been in crisis. The devils have been developing face tumors and the cause hasn't been determined. I guess devils can not travel to other places in fear of possibly spreading the reason for the tumors.

We continued on to Katoomba for lunch. Than we saw the IMAX film about the Blue mountains. It was about a tree that had been discovered over ten years ago in one of the remote, hard to reach places in the mountains. This tree has been around during the dinosaur ages!! It looks like a combination of pine tree and palm tree. The big scare is that humans will contaminate the area and destroy the habitat for the ancient tree. The film (called the Edge) was very educational.

The Three Sisters rock formation up close and from a distance.

The Legend... The Aboriginal dream-time legend has it that three sisters, 'Meehni', 'Wimlah' and Gunnedoo' lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe. These beautiful young ladies had fallen in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade them to marry.

The brothers were not happy to accept this law and so decided to use force to capture the three sisters causing a major tribal battle.

As the lives of the three sisters were seriously in danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn the three sisters into stone to protect them from any harm. While he had intended to reverse the spell when the battle was over, the witchdoctor himself was killed. As only he could reverse the spell to return the ladies to their former beauty, the sisters remain in their magnificent rock formation as a reminder of this battle for generations to come.

The legend was taken from www.bluemts.com.au/tourist/thingsToDo/threeSisters.asp



Then we went to Scenic World, a place to see the rainforest and information about how they mined coal from the area. The valley containing the rain forest is World Heritage listed by the United Nations.

We took the coach home to Sydney, watching a movie about the life of kangaroos over a year. I remember seeing it four years earlier. If the students weren't asleep, they watched it.

The bus stopped through Olympic Park and Danna gave information about it. The majority of the information had been heard by Sam and I before.

We got back around 6:00 p.m. The students took the evening easy and ordered pizza. Laundry was done also. I managed to eat and do some shopping before coming back to the hotel and getting packed for our last stay in the country for this trip.