Drive Stay Play · Blue Mountains
The cold two hours west
Sydney lets go somewhere around Springwood. By Katoomba the air has changed, the light has gone long, and the town is wearing a jumper it never takes off.
We came up on a Friday with no plan beyond dinner. That turned out to be the right amount of planning. The Three Sisters do their thing at Echo Point with a hundred phones raised, and then, four hundred metres along the Prince Henry Cliff Walk, everyone is gone and the valley is just breathing at you.
Saturday we did the thing you're supposed to be too cool for and rode the railway down into the Jamison Valley. It is a two-minute ride and it explains the scale of the place better than any lookout. The boardwalk at the bottom is the part people skip.
By Sunday morning the fog had filled the valley to the brim and we sat with coffee watching it move. That's the argument for staying the night rather than driving up and back — day-trippers never see it.
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