Elad’s blog

Yesterday morning I went to finish all the car paperwork: I changed the ownership, I made an insurance, I bought a converter from the cigarette lighter to 220V (I found a used one on the car market) and a small radio transmitter to connect to my NOMAD so I can hear my music in the car (it actually works!) I didn’t find in Sydney, though, the spare battery for my Nomad that I didn’t find in Hong-Kong.
All the morning I was still very angry at the Habad Rabbi from Sydney. On Saturday evening I found him showing to some Israeli travelers a really nasty Habad propaganda movie, stating how Herzel wanted to make us all christians. It made me really, really, angry at these Habad guys. At first they seem to help, but I guess Heinlein was right - nothing comes for free.
At one o’clock I met with my lifters, and since they also have a driving license (and they drove in New-Zealand) I went and added them to the insurance (it costs nothing, and now they can also drive). It took some more time, and so it happened that we only left Sydney around 15:00.
We stopped at the olimpic park just outside Sydney. They have some funny stuff there - for example, they moved the Atletics race-track out of the stadium because they needed more space in the field (Rogby required larger field than soccer). They also have the first few rows of seats move back to make the field larger. The place is very nice, but over all it was pretty disappointing - for every facility they charge you entrance separately, and there isn’t too much to do there. So we left the olimpic park and headed to the Blue Mountains.
We arrived at Katoomba on the evening, and cooked a very nice dinner (actually, just pasta and simple things, but it was good). At the evening guess whom I bumped at the youth-hostel? Correct, it is Gadi, the non-Atudai guy from two posts ago. He came separately to Katoomba.
We went to a bar together, but it was very weak. So we went back, and today all the four of us went hiking just outside Katoomba, for a nice 5-hour hike. The place is in the middle of mountains, with very beautifull clifs and limestone formations - including their famous ‘three sisters’, which are three rock towers (like in NAHAL AMMUD, only much much bigger). The place is full of huge trees and very special birds - all sorts of parrots (mainly red but also on other colors) and other birds are flying just by you. In the clifs used to be coal mines, but we didn’t enter them. What we did do is walking the ‘giant stairs’ - a set of very steep and very long stairs that are carved in the rock and go all the way down the cliff into the valley. Than we took on the way up a nice train, which the locals claim to be the steepest train in the world (I’m not certain. This train is very steep indeed, but so is the one at Hong-Kong, so I’m really not sure).
It was really a nice hike. Tomorrow we’ll probably go to see some famous caves here, and than leave the area towards the north coast.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 24th, 2005 at 9:04 and is filed under Travels, Australia East Coast. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.