Saturday: Blue Mountains

Saturday: Leura, Everglades Gardens and Blackheath, Blue Mountains

Awake by 4:30, we packed quickly and made a killer egg and bacon sandwich for our breakfast. Even after checking e-mail, we were on the road by 6:15 and had arrived in Leura, Blue Mountains (west of Sydney), by 10:30. We bought a great little hiking/bushwalk guide to the Blue Mountains at the Visitor Centre. It was very expensive at $32—much more than you would expect to pay for a book in the U.S. The best part about the book is at the end—an illustrated guide to the flora and fauna of Australia.

Our first stop in Leura was on the recommendation of the concierge at our hotel. He emphatically recommended, with ample and amusing body language, that we eat at The Red Door café. He implied, with said body language and Australian nuance-- much of which was lost on me--that most of the cafes in Leura are places to “get taken” and are full of pretentious snobs. The Red Door, on the other hand, has barristas second to none (who, apparently, are often drafted for the Sydney café scene) and “hearty food, honest food.” After eating a hearty, honest breakfast there with the most amazing Earl Gray tea I’ve ever had in my life, I can at least vouch for the tea and the ham/feta/tomato omelet with pesto mushrooms, if not the coffee or anything else. Tea is well-done in this country, served in a small teapot with cream and sugar and a saucer and spoon. You can while away at least an hour with a friend and a $3 investment in tea.

After tea, we did some looking into the little jewels of shops in Leura. But our step into a used bookstore owned by a friendly French monsieur was our doom—or at least that’s probably how it felt from Brian’s perspective. Ah, the trials of being married to a bibliophile! About to leave, I “just happened” to spot a very small little brown book with an inscription from 1862: “A prize awarded to Emily Puill from the Sabbath School Rope Creek (as best catechism scholar) Christmas Day 1862.” The title of the book was “First Steps in General Knowledge: Vegetable Kingdom.” Immediately, I was engrossed in this book—a botany course for children in the form of a conversation between a Christian father and his children. I could not put the book down, even as Brian was politely trying to extricate my body from this too-cosy, too-inviting little shop with all the romance and atmosphere of a European vacation. Poor man! Not only books—but now a book on botany. The combination was too irresistible. I raised pleading eyes to his as he spied the $30 price tag. Of course from Brian’s perspective, it could only get better, the closer we came to payment and a quick escape. But no! Monsieur had just spent the past month acquiring all but one of the titles in the series, one of them a rare first edition. And so we left with Brian’s wallet $150 Australian dollars lighter and carrying all but one in the series: Vegetable Kingdom, Mineral Kingdom, Animal Kingdom, and The Starry Heavens—all written and published by Clarendon Press, Oxford “For the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.” Our nighttime reading with Dad routine will be amply enriched for the coming years.



After the bookstore, we decided against looking into the shop scene any further and proceeded to Everglades Gardens, now a public trust garden in Australia. This garden was once built and owned by a Sydney businessman of Belgian descent named Henry Van de Velde. The garden was designed and overseen by Paul Sorensen, a Dane with big vision. The garden was spectacular—with unobstructed views in places of the grandeur of the Blue Mountain sandstone cliffs, with huge rhododendrons, with giant moss-covered boulders and perfectly puzzled stone walls, with a man-made fern grotto that looks entirely natural, with stately Eucalyptus trees and bulbs everywhere. In another week or two, the entire garden will be in riotous bloom. For now we were content to observe the grand garden bones without the bloom and to enjoy the little that was in bloom. Visual texture has been mastered in this garden. The pictures say so much more than I could.





Post-garden, we continued to Blackheath, another town in the Blue Mountains, to see their version of the Grand Canyon. We took a taxing (for me) bushwalk to a spectacular lookout as the sun was getting low on the horizon. The shadow play was tremendous. The photos will never do it justice. This canyon is much smaller than our Grand Canyon—but a gynormous (Eva’s word) tribute to the creative hand of God once again. The bottom of the canyon is covered with blue gum (Eucalyptus) trees which exude an oil that gives the mountains the name of “blue.”



After a quick look in Blackheath at some of their shops and cafes, we made it to Katoomba—Tourism Central for the Blue Mountains—to view Australia’s version of The Three Sisters as the sun began its setting. It was perfect picture-taking time but also superbly chilly. Our “booking” for Indian food was sounding inviting. . .



Once again, we were tucked in bed by 8 PM.