My last visit to the Abbey was in the depths of August. It started out clear but cold, with the paddock covered by a thin frost.
But the weather is never predictable in the mountains, and the next day was a wet one.
There was certainly a lot of contemplation, knitting…
And painting (I practised my sheep) involved in this visit.
I hadn’t spent much time exploring Leura before, and so was surprised to discover Sublime Point when we were visiting friends nearby. It has a better view in my opinion than Wenty Falls or even Echo Point, since you can see both valleys.
View to Katoomba.
View to the Kings Tableland.
And because access is via some very quiet suburban streets, there are no walks from it, and parking is limited, it seems to be one of the more secluded lookouts in the Mountains. Bonus!
The Blue Mountains has a wide range of accomodation to choose from, especially in the village of Leura. We stayed at The Greens B&B. It was set in one of the old houses just off the Mall, and each room was named after a classic author or poet. I chose Jane Austen, of course.
The rooms were luxurious, and so were the breakfasts. There was even muffins for afternoon tea.
I liked the little touches, like a set of Jane Austen novels in the room. It made for a very homely stay.
Now that I’ve finished posting about our travels abroad, I can concentrate on catching up on our activities here in the last 6 months. Last August we spent a weekend in the Blue Mountains to celebrate our wedding anniversary. One thing we did was take a walk along the Charles Darwin Walk.
It had been some years since I walked this track, and I was glad to see the pre-spring wildflowers out.
It was always a treat to see the waterfalls.
And of course, the grand view from Wentworth Falls at the end.
What a way to catch up with friends than to enjoy a leisurely 3 course lunch! I met up with N and F pre-Christmas at the Devonshire Restaurant in Surry Hills, where their Prix Fixe Friday lunch was too good to be missed. The menu changed weekly, but we weren’t too pertubed about what we got as we knew it was all going to be very good indeed. We weren’t wrong.
For entree was roasted pork belly croustillant, spiced apple relish, shaved fennel and radish. It was a spring roll that had been well and truly pimped, but with the salad and relish was still light and fresh.
The main was the magnificent seared Ora king salmon, fried calamari, squid ink, orange and chive dressing. With a crispy skin, more-ish sauce and dressing, all refreshed by the oranges (a citrus that you don’t often think of when accompanying fish), it tasted as good as it looked.
The sides of broccolini and twice-cooked potatoes were also amazing. How did they get the potatoes so crispy, I wonder?
We really didn’t have any room left after that effort, but still we managed to fit in a delectable sticky pear pudding, toasted coconut milk sorbet and toffee sauce. The pudding was surprisingly light, and the sorbet creamy without being too rich. A perfect end to the meal.
One place we visited that had nothing to do with volcanoes was Waitomo Caves. The caves were set in dense rainforest, and is famous for their glow worms. I have been to some of these caves before but since then they have opened up some new caves – we were able to visit three of them.
They weren’t the biggest caves I had ever seen, but they did have some lovely details.
One of them you descend into by a giant corkscrew ramp, and had suspended walkways to keep you above the wet floor. Now that’s engineering.
The Kiwis are good like that, very creative, out of the box thinkers, and you see evidence of it everywhere. Sorry to say, but often Aussies seem like square pegs in comparison.
Well, we’ve come to the end of our geological tour of NZ, and all the travel posts too. I’ll be posting about things much closer to home from now on, which isn’t all bad, because 4 months of travelling was very exhausting.
Down the road from Rotorua in Taupo, they make use of the geothermal energy by building powerstations.
The raging Waikato river (shown below at Huka Falls), means that there are also hydroelectric power stations too.
One needs only to look at the vastness of Lake Taupo, the result of a supervolcano eruption, and whose vast caldera is still active underground, to know that there’s certainly energy available, but if that volcano was to erupt again, then we’d all be in big trouble.
More mid-winter scenes from the Waikato region, as taken from the bus.
The foggy, early morning landscape was atmospheric in a claustrophobic way.
But there are advantages to living in a geothermal area. One is that you can have free hot water. The city has been using the underground hot water sources since Maori times. The Maoris bathed and cooked their food in the hot water (at different temperatures of course). The Europeans followed suit, and opened a spa resort. No, health spas aren’t a modern invention – the Victorians were addicted to them. Rotorua has preserved its oldest, set in this mock Tudor mansion.
It is now a museum and not a spa resort, but inside you do get an idea of how grand it all was. People came from all over the world to experience its ‘cures’.
The treatments offered back in the day were pretty extreme. Swims, soaks and showers at various temperatures, hot towel wraps, massages, electricution and x-rays (to stimulate the blood), and literal mud baths in the dank basement!
Added to that a meagre diet, drinking disgusting mineral water, and taking a walk by the lake, and you’d be good as new (or so they say) whatever your ailment. Personally, I’d stick to a simply massage and spa.
Aside from geysers, there were plenty of geothermal attractions all over the place. In some places you really did need to watch where you were going lest you fall into a pool of hot, acidic mud.
The mineral rich pools came in all shades, no food colouring involved.
In other places, the landscape created by all of this turmoil was very pretty.
There were plenty of stories told by our various guides, particularly from the 19th Century when a local volcano, Mount Tarawera, erupted, destroying much of the area and killing many people. It could happen again, and soon. Despite this, Rotorua is one of the North Island’s bigger towns being a centre for forestry, energy and tourism. It goes to show that the locals must be hardy types.
Static and Silence 