The Ruined Castle

I am sitting here waiting for our ride back to Sydney, so I thought I would blog about my day today.

First off, I forgot to mention a story about yesterday. When our tour bus left Jenolan Caves, we actually picked up two more people at the caves. They had just completed a 42km run along a trail called Six Foot Track. It took them 8.5 hours, so I am assuming that it was a strenuous hike. This is the same trail the city uses for the annual marathon in March. (Joey - how much fun would that be!) I was really impressed with their accomplishment, but they totally looked the part, so it probably wasn't a difficult task for them. It made me miss training...

So today started off with us packing up all our gear, checking out and storing our luggage in lockers. Our ride won't pick us up until 5pm, so we decided to go bushwalking today (again!). We did a completely different trail today though and headed to the Ruined Castle. It is a 6 hour return trip, so we headed out at 9:30am to make sure we would be back on time. The weather was absolutely perfect today. Sunny and warm, but not too warm. We really lucked out finally on our last day here. So we headed out to Narrowneck Plateau and then down the Golden Stairway (very steep). I was in the lead at this point and what do you know, as I am walking along, all of a sudden I stop short because in front of me is a 2 foot brown snake (2nd deadliest in the Blue Mountain area). Okay, so I'm not 100% sure it was that type of snake, but Nackers mentioned them the other day, so I figured it must be! We took pictures and it scurried along off the path, so we were able to skirt around it - I made Matt take the lead from there!

After the stairway, we hiked along Federal Pass to the Ruined Castle. The climb up to the castle was steep and hard, but I thought "it's gotta be worth it!" Well, it really wasn't. The "Ruined Castle" was just a huge rock formation that had probably been knocked over some thousands of years ago. The sites were beautiful though and we got to see so much more of the mountains and valleys. We all climbed to the top of the rocks and got to look out over everything. Oh wait, I made it only three quarters of the way because I'm not a big fan of rock climbing and it wasn't very easily accessible.

For the return trip, we decided to go another way and hike to the Landslide area back to the Scenic Railway but it was more like rock climbing. The Landside area is an actually landslide area, so you have to manuever your way around and try to stay on the path. We almost got lost a couple times. We made our way to the Scenic Railway and again decided to hike up the 1,000 steps instead of take the easy way up. By the time we got back to the hostel, it had only taken us 5 hours to do the hike, so I guess we were a little faster than most. I like hiking with Matt because he is more my speed (Cory and Rebecca showed up about 45 minutes later).

Now we head back to Sydney for a few days before heading to Melbourne. I'm not really looking forward to being back in the city, but Saturday is Australia Day, so that should be fun.