The Blue Mountains is a world heritage region named for the distinctive blue haze that dominates the skyline, though by the time of my visit all rich cloudless Australian skies were beginning to look the same to me. Apparently the blue haze is caused by abundant oil-rich Eucalyptus trees that disperse fine droplets of oil into the atmosphere which then trap dust particles and mix with water vapor to scatter short wavelength light rays which are--- and you should know this if you had paid attention in class all those years ago--- predominantly blue. What the sanitized travel brochures will conveniently neglect to inform you though is that the same oil-rich Eucalyptus trees growing in the outback are also inadvertently the main culprits whenever a major bushfire breaks out and spreads alarmingly out of control before burning itself out. Now you know where Indonesian plantation owners get their inspiration from.

Archaeological studies estimate that the Blue Mountains were formed a million years ago during the Pliocene Epoch as part of the Kosciusko Uplift. Just to give you an idea of how long ago that was, during this epoch, the once-separate tectonic plates of North and South America were joined and unpatriotic animals such as dogs, cats, bears and horses migrated en-mass over the new land bridge from North to South America. Porcupines also moved in the opposite direction, though one suspects they didn't really have much of a say in the matter, judging by the number of pricked bottoms around at that time. Just for the record, the Himalayan Mountains were formed during this epoch as well.

Once considered an impassable barrier to early explorers, the Blue Mountains today has many delightfully-named towns scattered across the region, from Glenbrook, Leura and Lithgow to Katoomba, among others. It is a hiker's paradise here with walks for everyone (some are even wheelchair accessible) incorporating cliff views, waterfalls and rainforest treks. There are probably poisonous spiders and snakes waiting to pounce on unsuspecting passers-by along the way, but officially the most threatening danger is the unfiltered skin-penetrating Australian sunlight. Take it lightly at your own peril.

After a ninety-minute drive from Sydney, we arrived at Echo Point in good time. Apart from the minor inconvenience of having my innards frozen by the stiff mountain breeze, the view on offer was a reasonable reward for the long journey. Actually, having a laugh at the horrendously long lines of traffic crawling towards the city at seven in the morning while we coasted along in the opposite direction was gratifying enough. Apparently, Australians get up early just to get stuck in traffic for two hours so that they'll only be late for work by an hour or so. And they do this from Monday to Friday.

One-stop visitors to the Blue Mountains will probably be ushered to Echo Point, from where a front-row view of rock formations jutting out from a dense foliage of Eucalyptus trees against a backdrop of ethereal blue is on offer. The Three Sisters--- a famous rock formation--- can also be viewed from this vantage point. According to Aboriginal legend--- and I love legends so you'll have to bear with me--- three sisters (Meehni, Wimlah and Gunnedoo) from the Katoomba tribe were in love with three brothers from the Nepean tribe, yet tribal law forbade their marriage. Undeterred, the brothers resorted to kidnapping the sisters and this sparked off a major tribal battle. To protect the sisters from mortal danger, a witchdoctor from the Katoomba tribe took it upon himself to turn them into stone; a spell which he can then reverse after the hostilities had ceased. No, the well-meaning witchdoctor didn’t absentmindedly forget the magic words, nor did he suffer from amnesia after a club too many to his head during the fighting, but he was killed, which was a tad unfortunate given that he still had a spell to uncast. And so the three sisters live on to this day, frozen in their indignation at not being able to touch up their mascara even though thousands of visitors throng to admire them in their eroded glory every year.

Incidentally, I later spotted a rock formation resembling a wrinkled face looking longingly back in the general direction of the Three Sisters at the midway point of my descent down the Giant Staircase. Excited by my previously unreported discovery and ignoring the fact that only the sisters had been turned into stone (maybe the original fuss had been over taboo human-gargoyle relationships), I promptly whipped out a camera and captured some photographic evidence. As I wasn't using my own camera in this case there wasn't any chance of the batteries going flat.

As mentioned earlier, you can pretty much do whatever you want and go wherever you pleased once you're up in the Blue Mountains. But as my unadventurous mother was around, the scope of our activities were decidedly limited. So I trudged down and up the very steep Giant Stairway with my brother and took a Scenic Railway ride down a 52º descent without any seatbelts whatsoever (and we were in the very first row) before strolling through a rainforest and breaking for lunch at the homely Blue Mist Café.

Thereafter my brother got into his customary habit of getting us lost before I set off with him on a short walk to a lookout point at Leura Falls, where I could only watch lustily at the alluring spectrum of colors sprinkling in the sunshine as water broke over smoothed rocks from a height of a few hundred feet above even as they disappeared into the atmosphere mysteriously as a spray of mist. When you see panting grannies gamely trudging their way along rocky terrain to catch a sight of the spectacular falls, you know the effort will be well worth it, amusing traffic jams or not.