To Winter Magic We Went

Last weekend we caught the train up to Katoomba and had a wander around the Winter Magic Festival.

I can't tell a lie - I found it a bit dismal. The parade was great, but after that the hordes closed in, and it was extremely hard to get around. Not to mention it was raining and cold.

Fortunately, though, the evil guy from Hellboy was there being generally evil. He's the dude wearing the hat.

Oh, and the ice creams rocked.

'Pointy Hair' Ant.

We went to Bathurst

Last Monday was the Queen's Birthday holiday here, a relic of Australia's colonial past no doubt and once upon a time, Cracker Night! But there are no crackers any more, I expect they eventually blew one too many people up. So being without, we drove to Bathurst instead.

Bathurst is about 100 kms west of us here in Lawson, has a population of around 30,000, and is apparently the oldest inland settlement in Australia, having been founded in 1815 on the orders of Governor Macquarie. The local aboriginals were from the Wiradjuri groups, but they got short shrift and in the early 1820s the Frontier Wars effectively put paid to any idea they might have had of keeping a hold of their land.

Nowadays, Bathurst is the home of my old mate Pete Simmons. Pete and I went to the same primary school in Warrawee, so I guess he's the oldest friend that I keep in touch with, though it's five years or more since we saw each other last.

We spent a lovely day and night with Pete and his wife Bernie and their boys Max, Henry and Joe, who are all in high school or beyond. Pete's mum Helen was there as well. We also met Bernie's sister Alice and her daughters Anna (8) and Rosie (6), so Zac and Tash had some kids to hang around with too.

Good times.

Ant.

We went to Jenolan Caves

A couple of weeks back, we took a trip out to Jenolan Caves, about an hour and a half west of Lawson by car.

For me it was a bit of a nostalgia trip, like so many things we've been doing since we arrived in Oz. I remember the Caves quite vividly from my childhood. I spent a week at Caves House with the family when I was about ten, and then another few days with my school.

I remember this school trip well, mainly because of the crazy stuff that we all got up to while our teacher was taking an afternoon nap. About forty of us, all around twelve years old, took it upon ourselves to explore the caves. On our own.

Not the caves marked out and made safe for tourists, but the other caves, the ones which may have been explored by speliologists, but which are considered too dangerous for the public to go into.

Jenolan Caves is a limestone system which is only three hundred metres wide, but which runs for twelve kilometres underground. You can see small cave entrances everywhere you go. We were like ants, crawling up the sides of the Devil's Coachhouse, in and out of these little caves with our torches. Well, they start out little. We found out later that some of these passgages have bottomless pits in them. Nice.

This time round, we settled for a guided tour of the Chifley Cave, an unguided tour of the Nettle Cave, and a walk down by the lake.

The top photo in this entry is a view of the Devil's Coachhouse from the Nettle Cave. The strange 'lobster' formations you can see on the right are called stromatolites, or craybacks - colonies of live cyanobacteria. You can find out more about this unusual life form here:

http://www.jenolancaves.org.au/index.asp?pageID=24

Ant.