The Young & The Restless | Chauffeured to the Blue Mountains

But when you’re not from an area, have limited time, don’t have a vehicle with you and want to make sure you see the ‘best bits’, sometimes joining a tour is the most practical and efficient thing to do.

I wasn’t keen on hiring a car for a day on a short stint in Sydney to head to the Blue Mountains.

I probably would’ve wasted most of our time and allocated kilometres chucking U-turns after taking wrong turns and not being able to fully appreciate the scenery beyond the windows while I tussled with Google Maps.

So I booked tickets for a 12-hour bus tour for a couple of days after Christmas instead.

Now, I don’t like holidaying during holiday periods as a rule (big crowds, long queues, more people to suspect are peeing in the motel pool, that kind of thing). Still, Christmas holidays, in particular around Sydney, featured a volume of humans we’d probably never seen congregate in any one place before.

I guess hitching a bus out to the mountains also meant I didn’t have to find my own park for a hire car in the scrimmage of vehicles, but what it did mean is that every stop we made evoked a deep breath from us all before disembarking the bus to navigate our way through city-type crowds way out in the ‘wilderness’.

Our first stop en route to the mountains was Featherdale Wildlife Park in Western Sydney’s Doonside, home to 2000-odd individual animals and more than 260 native Australian species of fauna.

It is an adorable wildlife sanctuary, set on nearly three hectares, whose residents mostly stay just for rehabilitation before they’re released back into the wild.

You could get your photo taken with a koala for $20 or grab a cup of fodder for $3 to feed the free-range hopping marsupials.

But to give you more of an idea of how busy the area was, we had other tourists who were leaving the park at 8.30am give us their leftover cups of feed because the macropods had already had their fill that early in the day.

After getting violently (and hilariously) pecked by birds who thought the kids’ phones were food when they put them too close to the wire on their cages, saying g’day to a usually nocturnal wombat parading around and having a staring comp with a giant danger chicken (cassowary), we boarded the bus bound for Leura Village.

Leura is a quaint little town with picturesque gardens, heritage buildings and a postcard-perfect main street.

We didn’t have much time to take it all in, so after the group disbanded to find lunch, my boys and I stepped inside the funky little Wayzgoose Diner to sample the “famous flowerpot scones” its outdoor signage touted.

Everything in this eatery was so sweet — from the décor to the heart-shaped toast and dishes to the outdoor garden and the diner’s whole backstory itself.

The diner is the oldest commercial building in town, built in 1901 by the Milgate family, who owned the land that eventually became Leura.

The building later became home to the local printing press (thus the Wayzgoose namesake) and even survived the disastrous fire of 1957 that destroyed 100 homes, a couple of churches and many shops in the village when a local chopped out the part of the building that was on fire with his axe, seeing as he had no access to water.

We didn’t discover just how rich in history the place we had chosen to eat at was, however, until long after, when we were back on the bus heading deeper west to Katoomba.

We arrived at a place called Scenic World just after noon and were let loose on our own, with a curfew to be back on the bus by 3pm.

Plenty of time, one would have thought, but with three separate cable vehicle rides (including the world’s steepest railway) and crowds as swollen as they were, getting around wasn’t as easy as I’d predicted.

While the cable cars across the valleys were exhilarating and delivered unmatched views of Blue Mountains scenery, including waterfalls and the Three Sisters, we spent most of our time waiting in lines to board them and the Scenic Railway.

A walk along the boardwalk took us through a breathtaking shaded forest, where there is also currently a dinosaur installation with maybe a few too many roaring animatronics disturbing the sounds of nature (especially when adjacent to queues where tourists were subjected to hearing the same sound repeatedly for too long). Still, the whole Scenic World adventure was made worthwhile by that one ride on the Scenic Railway.

It’s 415m long, has a vertical drop of 206m, an incline of 52 degrees (which, once on board, we could tilt our seats a further 12 to make it 64 degrees — so we did) and passes through an 80m pitch-black natural tunnel for even more of a thrill.

With a quick pitstop to the loo and another line to navigate for an ice-cream in the souvenir shop, my boys and I were last back on the bus with just 60 seconds to spare.

Our bus driver rewarded our punctuality with a bonus stop at Echo Point for a better view of the Three Sisters (along with a million other buses spewing multitudes of tourists out their doors).

Despite the crowds, the lookout is well built so that everyone can get a spot along the wall with a good vantage point for an unobscured view of the trio of grand rock formations — and to snap a selfie (or 624 in some cases, it appeared).

We returned to the bus after a short wander around the area and were chauffeured back towards Sydney as fatigue from the early start, humid weather and the day’s higher-than-average step count set in and rested while the bus rocked some of us to sleep.

We disembarked at Olympic Park and took a 30-minute ferry ride back to Sydney, rounding into Circular Quay late in the day. As the sun sunk to that point, it cast a luminous golden glow over everything.

Despite the rushing and the crowds, looking back towards Australia’s most iconic bridge under the setting sun was such a grand finale.

I mean, I can hardly complain about crowds when we contribute to them. I can hardly complain about masses holidaying in holiday periods when that’s what we were doing.

Having someone else set an itinerary, provide transport, allocate times and deadlines, and organise all your entry tickets for one flat fee is sometimes just what you need.

Therefore, I can truly appreciate why the place was inundated with tour buses.

One day, I’ll return in my own vehicle with exploration time on my hands and a cache of research under my belt.

But I can almost promise you it won’t be at Christmas time.

Details:

Many companies offer tours to the Blue Mountains from Sydney with varying itineraries, but we chose FJ Tours.

Tour company: FJ Tour

Cost: Adults $172; children (under 12) $145

Inclusions: Entry into Featherdale Wildlife Park; Leura visit (buy your own lunch here); Scenic World entry (includes Cableway, Skyway and Railway rides); Echo Point stop; ferry river cruise into Circular Quay.

To book: fjtours.com.au