37. The Blue Mountains

With a footprint of about 662k+ acres, Blue Mountains National Park is located 80 km west of Sydney and is easily accessible to Sydney based tourists via a 2 hour train ride and 20 minute walk.

When previously deciding how best to view the park, we took advice from some of the youtube travel videos, and chose to buy tickets to Scenic World, which boasts a few major features, including Scenic Railway: world's steepest passenger railway, Scenic Skyway: cable car travelling across the gorge with views of Katoomba Falls, Scenic Cableway: a cable car transporting you down 650ft to the Jamison Valley floor and forest. Sounds like a great way to gain access and see all the major attractions of the park, right?

Total bust. What a waste of $. ($40 US ea). The rides were very short, and, in my opinion, kind of lame, with limited visibility due to dirty safety windows & screens. Turns out we could have easily accessed views to all of the major attractions by just hiking around the park (which we did anyway). Maybe its entertaining for people with kids or less mobile adults, but we were not impressed.

As far as the park itself goes, the Jamison Valley, Katoomba Falls, and famous Three Sisters rock formation were all nice, but I've honestly seen better. To give credit though, I understand that there were other less touristy parts of the park that we may have enjoyed more, but we're tourists with limited time so we chose to see the highlights.

A nice hiking/walking day anyway.Read more