The Blue Mountains had a tough time getting into the List. The site was deferred once, and the next year the IUCN advised deferral again. “We can’t have a WHS based solely on its eucalyptus trees, can we?” was their argument. And anyway, there are eucalyptus trees all over Australia, also in parks that are already WHS. The WH Committee thought otherwise, possibly helped a little by the fact that Australia (Cairns) was hosting the Meeting that year. And after promising that it would look after the eucalypti well, Australia was given its souvenir WHS.

For my visit to this WHS, I stayed for 2 nights in the town of Katoomba, the largest in the area and 2 hours away by train from Sydney Central. The town is all faded glory, reminding me of visits to the High Tatra in Slovakia or Rhine cruises in Germany. Tourism once was big here, but although I visited during the Easter school holidays most of the hotels/motels/b&b’s had ample rooms available.

From Echo Point, the main viewing point over the valley, the surrounding mountains, and the Three Sisters, I hiked down via the Giant Stairway. Like Ian reported below in his review, I did not find it tough although the walk is labelled as "hard". Over the past weeks, I often experienced here in Australia that the signs are overstating the difficulty or the time that it will take to finish a particular hike. It's probably to deter the totally unprepared. At least I was wearing hiking boots and had a small bottle of water with me. Some people were coming up again while I was walking down - "too steep" they told me. Well, it's just a lot of stairs, even with handrails and benches to rest on. After 25 minutes I arrived at the Dardanelles Pass. This path is not at the bottom of the valley, but more on a ridge about halfway. From there it's a flat walk to the spectacle of the Scenic Park. Those who do not like to walk can take the cable car here, or the little train which is in the Guinness Book of Records because it's the steepest railway in the world. I took the train back up again, the only passenger as most people like to do this rollercoaster ride downwards.

As the forest is quite thick, I did not see much wildlife here. Mostly birds, among them the screaming Sulphur-crested Cockatoo (you hear them when you're walking down the Giant Stairway, it's as if you will enter a pit full of birds), the small Eastern Yellow Robin and big long-feathered birds which I guess are Superb Lyrebirds.