Sydney, Australia (GMT + 10)

What an incredible day!  My high level summary:  Blue Mountains National Park & the 3 Sisters, Featherdale Wildlife Park near Blacktown, Cabramatta home to Little Vietnam and, finally, my new hotel right on Manly Beach at the end of the strip!

I thought my guided sightseeing day would start around 0900 today (as we'd agreed to yesterday) but, Hoa ended up calling me at ~0700 while he was enroute to pick me up - I had less that 1/2 and hour to clean-up, gather-up, check-out and meet Hoa in front of the Sheraton... no worries, mate.  I was up for the early start!

Hit the road right at 0730 after packing the back of Hoa's SUV with all of my luggage.  He tells me it's about an 80km drive out to our target sight seeing spot in the Blue Mountains National Park, Katoomba.  Very light traffic this Sunday morning on the roads in and around Sydney.  We will be taking the 4 Highway all the way out to Katoomba.

We're in no big hurry and I'm getting along fabulously with Hoa - very interesting guy and I'm enjoying getting to know him.  The day's started out overcast and quite cool - kinda odd to me for being summertime here in New South Wales.

One of the first places we pull over to just visit and see in the Blue Mountains is a little place called Wentworth Falls.  We stopped at the lake first before hitting the falls.  A bit of a hike to see - we didn't go all the way down.  Enjoyed the hiking and exercise.  The falls are a part of the Jameson Valley at the northern end.  Beautiful. 

Left Wentworth Falls and continued on to a small town just outside of Katoomba, Leura (means lava in Aborigine), just to walk around - Rosie would love the charm of this village - and have some breakfast.  Hoa found a place that was selling freshly made bread, bought a loaf with raisins in it, bought a couple of coffees and we just copped a squat along main street and enjoyed a bite to eat.  Was like an impromptu picnic. :-)

After chow we drove to Katoomba, parked, walked a bit around the town and then headed over to see the 3 Sisters and Echo Point.  Just like most places here in Australia, one could spend several days visiting any site - I don't have enough time to do that, which Hoa appreciates - but, I've ended up basically doing high speed, low passes everywhere in order to get in as much sight seeing as possible!

Phenomenal vistas!  The only minor downer was that fact that most of our time at Echo Point and the 3 sisters were during overcast conditions.  You can actually cable car down to the floor of the valley - which I would have loved to do - but, that would have taken a good 1/2 day.  OK, so we didn't do that but, we did hike down to 1 on the 3 sisters, climbed a very steep set of stairs down to a bridge over to the Sister and took reverse photos of Echo Point from there... boy, were my feet tingling!!  Couldn't pass up the chance.  :-)

From there we took a quick pause in Katoomba in order to purchase a food item from a fish & chips shop that I have very fond memories of - a Chico Roll!  They had them!  Bought myself and Hoa one... tastes virtually as I remember it ~40 years ago when I lived on North West Cape, Western Australia. :-)

Departed for Featherdale Wildlife Park about 30km outside of Sydney to go to a small Australian Wildlife Park petting zoo....  What a great time!  Extremely well worth the $23Au/adult.  Got to feed and pet Wallaby's, pet a Koala and just mingle with a lot of grey and red kangaroos and most every other type of indigenous Australian animal and reptile.  Spent a good hour and a 1/2 there.  Too much to justice to in this blog but, I'll post a ton of photos later.  Hoa basically filmed the entire park with my JVC digital video camera.

From there Hoa took me to Cabramatta, the Little Vietnam, of New South Wales about 15km south of Featherdale for a late Vietnamese lunch in a restaurant called 'Bau Truong'.  Delicious!  My first ever Vietnamese meal and a perfect host to talk me through everything I was enjoying.  After lunch we took a little stroll around Little Vietnam before we jumped back in the SUV for my lift to the Sebell Hotel on Manly Beach.

Got to the Sebell - incredible location - at ~1800.  Profusely thanked Hoa for a magic day, bid him goodbye - will see him tomorrow at the office to start a busy 4 days here in French's Forest - and checked into the Sebell.  I'm in the south 5 story tower (of 2 buildings) in room 417.  I have a partially obstructed view of the Pacific Ocean and look forward to doing some exploring over the week after work!

OK, let me get this posted and I'll work on photos later.

What a day!!!!!!!!!!  :-)