12th January

The Blue Mountains, 35 miles or so west of Sydney, look neither blue nor particularly mountainous as we roll through them on the train. Despite innocuous initial appearances, though, they're part of the fourth longest mountain range in the world - the Great Dividing Range - which stretches all the way from North Queensland down to Victoria, separating Australia's Eastern seaboard from the rest of the country. The train from Sydney to Katoomba, in the heart of the mountains, takes around two hours - Mike gets stuck into the gargantuum Harry Potter tome he's insisted on lugging along, while I entertain myself by keeping the camera constantly trained on him in the hope that he'll do something interesting.

Next time I might bring a book.

Although the Blue Mountains are supposedly one of New South Wales' most popular tourist attractions, if our fellow travellers are anything to go by most visitors don't actually want to do anything much once they get there: the vast majority of people troop straight out of Katoomba station into one of the tour bus offices, and spend the day being driven from one scenic spot to the next, disembarking only for long enough to stretch their legs and take a few photos before being scooped up by the next bus. These hop-on, hop-off buses aren't cheap - you're talking $34.50 for a day ticket with the most popular company - and it seems to rather miss the point of being in an expansive wilderness, so we decide to branch off on our own. Despite the fact that I'm in charge of the map-reading (I'm not sure which of us thought this was a good idea) we manage to pick up the Prince Henry Cliff Walk, which runs along the top of an escarpment. The path meanders through lush, dense forest, and we follow it as far as Echo Point, which basically seems to be a large car park, but offers spectacular vistas across to the Three Sisters rock formation. According to a Dreamtime legend, a witchdoctor turned three sisters into stone for their own protection, and as he himself was killed in battle no-one was able to restore them to human form. Considering each "Sister" is over 3,000 feet tall, they must have been pretty hefty girls.

The Three Sisters also mark the start of the Giant Stairway, which, depending on which source you trust, comprises either 861 or 911 steps (nope, I didn't keep count) - some hewn from the rock, some metal - descending sharply into the subtropical undergrowth. Having come down the stairway, you have three options for getting back up and rejoining civilisation: the world's steepest railway, Australia's steepest cable car, or walking back up all 861 / 911 steps. Mike and I being in silent agreement that we'd sooner gnaw off our own toes than retrace our steps, we opt for the cable car. It soon transpires that we're the only people on board who actually walked down: everyone else took the cable car down to the valley, had a wander around for ten minutes and caught the cable car back up again. Several of them are nonetheless kitted out much more impressively than us, though lacking our smug glow of worthiness.

13th January

Mike has a bit of a thing for zoos, so a visit to Taronga came high on his wish list. I won't say too much about it - a zoo's a zoo, after all; I'm sure you've all seen your fair share of them (if not, a word with your parents might be in order; drop the phrase "deprived childhood" in a couple of times), but this is a pretty damned good (if exorbitantly expensive) one - here are a couple of pictures just to give you a flavour:

Besides the usual culprits we also saw wombats (the cutest things since baby shoes, which they even bear a slight resemblance to if you really squint - I challenge you to resist), echidnas, the gloriously bizarre cassowary, a Tasmanian Devil who looked like he was having a really good dream ("mummy, look, he's laying eggs!"), and the elusive platypus. I thought I'd spied one in the outdoor pool, and kept my camera trained on him for a good fifteen minutes in the hope that he'd move again, but with hindsight I might just have been stalking a rock. Luckily the platypus in the indoor enclosure was feeling a bit bolder - apparently they're so shy that sightings are by no means a given.

We finished off with a talk from one of the spider keepers, who passed round a funnel web (a candidate for the world's deadliest spider), a red-back (a close relative of the black widow; doesn't Australia just have it all?) and a huntsman spider, which, though harmless, is actually the most skin-crawling of the three, being both extremely large (to our uninitiated British eyes, at least) and extremely hairy. They do eat mosquitoes though, so I've resolved to try to warm to them, though I have a feeling this strategy may work better academically than if I ever actually see one in my room.

14th January

While Mike was busy doing that work thing I hear occasional rumours of, I took myself off to the Powerhouse Museum, supposedly Australia's most visited museum. By "supposedly" I mean that's what the guidebook says and I choose to trust it implicitly rather than do any actual research. The museum's largely dedicated to science and design, but, rather amusingly, is currently holding a "back to the 80s" exhibition. There's nothing to make you feel elderly like having swarms of seven-year-old children staring wide-eyed at cases full of the toys you grew up with.