Day trips from Sydney

The Blue Mountains

These mountains give no peaks: they form a sandstone plateau split by enormous gorges, with eucalypt forest as far as you can see. From the Echo Point lookout, in Katoomba, you see the Three Sisters, three rock spires leaning into the void, and a valley that fades into blue. That colour is eucalyptus oil scattering light, and it’s why the park is called what it’s called.

There are two ways to do it and both are good: along the top, chaining lookouts together, or down to the gorge floor on the tracks. To go down there’s the scenic railway, with a fifty-two-degree gradient that makes it the steepest in the world. It began as a mining train hauling coal out of the valley and now it carries people. It’s all done by train from Central, no car and no organised tour. Take warm clothes: it’s a thousand metres up and it frosts in winter.

The Royal National Park

South of the city, an hour by train, there’s a national park declared in 1879 which is, after Yellowstone, the second oldest in the world. That fact alone justifies the trip: when this was protected, the very idea of a national park was seven years old.

What’s there is cliff coast, sand coves, bush and a thirty-kilometre coastal track you can do in sections. The odd jewel is the Figure Eight Pool, a natural figure-of-eight pool cut into the rock platform, which only appears at low tide and which has become famous to the point that visits have to be regulated: people have gone at high tide and had to be rescued, because the waves sweep the platform.

If you go, read the tide table and obey it. The rest of the park is quiet, vast and has train stations along its edge.

The Hunter Valley

Two hours north grows Australia’s oldest wine region, planted since the first half of the nineteenth century. It’s the classic weekend outing from Sydney and it works as one: cellars, food and road between the vines.

What you need to know for the visit to make sense: the grape here is semillon, and it makes a white that’s a global oddity. It’s bottled young, at very low alcohol, and freshly made it’s lean and doesn’t say much. What happens is that with ten or fifteen years in bottle it turns into something toasty and complex that resembles no other white. It’s one of the few wines in the world made with a long decade in mind. If you taste a young one and an old one from the same place and can’t tell the difference, there was no difference.

And a practical warning: this is roads and wine, so either someone who isn’t drinking drives or you go with hired transport.

The whales, and the northern cliffs

Between May and November humpback whales pass in front of Sydney on their annual migration between Antarctica and warm northern seas, and this isn’t a compulsory paid excursion: you see them from land, from any cliff facing the open ocean. Thousands of them travel this coast each season.

The places are the headlands: North Head at Manly, reached by ferry and bus, and The Gap at Watsons Bay, also reached by ferry, are two balconies over the ocean. You bring patience, watch the horizon and the spouts appear. You can hire boats that go out to find them, and that gets you closer, but it’s worth knowing you can see them from the cliff just as well and for nothing.

And besides, those two headlands are among the best lookouts in the city even if no whale passes: sandstone cliff dropping sheer into the Pacific, and behind it, the harbour.