Blue Mountains self-drive audio guide

63 places · no fixed route · every story starts by itself

Every place on the map

Each red dot is a place with its own story. The story starts by itself when you reach it — on foot, by bike or by car.

All 63 places in this guide

Here is every place the guide tells you about, with the first line of its story:

1. Parramatta — Old Government House — Parramatta — the second town of the colony, founded in November 1788, only ten months after the First Fleet sailed into Sydney Cove.
2. Prospect Hill — A low green rise on the western edge of Sydney, and one of the most important viewpoints in Australian history.
3. Featherdale Sydney Wildlife Park — Featherdale Sydney Wildlife Park, a family-run wildlife park in Doonside about forty minutes west of the CBD.
4. Nepean River & Victoria Bridge — The Nepean River — the last barrier between the plains of Sydney and the mountains.
5. Emu Ford — The shallow crossing of the Nepean where the first way over the Blue Mountains began.
6. Arms of Australia Inn — A roadside inn on the Great Western Highway and one of the oldest buildings in the Penrith district.
7. Nepean River — You are crossing it now, and on the far bank the road starts to climb: the Blue Mountains begin at the water's edge.
8. Lennox Bridge — A small stone arch over a creek, and the oldest bridge of its kind still standing on the Australian mainland.
9. Knapsack Viaduct & Lapstone Zig Zag — Knapsack Viaduct. Seven sandstone arches across a gully, a hundred and eighteen metres long and thirty-seven metres high, built when the railway first had to climb into these mountains.
10. Lapstone Hill — This ridge is the first wall of the Blue Mountains, and everything that ever tried to get west had to beat it right here.
11. Glenbrook Village Cafés — Glenbrook. The first village of the mountains, and the last easy coffee before the climb.
12. Euroka Clearing — Euroka. An open grassy flat under tall blue gums, and the easiest place near Sydney to stand quietly among wild kangaroos.
13. Mount Portal Lookout — From here you look straight down at the place where the Nepean River leaves the mountains and steps out onto the plain.
14. Tunnel View Lookout — The railway below disappears into the mountain, and that tunnel is the one that has carried the main line since 1913.
15. Red Hands Cave — A shallow overhang in the sandstone, and on its wall dozens of human hands, printed in ochre.
16. Hawkesbury Lookout — A grassy shelf on the very edge of the mountains, with the whole Cumberland Plain below you and, on a clear day, the towers of Sydney on the horizon, sixty kilometres away.
17. Kangaroo Rock Carving — Just below Hawkesbury Lookout, on a flat shelf of sandstone, a kangaroo is cut into the rock, and it is still exactly where it was made.
18. Norman Lindsay Gallery — A stone cottage in the bush at Faulconbridge, a garden full of sculpture, and inside it the work of the most argued-about artist this country has produced.
19. Prime Ministers' Corridor of Oaks — An avenue of English oaks in a quiet park, and every one of them was planted by a Prime Minister of Australia, or by their closest living relative.
20. Ticehurst Park — A long ledge of sandstone behind the houses of Faulconbridge, and one of the very few Aboriginal engraving sites in these mountains that is signposted and easy to reach: the path in runs along a strip of grass between two…
21. Kings Cave — A wide sandstone overhang a few minutes' walk from the road near Linden, with a spring inside it and one word cut into the wall.
22. Woodford Academy — A long, low colonial building standing right on the highway, and the oldest group of buildings in the Blue Mountains.
23. Kangaroo Petroglyph — A second kangaroo, and a different one. The first is down at the eastern edge of the mountains; this figure is cut into the sandstone up here, some four hundred metres higher.
24. Wentworth Falls — The highest waterfall in these mountains: a hundred and eighty-seven metres, in three drops, straight off the cliff into the Jamison Valley.
25. Watering Hole — Below the top of Wentworth Falls, where Jamison Creek gathers itself before the long drop, there is a pool in the rock with a beach of sandstone around it.
26. Darwin's Walk — The Charles Darwin Walk. From the park beside you a track follows Jamison Creek down to the top of the falls, about two and a half kilometres of boardwalk and stepping stones, and it is the walk Charles Darwin took on the seventeenth of…
27. National Pass & Valley of the Waters — National Pass. Halfway down a vertical cliff there is a ledge, and someone cut a footpath along it.
28. Gordon Falls Lookout — At the end of Lone Pine Avenue in Leura, a railed platform on the cliff edge with the Jamison Valley opening in front of you and Mount Solitary across it.
29. Elysian Rock Lookout — Elysian Rock. A small platform on a rock shelf above the Jamison Valley, and almost nobody here.
30. Olympian Rock Lookout — Olympian Rock. A small platform on the cliff edge at Leura, with the Jamison Valley below you and Mount Solitary lying across it, and usually nobody here at all.
31. Sublime Point Lookout — Sublime Point. A narrow finger of rock pushed out into the Jamison Valley, with cliffs falling away on three sides of you.
32. Leura Cascades — A picnic ground in deep shade, and a creek that comes down a staircase of mossy ledges beside you before it falls off the cliff into the valley.
33. Everglades House & Gardens — Everglades. Five hectares of terraced garden cut into a steep hillside, and the best garden of its period in Australia.
34. Leura Mall — A wide street under big trees, lined with cafés, a bookshop, galleries, a sweet shop and a candle shop, and the most comfortable hour you can spend in these mountains.
35. Bygone Beautys Teapot Museum — Bygone Beautys. Behind a shopfront in Leura is the largest private collection of teaware on the planet: thousands of teapots, spanning five centuries, gathered by two collectors over a lifetime.
36. Echo Point & the Three Sisters — Echo Point. The most photographed view in New South Wales, and the three rocks standing off the cliff in front of you are the Three Sisters.
37. Eaglehawk Lookout — Two minutes along Cliff Drive from Echo Point, and this is where the photograph is better.
38. Scenic World — Three rides into the same valley, and the reason the queue is worth it is the railway.
39. Katoomba Falls & Cliff Drive — Katoomba Falls. Katoomba Creek reaches the edge of the plateau here and goes down into the Jamison Valley in three cascades, one under the other.
40. Cahill's Lookout — A quiet platform at the western end of Katoomba, looking into the Megalong Valley, with Boars Head Rock jutting out below.
41. Narrow Neck — A ridge about a kilometre wide and ten kilometres long, running south from Katoomba with a valley on either side: the Jamison to the east, the Megalong to the west.
42. The Carrington & the Paragon — Katoomba's main street, and two buildings on it that tell you what this town was.
43. Wollemi Pine — Two Wollemi pines stand at the entrance to the car park, and they are easy to pick out: one straight slender trunk, short branches, no spreading crown.
44. Hydro Majestic — More than a kilometre of white buildings strung along the highway at Medlow Bath, and every one of them was one man's idea.
45. Govetts Leap Lookout — Govetts Leap. The best view in the Blue Mountains, and most visitors never come here because it is ten minutes off the highway.
46. Evans Lookout — The same Grose Valley from the other side, and the start of the finest short walk in New South Wales.
47. Anvil Rock & Wind Eroded Cave — Anvil Rock. A dirt road north of Blackheath, a bare rock platform at the end of it, and a block of sandstone balanced there in the shape of a blacksmith's anvil.
48. Campbell Rhododendron Gardens — Eighteen hectares of cool-climate garden on the edge of Blackheath, made and still run entirely by volunteers.
49. Megalong Valley — This is the start of the Megalong Valley. From here the road goes over the edge and down: about ten kilometres of switchbacks off the escarpment onto a valley floor of green paddocks, cattle and horses.
50. Dryridge Estate — Megalong Valley winery — Dryridge Estate, the first vineyard in the Blue Mountains. The vines went in around the year 2000, on a valley floor that had been cattle and dairy country for a century and a half: Megalong grew grass, and nobody thought of wine…
51. Mount York — A grassy headland at the western end of the plateau, an obelisk standing on it, and the view that ended the first crossing.
52. Victoria Pass — The descent off the western escarpment, and the oldest piece of road still carrying the highway in Australia.
53. Hartley Historic Village — Hartley. A village of sandstone buildings in a green valley at the foot of the pass, and almost nobody lives in it.
54. Hassans Walls Lookout — Hassans Walls. The highest lookout in the Blue Mountains, about eleven hundred metres up, on a cliff above Lithgow.
55. Zig Zag Railway — The engineering that finally got a main line down the western escarpment, and you can still ride it.
56. Jenolan Caves — About an hour south-west of Katoomba, under the limestone, are the oldest open caves known anywhere on Earth.
57. Blue Mountains Botanic Garden, Mount Tomah — Mount Tomah. The cool-climate garden of the Botanic Gardens of Sydney, twenty-eight hectares of it, sitting at a thousand metres on the top of an old volcano.
58. Mount Wilson — A village of enormous gardens under enormous trees, on another cap of basalt, and it feels like somewhere else entirely.
59. Walls Lookout — A rock platform on the northern rim of the Grose Valley, and one of the few views in these mountains that you have to earn.
60. Bilpin — A ridge of orchards along the road, and the place Sydney comes for apples.
61. Bellbird Hill Lookout — Bellbird Hill. The eastern end of the mountains, and on a clear day you can see the towers of Sydney from here, sixty kilometres away across the plain.
62. Richmond — A country town on the Hawkesbury plain, laid out by Governor Macquarie in 1810 as one of his five towns, and still built on the same plan.
63. Windsor — The oldest inland town in Australia still doing its job, and the right place to finish this drive.

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By Andrew Sorokin, Sydney guide since 2006.