Jenolan Caves

Jenolan caves is a must visit location near Sydney. It's close to blue mountains, so can be combined with the blue mountain visit.
These caves are a beautiful natural wonder which is amazing to look at. There are multiple caves to visit and depending on your time, you can decide on which ones to visit.
For the more adventurous, there are tours which include going in the caves without lights and exploring caves which can be accessed only by crawling inside.Caution for claustrophobic people - best to go for open caves or chose a cave which can be explored in a short duration.
My trip -

We started from Sydney early morning and took our first halt at Katoomba for some fresh breakfast. From there we took a short detour to the 3 sisters for photo ops. Back on our way to Jenolan and reached there by 1pm - I would suggest to come to Jenolan directly if you want to see more than 1 caves.

Due to limited time and cave tour timings, we were able to accommodate only a single cave - the Oriental.
But what an experience it was!  Oriental is known as one of the most beautiful caves in the world and it definitely lives up to that.





The caves are formed in the sedimentary rocks by underground water flowing through it. The water cuts the rocks in form of pillars - called stalactites and stalagmites.  And these can actually grow to be really huge.
Apart from these pillar like structures, there are the curtains and waterfall structures and crystallised structures.

The cave administration has taken great care and imagination to build the tours. You go in taking in the scientific details about how these caves actually form. Plus the guide also describes how they were discovered and how they were opened for public via tunnels. With switching off all lights, the guide makes you experience how the early
explorers may have experienced - which is quiet scary .. :)

The lights come to life one by one and they have been placed with such creativity that it enhances these internal structures of curtain and crystals to make an awesome, beautiful picture. It's kind of hard to describe in words but it's really breathtaking to look at. The tours roughly last for 45mins to about an hour.

Once out we were back on our way, since we were ravenous by now. Back to Katoomba and some late lunch brought us to the end of this awesome trip. I haven't stopped raving about these caves ever since I've been back.

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