We had to get up early since we had to meet the bus that would take us to the Jenolan Caves at 9am. That was when the bus would leave Katoomba, which itself was about 2hrs away by train. So we got up at 6am in order to catch the train. If we were completely unadjusted, that would have made it 1pm, so it wasn't too bad. The train ticket prices were actually decent too, roundtrip it was $25. So it's just the airport tickets that they charge an arm and a leg for.

Let me take a moment to remark on payment in Australia (and to a lesser extent, New Zealand). It looks like credit is not as prevalent over there -- cash is still predominantly used. We tried to use cash too where possible, because of the extra 3% fee associated with converting from USD that our credit card companies charge, but we were only carrying so much cash around. The first weird bit is that when you use your credit card, they ask you, "PIN or sign?" I guess a lot of people over there can enter in a PIN to verify the charge. Anyways, I don't know if my credit card has a PIN or not, so I always told them that I sign for the credit card. And 90% of the time, they would look at the back of the credit card and check to see if the signatures match.

Well this is a problem for me because as I found out on my very first transaction (at the train ticket counter in the airport), I neglected to sign my name on the back of my credit card. And that's because nobody in the US cares about your signature. Here's one man's experiences with what you can get away with in the US (there's also a part 2): http://www.zug.com/pranks/credit/. If you're too lazy to read it (it's a funny read), he basically escalates the signature on the receipt. Here are some of the signatures he makes that nobody cares about: An X. "Please check ID." "I stole this card." Shamu (with a picture of a smiling whale). Some stick figures. A musical staff with notes (with lyrics). The only time in which he is stopped is when he went to Best Buy to buy their most expensive HDTV (all three of them in stock), and tried to sign it "NOT AUTHORIZED". (In fact, Best Buy probably could have sold him the TVs, it doesn't actually matter what you sign your name as: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2864/does-it-matter-if-you-sign-a-contract-with-a-name-thats-not-your-own)

So I'm at the ticket counter, and the guy behind the counter tells me that I need to sign my name on the back of my credit card. The first thought that comes into my mind, "That doesn't provide any security at all -- what are you going to do, check to see if the signature that I just signed in front of you matches the signature that I wrote two seconds later?" Anyways, it was a moot point since I couldn't write anything on the back of my credit card with the ball point pen provided. So instead I just showed him my driver's license instead, which satisfied him. In fact, I'd say about 70-80% of the credit card transactions I made over there, the cashier or clerk conspicuously checked to see if the signatures match. Of course, I couldn't write on the back of my card with a ball point pen (I finally managed to get a faint "A" as part of my standard, "Ask for ID"), so I had to keep explaining that it meant to say, "Ask for ID" on the back and show them my ID. So that was different.

Back to our trip. We probably got slightly scammed by the taxi ride over to the train station -- he said his meter was broken and charged us $15 (the return trip was like $11). We barely made the express train. The train was pretty empty this early in the morning, and all the seats were facing backwards (we boarded at Central, which was the departing station for this train). The seats were relatively easy to switch over to face the other direction (unlike CalTrain -- I can never figure out how to change them...). Patricia switched over three or four in a row before finding one she liked, I guess. =p

The train ride was uneventful, but when we stepped off at Katoomba, man, it was freezing!! I mean, I still dressed warmly since I knew we would be going into cold caves, but I thought I could save my really warm wear for the Tongariro crossing. Originally I thought if we had some free time we could head to the end of Katoomba's main street to go to the info center and ask questions about the hike we would do the next day, but it was just too cold to even walk a few blocks down. We were a little early for the bus, so we did walk down a little bit -- primarily to find something we could pack in our backpacks for lunch. We ended up getting some sandwiches from Subway. We also found a small little mall off the street that provided some shelter from the wind and there was a quaint little shop that we got some hot chocolate and a muffin to recover from the cold. I also bought some gloves since I realized when I pulled mine out of the suitcase in the morning that my old gloves had a couple holes in them from my New York/Washington trip a couple years ago.

When we were maybe 10km (metric, yay!) away from the caves, the bus ran into a traffic jam of sorts. There were a bunch of cars going our direction stopped on the road. The road wasn't actually designed to handle tour buses, so there was no way that our driver could get us past the cars. There were a bunch of people standing around, so the driver jumped out and went to see what was happening. Turns out, a car had gone over the side of the road, and one of the persons was injured. Some of the other people in the bus (there were ~15 of us) said they could see the car down below, but I never got a glimpse. The drop off the side was pretty steep, maybe 300ft (imperial, yay!) at ~70-80 degree incline at most places. It looks like the people climbed back up the easiest route, and even then, it was probably about a 50 degree incline. The injured person was bleeding from his arm -- I stayed in the bus so I didn't see how bad it was -- whether it was a cut, or it was broken, or what. There were a couple french dudes in the bus who went to go help (one was a dentist). We didn't actually end up stopping that long; they apparently got the bleeding to stop, and our driver couldn't find a first aid kit in the bus. So when it looked like nobody was in any serious danger we went on towards to the caves (also, we could get more help for them there).

The first thing the driver did when we got to the caves was to let the rangers know what had happened, and then he gave us the tickets for the caves and we went off. When booking the tour I didn't really know which caves we would have time to tour. The tour people said we really only had one option if we wanted to do two caves, the Lucas cave and the Orient Cave, with a short 30min break in between for lunch (which is why we grabbed the sandwiches). It was actually warmer inside the caves than outside with the cold air, so we weren't suffering badly at all. Our second tour guide (for the Orient Cave) mentioned in passing that a helicopter had come by to take somebody out, so I assume that it was the guy with the arm injury, and he made it safely.

The caves were fun. There were all sorts of interesting structures, and the tour guides would tell us the names of a few (I'll post examples in pics and captions). Patricia mentioned she could see bats in some of the holes, but I wasn't so sure if they were really bats or not. The second group miffed me a little bit because there was this family with a tall, red-headed kid, and the kid kept touching different formations even though we weren't supposed to touch anything. The Lucas cave was a good introduction to caves -- I've never toured a cave before, so to have all the lights prepositioned and everything in order to see the entire cave was nice. I only remember being in two other caves: an Indian cave in Yosemite, which was tiny and none of us had a light (except for the leader) and I had to continuously bump into the girl in front of me for fear of getting left behind, and the one in Seattle that I went to with Jason and Prasanth -- we had to bring our own lights for that one too. So my previous experiences have only been flashlight/match illumination.

I didn't bump my head or fall down once. Yay.

The Orient cave was cooler because it had a whole lot of examples of helictites which are like stalagmites and stalactites except they grow sideways and curvy and basically every which way except straight up or down.

The gift shop afterwards had a group in it that was embarrasingly Chinese. One lady took something out of its bag, and the shop owner was kind enough not to make them buy it, but they had a hard time getting it back into the bag. And one man tried to haggle the price.

We had some time to wait for the train when we got back, so we looked around a little bit (suffering from the cold), and ended up getting some food to eat on the train. I got a bacon and egg burger that was pretty nice. Bacon is different in Australia, it looks more like slices of ham, but with fatty edges. We made the upper level of the train car we were in smell like food. This Chinese family also boarded a little later -- the daughter looked like she was at least fifteen or so, but when she talked with her dad, she sounded like she was closer to six or seven. I originally thought that maybe she was deaf, but it sounded more like she had some sort of neurological issue. It made me a little sad.

Day 2 was cold, but I would be prepared the next day -- we were going back to Katoomba, so I would make sure that I had my thermal pants, scarf, new gloves to protect me from the cold, and my hat to protect me from the sun.