Blue Mountains Caving at Jenolan Caves Australia

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Blue Mountains Caving

Australia is filled with natural wonders and impossibly beautiful sites. If it’s your first time in Australia, you may want to plan a 3-week Australia itinerary to experience as many highlights as possible. But even if you only have a few days in Sydney, one of the highlights I highly recommend is the Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves, Australia. Located just outside Sydney, the Blue Mountains and Jenolan Caves make for an idyllic day trip from the city.

My Trip To Jenolan Caves

My physical limitations are often in conflict with my desire for adventure and spontaneity. There’s a certain romantic notion of adventure and simply going where your mood and the road take you. However, this can be incredibly difficult when the “road” is made of dirt and stairs and your mood is, “Dammit, I’m in so much pain!!! Why didn’t I plan for this?!” My visit to Jenolan Caves was one of these times.

When asking locals about the must-see attractions in and around Sydney and New South Wales travel tips, one place kept coming up: Jenolan Caves. I’d never been in a real proper cave before, so the thought of seeing the largest limestone cave system in Australia immediately appealed to me. A few months earlier, I had attempted to inner-tube through a cave system in Belize, though heavy rains ended up flooding the caves and thwarting my plans. In lieu of tubing down a lazy river and enjoying cave art, our guide convinced me to try zip lining. This, unfortunately, ended with my brakes failing and me smashing directly into a large tree, crushing my ankle.

Now five months later, I was hobbling around Australia in a boot, still trying to heal the torn ligaments in my ankle, yet somehow contemplating more nature adventures. What can I say, I’m a glutton for punishment. The boot was cumbersome and annoying, but not impossible to walk in. Though I was definitely concerned about heading into these scenic caves and climbing stairs with my foot in a boot.

Visiting Jenolan Caves & Blue Mountains on a Day Trip from Sydney

You have a couple of options when it comes to visiting the caves. If you’d like to take your time and stay a few days, there are plenty of great places to stay in the Blue Mountains.

How much time you need depends on how much you love the outdoors and what you want to do. There are tons of things to do in the Blue Mountains, but I was most attracted to visiting Jenolan Caves, and not in great physical shape to explore much more than that. So, I contacted a local tour company in Sydney offering Jenolan Caves Tours. They offered to pick us up from our hotel and take us to these NSW caves, complete with a stop at the Three Sisters, an unusual rock formation in the Blue Mountains.

The company assured me that while there were “some stairs,” the tour was not a difficult walk and I should be fine. One three-hour drive later, I came face to face with this:

Clearly we had very different ideas of what constituted “some stairs.” But I had driven three hours to see a cave half a world away, and I was not driving back defeated. I was seeing the damn cave. Busted foot and all!

It’s important to note that Jenolan Caves is actually nine separate caves, each with varying degrees of difficulty. NONE of the standard cave tours can accommodate wheelchair users. However, their website mentions this: We can arrange a special tour into the first part of the Orient Cave, which is wheelchair accessible.  To enable us to arrange a guide, you must book in advance for this special tour. Non-wheelchair users with reduced mobility can also enjoy Devil’s Coach House and The Imperial Cave, the easiest of the ‘standard’ tours.

What I do not recommend from personal experience is Baal Cave, which seemed like some sort of extreme boot camp torture experience and was not at all the breezy walk with “some stairs” that I was promised on the phone.

If you have any doubt in your mind about walking uphill or up and down stairs in potentially narrow, dark conditions or think caving might be too difficult given your level of mobility, please contact the Jenolan Caves directly to arrange for a tour that meets your needs. Do not trust that an outside tour company knows the ins and outs of this or any other destination. There is no substitute for speaking with an actual employee of the attraction you are going to visit. You can email the staff at Jenolan Caves via the following address: reception@jenolancaves.org.au

Now, who’s ready to check out some 340 million-year-old caves?

The local indigenous Gundungarra tribe called the area “Binoomea,” meaning ‘Dark Places’. They visited the caves to bathe their sick in the curative subterranean waters.

I’m not going to lie, it was a pretty dark place. It was difficult for me to navigate the one cave we did explore. I wish I could have seen more, but just walking through one of the “easier” caves had me in a great deal of pain and ready to drive back to the hotel. That said, it was extremely beautiful to look at this underground wonderland. The caves stay at an almost constant 59 degrees Fahrenheit, so it was a welcome relief for this chronically overheating traveler. But if I had it to do over again, I would have arranged an accessible tour in the Orient Cave.

The Blue Lake Outside Jenolan Caves

Outside the caves, you’ll find a trail (rated easy to moderate) alongside the blue lake. The lake takes on this extraordinary blue hue from the refraction of light bouncing off the limestone and bedrock. I didn’t venture too far down the trail as it was damp earth on the day we visited and I didn’t feel as though I had stable footing. If you do make the walk down the trail, keep a lookout for wallabies and platypus, especially around the lake.

There are accessible bathrooms outside along Caves Road as well as a restaurant, Chisolm’s. I didn’t have anything to eat at the restaurant, but if the online reviews and comments from tourists on our trip were any indication, you shouldn’t either. It currently has 2 stars on Google reviews. However, there are several tables and chairs set up outside where you can enjoy a snack if you pack one. Ever the fancy people, my fiancé and I packed various cheeses and crackers, which we enjoyed amongst the company of our new, brightly colored bird friends.

Blue Mountains and Three Sisters

After leaving the caves, we made a quick stop by the Three Sisters, a rock formation in the Blue Mountains close to the town of Katoomba. The sisters were formed by years of erosion. The Aboriginal legend states that three sisters, Meehni, Wimlah, and Gunnedoo, lived in the Jamison Valley as members of the Katoomba tribe. They fell in love with three men from the neighboring Nepean tribe, but the marriage was forbidden by tribal law. The brothers were not willing to accept this law and decided to use force to capture the three sisters. A major tribal battle ensued, and the sisters were turned to stone by an elder to protect them, but he was killed in the fighting, and no one else could turn them back.

We arrived at the scenic overlook shortly before sunset and only had a few minutes to appreciate its beauty before being loaded back on the bus to Sydney, where we would get a solid night’s sleep, and I would apply half a roll of KT tape before finding our next adventure the following day.

Where to Stay Near Jenolan Caves

If you’d like to extend your stay, continue canyoning, caving, and exploring more of the destinations the Blue Mountains offers, like Wentworth Falls, Carlotta Arch, and other formations, my recommended accommodation is Jenolan Caves House. The Caves House is only a minute’s walk from the Grand Arch and provides a unique wilderness retreat for you outdoorsy types. The entire Jenolan Karst Conservation Reserve is a world heritage site. The unique and historic Caves House is on the New South Wales State Heritage Register. Each room is uniquely designed, providing an individual experience. Staying here gives you beautiful natural surroundings in all directions and saves you those long same-day road trips to and from the city of Sydney.

Word of caution: Jenolan Caves House mountain lodge has only one wheelchair-friendly guest room. The onsite restaurant and Caves Cafe are also wheelchair-accessible. However, many of the common area bathrooms and Kanagra-Boyd Function room do NOT have wheelchair access. If you require wheelchair-accessible accommodations, it’s best to book well in advance and confirm your room before traveling.