Blue Mountains National Park vs Royal National Park
Two parks in New South Wales. Blue Mountains National Park has 92 tickets and tours to book; Royal National Park has 5 tickets and tours to book. The table and the two notes below put them side by side; the full pages have what to see, the ticket and the timing for each.
The Blue Mountains begin about sixty kilometres west of the centre of Sydney, and their national park, a vast wilderness of sandstone cliffs, forested valleys and waterfalls, is the most visited in New South Wales and the classic day excursion from the city. They are reached by car along the Great Western Highway in an hour and a half to two hours, by countless coach tours, or, very conveniently, by the electric trains that leave Sydney's Central station about every hour and take two hours to Katoomba, the chief town, stopping at all the villages strung along the ridge; at Katoomba a hop-on hop-off bus links the station with the lookouts. The park is free, apart from a vehicle fee in the Glenbrook section. It must be understood that the towns lie on top of a narrow plateau and the park lies below and around them, so that every visit begins at a cliff edge.
The Royal National Park lies on the southern edge of Sydney, its northern boundary only about thirty kilometres, under an hour by road or train, from the centre of the city, and it is the second oldest national park in the world, a broad tract of sandstone heath, forested valleys, rivers and magnificent sea cliffs, which Sydneysiders simply call the Nasho or the Royal. It is unusually easy to reach without a car: trains on the Illawarra line stop at Loftus, Engadine, Heathcote, Waterfall and Otford, all of which have walking tracks leading directly into the park, and a small ferry crosses from the suburb of Cronulla, which also has a railway station, to the village of Bundeena, on the park's north-eastern corner, in half an hour. Motorists pay a daily fee per vehicle; walkers and cyclists enter free. The park's hub is Audley, on the Hacking river, fifteen minutes from the northern entrance, with the main visitor centre, a restored dance hall and cafe of the 1940s, picnic lawns, and a boatshed hiring rowing boats, canoes and bicycles.
