Blue Mountains day trip itinerary: hour by hour from a Sydney hotel

Coaches and minibuses collect from central Sydney hotels and from a meeting point near Circular Quay, and the first pickups start at about seven. Most days are moving by half past, and the first hour is motorway: out through the western suburbs and onto the M4, with the driver-guide talking through the day ahead.

The order of pickups is set the night before, so the time on your voucher is yours and not a window. Be in the lobby five minutes early; on a coach day with forty people, one late passenger is ten minutes for everybody.

On the small-group listings the vehicle is a minibus of ten to twenty, which does the pickups faster and gets onto the motorway first. That is one of the quieter advantages of a small group, and it shows up again at every stop.

The koala lives on the plains, and this is the stop that surprises people who expected to find it in the mountains. Featherdale Wildlife Park at Doonside and Sydney Zoo at Bungarribee both sit just off the motorway, and most listings stop at one of them on the way out.

Featherdale is the older park: koalas at close range, kangaroos and wallabies you can hand-feed, wombats, dingoes and a long list of birds, in about an hour. Sydney Zoo is larger and newer, and on our top pick the stop includes a koala photo in the price.

Either way, this is where the animal photographs happen. The mountains themselves have wild kangaroos, and one small-group listing goes looking for them at dusk, but the koala is a wildlife-park animal on every day here.

From the plains the road climbs steadily to a plateau above a thousand metres. The temperature drops five to ten degrees on the way up, which is why every guide mentions a layer, and the first glimpses of the valleys come as the road reaches Katoomba.

The blue haze that names the range is real and it is chemistry: fine droplets of eucalyptus oil in the air scatter the short blue wavelengths of sunlight. It is strongest on a warm still morning, and from the first lookout it hangs over every valley.

Some listings make a short stop in Leura on the way, a mountain village with a main street of galleries and cafés; others save it for lunch. The small-group days often add a lookout here that a coach cannot park at.

Every Blue Mountains day trip from Sydney stops at Echo Point in Katoomba, and it is the view on every brochure: the Three Sisters, three sandstone pillars standing out from the cliff, with the Jamison Valley falling away below them and Mount Solitary across the far side.

The lookout itself takes ten minutes. The good half hour is the walk: the track along the cliff edge to the top of the Giant Stairway, where a short flight of steps puts you on the first Sister at Honeymoon Bridge. Coach days usually allow the walk; the small groups make a point of it.

Morning light is best here, with the sun behind you and on the rock, which is why most operators put Echo Point before lunch and the rides after it.

Two listings here include lunch in the price: $195 sits down in Katoomba, and the small-group day at $211 shifts the meal to the evening. The rest give you about an hour of free time in Katoomba or Leura to find your own.

Leura is the prettier of the two, with a tree-lined main street and cafés that fill fast when a coach arrives; Katoomba has the pubs and the art-deco Carrington Hotel. On a coach day, order quickly: forty people arriving at once is a queue.

The hour matters more than it sounds. It is the one part of the day you plan yourself, and it is the best chance to walk a mountain town rather than look at it through a window.

Scenic World is the part of the day children remember, and most listings here include all three rides in the price. The Scenic Railway drops through a cleft in the cliff at 52 degrees, the steepest passenger railway in the world, into rainforest on the valley floor. The Scenic Walkway is a 2.4-kilometre boardwalk through that forest, past the old coal mine the railway was built for. The Scenic Cableway brings you back up the cliff, and the Scenic Skyway crosses the gorge on a glass floor 270 metres above the valley.

Ninety minutes is enough for all four; two hours if you walk the full boardwalk. The queue for the Railway is longest straight after lunch, which is the argument for doing the Skyway first.

The one listing that skips the rides is the walking-and-dinner day, which spends this part of the afternoon on a rainforest track instead. Everything else here includes them, and the card says so.

Most days fit one more stop before the drive home, and this is where the listings differ most. Coach days tend to pick a lookout with parking: Wentworth Falls, where a 187-metre waterfall drops off the edge of the plateau, or a viewpoint back over the Jamison Valley.

Small-group days go where the coach cannot: Lincoln’s Rock on Kings Tableland, a bare sandstone shelf with the whole valley below and no railing; or a quiet platform off the Prince Henry Cliff Walk. The private days stop wherever you ask, and Blackheath and Govetts Leap are within reach.

Late afternoon light is the second-best of the day, and on the sunset listing this stop becomes the point of the whole trip: the Three Sisters going gold from Echo Point at dusk.

Down the escarpment and back onto the motorway, with most coaches at the first Sydney drop-off between half past five and six. The traffic into the city is the one variable, and drivers know it; the later pickups in the morning are the later drop-offs at night.

The cheapest listing here does something different: it ends the driving at Parramatta and puts you on a ferry down the river to Circular Quay. Fifty minutes on the water past the harbour bridges is a better last hour than the motorway, and it lands you in the middle of the city rather than at a hotel door.

The walks-and-dinner listing comes back later still, after a meal in the mountains and a stop to watch wild kangaroos at dusk. Eight hours on the listing, and home about nine.

Pickup at seven, a wildlife park on the plains, the Three Sisters late morning, lunch, the Scenic World rides, one more lookout, and Sydney by half past six.

Every listing here keeps that shape. The differences are the group size, whether the rides are included, and where the last stop is.

Our top pick, $150, follows the order exactly with a koala photo at the zoo. The cheapest, $142, ends on a ferry instead of the motorway.