Koalas on a Blue Mountains tour: where they are and which days see them

The Greater Blue Mountains is a million hectares of eucalyptus forest, and the koalas in it are wild, scattered and asleep for twenty hours a day in the tops of trees you cannot reach. A day tour has six hours in the mountains and spends them at lookouts, on boardwalks and at Scenic World. The chance of seeing a wild koala from any of those is close to nil.

So the tours solve it on the way. Featherdale Wildlife Park at Doonside and Sydney Zoo at Bungarribee are both a few minutes off the M4, forty minutes out of the city and an hour short of Katoomba. An hour there puts you beside a koala, in a paddock with kangaroos that take food from your hand, and past wombats, emus and a dingo, before the road climbs.

It is also why the koala photo is the first thing on most itineraries and the reason the day starts at seven. The park opens early, the mountains are best by mid-morning, and the order works.

Eastern grey kangaroos live across the Blue Mountains plateau and come out to graze in the open at dawn and dusk. The clearings at Euroka near Glenbrook and the grassland on Kings Tableland are the reliable places, and both are empty of coaches at the hours that matter.

The small group with dinner at $211 is built around this. It starts later, skips the wildlife park, walks through the middle of the day, and reaches a grazing clearing as the light goes. The group watches a mob from a few metres away, the joeys included in season, and then goes to dinner. It is rated 4.9 by 305 people, and it is the listing for anyone who has seen a kangaroo in a paddock and wants to see one that is not.

The deluxe small group at $166 adds a kangaroo stop too, in a group of ten at most, and keeps the Scenic World rides and the koalas.

Book $150 for a koala photo at Sydney Zoo and the three classic stops in one day, with 2,885 ratings at 4.8.

Book $149 for Featherdale, the more Australian of the two parks, on the most reviewed day here.

Book $211 for wild kangaroos at dusk on the plateau, in a small group, with dinner afterwards.

The plateau is not empty of animals; it is full of animals that do not pose. Sulphur-crested cockatoos scream over Echo Point every afternoon, crimson rosellas feed on the lawns at Leura, and a lyrebird on the Scenic Walkway will imitate a camera shutter if one goes off near it. Swamp wallabies cross the tracks in the morning and freeze if you stop.

The small-group drivers know where to look and stop the minibus when a kangaroo is standing in a clearing beside the road, which happens more than the coach timetables allow for. On the walking day the guide names the birds by call before anyone sees them.

None of it is guaranteed, and that is the appeal. The park on the plains gives you the koala for certain; the plateau gives you whatever is out that day, and on a still autumn evening near Euroka it is often a mob of forty.

The parks are the same in every month; the plateau is not. Kangaroos graze in the open longest in the cool months, from April to September, when the grass is short and the evenings come early, and a dusk stop in July can put a mob of forty in front of the minibus. In summer they stay under the trees until the light is nearly gone.

Joeys ride in the pouch through spring and are out on the grass beside their mothers by late spring and early summer, which is the best window for children. The birds are loudest in spring, and the lyrebirds on the rainforest tracks display through winter.

Koalas, at the park, are awake most often in the morning, which is when every tour here arrives. The timing is not luck; the operators built the day around it.