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It wasn’t only vinaigrette that was drizzling the day we arrived in the Blue Mountains. The grey sky was hung visibly with rainstorms that billowed like net-curtains. The views were limited to the spindly fingers of eucalyptus trees scratching at the rolling cloud. We gave up and went inside. For lunch I had courgette soup followed by a smoked chicken salad drizzled with raspberry vinaigrette.

Less than two hours west of Sydney, the Blue Mountains have weird and wonderful geography, like a hairy green jigsaw when seen from the air. They are surprisingly rough and remote. Even now there are many views where you will not see a single human mark in a landscape that stretches for miles.

People have been escaping here for a hundred years, to the fresh climate and the outdoor activities. Also, particularly, for the scenery. Escarpments and cliffs stand out like huge layer cakes, their orange strata interlined with stretches of chocolate and cream. In places they are topped with an unexplained volcanic extrusion, giving some of the highest peaks a hardened lava cap.

They are also ancient. ‘Already here when the Grand Canyon was just a trickle’, I read somewhere. Like the mountains of Arizona the Blue Mountains are sedimentary, but they are eroding more slowly and so the area is still dominated by canyons rather than free-standing mesas.

Our second day by contrast was sizzling hot. It was time to take some exercise. There are marked trails all around the mountains, on the ridgelines and down into the valley floors. At one stage we found ourselves walking the ‘undercliff’, where soft strata have eroded into the rockface enough to create walkable paths midway up a cliff. Then we decided to take the walking a touch further, and in keeping with the terrain, we settled on an activity called canyoning.

Canyoning is a young and little known sport, sometimes called the ‘caver’s dessert’, because it was developed by pot-holers finding their way down gullies after coming out of cave systems. It’s a far cry from pot-holing, though. Really canyoning involves a walk along a remote riverbed and following the stream through the pinch of canyon walls. You find yourself walking, wading, scrambling over rocks and through the undergrowth and then, where the rock walls narrow, swimming. If boulders jumble in the gully, you jump into the water below, or if the drop is too high or too dangerous, you abseil. There are about 400 canyons to choose from in the Blue Mountains. Ours was Fortress.

As we made our way down, spotting water dragons, yabbies (small crayfish) and tadpoles almost the size of catfish, the angled valley walls closed up to the vertical until they towered above us. The sedimentary layers in the rock were clearly visible, etched by aeon’s worth of water action, which had carved huge scallops and flushed caverns in the rock ten feet across.

Down here you understand why it took explorers so long to find a route through these mountains. There were contributory reasons, among them a received tendency from African exploration to follow rivers, but in this canyon-dominated landscape explorers found themselves constantly bumping into three and 400 foot cliffs at the heads of the valleys. (Eventually they copied the Aborigines and followed the ridgeline instead, where there were just two routes across the whole range.)

Headed further and further down, we fixed a rope to the rock wall and abseiled down through the falling water of a cascade into a pool below. Having slid down so far into the depths of the earth, there was a surprise as we came to creek’s end. Suddenly we were standing three hundred feet up, in a cleft in the vertical valley wall, looking out onto the Upper Grose Valley. The water we had been following simply tumbled into space. From there we saw why the mountains are called ‘blue’. Apparently on a hot day oils released from the leaves of the Blue Gum give a blue tinge to the air.

All the exercise built a hearty appetite, so after walking out (canyoning usually involves a fair bit of walking) we stopped off at one of Leura’s genteel establishments, the Bon Ton Café, with its mock-classical dining room and old-style waxed paper straws that I haven’t seen since I was a child. The scorching weather spoke the choice of dish: asparagus, sage and prosciutto, sizzled in olive oil.

We headed back to the hotel, Lilianfels, which is a keynote for comfort and luxury in the Blue Mountains. Once the estate was the summer retreat of Sydney’s Chief Justice, Sir Frederick Darley. Lilian was his daughter and the ‘fels’ of the name denotes, in German, the cliff on which it stands. The dormer windows and pitched roof of the original holiday home (now one of the hotel’s restaurants, Darley’s) became the inspiration for a new building, which opened as the hotel in 1992.

The bright red brick and modern interior of new Lilianfels need a little ageing for it to take on an ambience of Victorian grace and finery, but when it comes to late 20th century relaxation Lilianfels is just so. Rest and recuperation in the mountains nowadays is all about herbal baths, facials and body marine mudpacks, so there’s a spa and beauty parlour, snooker and tennis. Interestingly this has come full circle since a century ago (with a period in between when holidaymakers went to the beach), though the water treatments are a little less fearsome than they were then. I was happy enough to join in. After the exercise of the day before it seemed appropriate to spend a lazy day around the pool and sauna.

At Darley’s Restaurant you take a drink on the large wooden veranda with its spindle balustrades before moving inside to the panelled and heavily carpeted interior. There’s a warm and homely atmosphere to go with the fare of traditional country cooking and game. I went for river trout. To top it off I chose a frozen hazelnut praline ice cream bombe with a caramelised sugar crust. It stood there, an escarpment of layer cake, beige strata interlined with cream and chocolate and topped with a crystallized caramel cap, almost volcanic in its hardness. Hmm. I’d come across that somewhere before, I decided.

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