Caves House

Weds 19th cont...

The descent down from the Great Western Highway offers spectacular views and when you arrive at Jenolan Caves, the road narrows to pass through the great arch, where miners used to light candles and use the road as a dancefloor.

Our hotel for the evening is Caves house, the only accommodation at the caves entrance. There’s been accommodation here for over 140 years, initially a five-room hut, then later a proper hotel.

Caves House reminds us a lot of the Carrington at Katoomba, full of what I think you’d call faded elegance, though charming all the same. There’s a lovely old oak staircase with a beautiful carpet runner, but when you look closer, it’s really threadbare in parts and anyway, it only continues to the first floor.

In common with the Carrington, Caves House also has loads of sitting rooms, though unlike The Carrington, they’ve got real fires blazing away, filling the air outside with the lovely smell of woodsmoke (The Carrington favours living flame gas fires, which really lets the place down). They’ve even got a cinema, though as you’d expect from the half-arsed land down under, they’ve set out three rows of office chairs for you to sit on instead of anything comfortable, so though you might well like to watch whatever they’re showing, you won’t exactly be comfortable if you do.

And then there’s the heat. Perhaps it’s something to do with the big old-fashioned radiators, but these old mountain hotels just love to pump out the heat, and the radiators are frequently painted completely shut, so you can’t even switch them off. The only thing for it is to sleep with all the windows open. Is it any wonder that Australia is one of the naughtiest kids on the block when it comes to wasting energy? At least half of it’s coming out of the windows at Caves House Hotel.

In the evening we ate in the grand dining room, where the average age of the staff was eighteen and the service was a bit like the Julie Walters two soups sketch (what part of please bring our daughter’s ice cream at the same time as our main courses don’t you understand?). Still, the food was great (liquorice pannacotta – interesting is the best thing I can think of to say about it) and Ella amazed us by ordering her own dinner from the waiter in the most lady-like fashion (I want a butty), which she revised to “I’d like a bread roll please” after we’d explained that the foreigners don’t know what a butty is.

Anyway, I may sound as though I’m slating it, but there’s something so endearing about Caves House that you can forgive almost anything.