I've felt pretty damn content since I arrived in Australia, and walking around the cool rainforest trails of the Blue Mountains National Park was definitely the high point - not only in the literal sense. I always love escaping from the urban sprawl and losing myself in the wilderness, especially when I don't have to actually get lost, can stick rigidly to easily accessible, well maintained trails and get home in time for dinner.
But all peaks must have their troughs (again, I'm not literally talking about terrain, but it is stylistically helpful that my mood changed in direct proportion to my elevation above sea level) and the illusion shattered when I got back to Sydney centre and had to deal with rush hour traffic for the first time since I got here.
It's so much more annoying being able to actually understand the inane banter taking place around me after spending so long in the non-English-speaking world, like a guy loudly narrating every stage of the journey over the phone and some teenagers dissecting a recent episode of Geordie Shore with more reverence and enthusiasm than necessary. I forgot how terrible people can be. Utopia my arse! Australia has the same problems as anywhere.
So the next morning I escaped to the mountains again, returned to the city in the evening and repeated the cycle for the rest of the week, riding the sine wave of stress into the sunset. Wheeeeee!
Katoomba,
Blue Mountains National Park
Blue Mountains National Park
I've decided I'm definitely retiring to a mountain town.
How long until I get to be an old man? Hurry up Chronus, you temporal tease!
Some kind of ancient aboriginal glyphs in Kingsford Smith Memorial Park.
If only there were some way of deciphering them
The Three Sisters from Echo Point, which the aborigines named after that nasty sports pub in Edinburgh... alright, I haven't done my required reading this time
Mount Solitary is kept company by a load of bloody flies
Prince Henry Cliff Walk. I'm literally following in his footsteps, whoever he was (?)
Unambitious bushwalking. This might be my first time in a temperate rainforest, I'm used to them being clammy but this was so fresh
Once again, I forgot waterfalls don't look impressive from the top
So I headed downhill to get an eyeful
Dave in a furnished cave
Wait, how am I going to get back up?
Fortunately, the misleadingly named but exciting Scenic Railway cuts a 90-minute walk down to 45 seconds
Today's irrelevant soundtrack: H. G. Wells, The First Men in the Moon (Alien Voices dramatisation)
