The Blue Mountains, Australia
By Dave • September 16th, 2008
In Down Under, Bill Bryson describes what a terrific surprise it is to him to step off a plane in Australia and find Sydney: a busy, beautiful city full of productive, intelligent people working for world-class, multinational companies.
He has a point. What should be here, of course, is a deserted wasteland, assuming of course, that you could even reach it, being as it is cut off by the sea and thousands of miles from anywhere inhabited.
The other astonishing thing is just how little of Australia is inhabited. Barely anyone lives here, and those that do cluster in the lower right hand corner (the south-east, for the geographically-minded). Venture much beyond that and population and towns quickly give way to nothing much at all.
This will be forcefully brought home to you if you go to the Blue Mountains. The Blue Mountains are a few hours west of Sydney - we visited Katoomba, a fabulously cosy town on the edge of the mountains that brought to mind small-town California with its comfortable coffee shops and crowded antique stores.
We ate and spent a quiet hour pottering around stockpiles of carefully-shelved Victoriana. Then we went to see the Blue Mountains.
This is the part where, if you think about it carefully, your jaw will fall uncontrollably open, and you’ll realise what a desolate and lonely place Australia can be. The Blue Mountains cover nearly 4,000 square miles - 16 times bigger than Singapore - and there really is very little there. From our high vantage point in Katoomba, the trees stretched to the horizon. There wasn’t a plume of smoke or manmade line between us and the horizon and, I imagine, there was very little even beyond that. We were just 100km from Sydney. Go 100km from London and you’d be in Northampton, which I suppose wouldn’t be ideal, but it wouldn’t be actively lonely. In the Blue Mountains, which are virtually next door to Sydney, you could walk for no more than an hour and be totally, possibly irretrievably, alone.
That, more than the view, was what I loved about the Blue Mountains. What isn’t to love about a country that doesn’t so much lie beyond the horizon as loom threateningly behind it? There’s nothing to make you feel insignificant like the realisation that you’re sitting on the edge of a virtual eternity of nothingness.
Dave is feeling a bit bigger now, thanks. Still, let’s aim not to get lost on the way to Cairns, eh?
Links
Flickr set
Katoomba on Google Maps
The early exploration of Australia
