Research Excursion: Blue Mountains

Backed by the pretence of doing a rekky (1), we took the 2 ½ hour train ride to Katoomba and spent the weekend exploring the Blue Mountains. The weather disagreed with me greatly – it was windy and bitey (2), and I was not suitably rugged up (3). However, after a visit to the local hattery, I was apples(4).

We had brekkie (5) at a café that resembled a hobbit’s lair run by a commune of Christian hippies. It is as rare to see a Ruben sandwich on a menu as it is to see scrambled eggs. The food was flavoured with peace, love, and forgiveness. Yum.

A circuitous three hour hike that included a ride across a canyon in a glass-bottomed gondola lead us to Echo Point, where tour buses disgorged excited groups of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Indian, and Australian tourists, who seemingly unaware of the sprawling natural beauty in front of them, instead queued up (6) to have their picture taken with a chain-smoking, didgeridoo-blowing, kangaroo skin-clad, white-washed genuine Aboriginal (7) who greeted and thanked each tourist in their native tongue and made more in an hour than I make in a day.



On our way back to the train station, I came across a tourist brochure for ‘Goomblar’s Dreaming’, featuring the very man who had just scented my sweater with his shockingly pungent armpit musk (much to my cat’s eventual delight.) No matter how I tried to reproduce the printed brochure, this is what happened:

Spooky! I wonder if he has been coming around my apartment eating up all the ice cream in the middle of the night.

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(1) to gather information
(2) cold
(3) suitably dressed
(4) peachy
(5) breakfast
(6) to stand in line
(7) Blackfellah