Mini-Rolls and Milkshake Gums

Into the Blue Hue

It was a cold, sky-blue Saturday when I discovered the wonderful concept of a “quiet carriage”, a section of a train where making any sort of noise is frowned upon. This is particularly wonderful news for anyone who has attempted to read while finding your seat surrounded by several inebriated members of a happy hen party. Unfortunately on this particular Saturday I was hungry and had just purchased crisps, which have to be the loudest food on the planet. This made me the first human to attempt the impossible task of eating crisps in a noiseless fashion, inserting a hands into the packet and taking pains not to let the plastic crinkle, in the same way one would play Operation. My speed averaged at 2 crisps per hour and I munched at a speed and volume which I hoped wouldn’t distract the man opposite us from his paper. The glares he gave us made it clear that we were failing. The stress and mortification caused by constantly breaking the silence of the carriage ensured that we lost more energy stressing than we gained from the four crisps we managed to digest.

Then, as if I hadn’t been stupid enough, I decided to open a bottle of 7up. It made a loud hiss, not the normal 7up hiss that sounds a bit like a dying snake but the hiss of a basilisk in its prime. The sound echoed across the room, shattering the peace and quiet of the carriage, waking wailing babies and triggering a cacophony of tutting and scolding. I could feel the atmosphere turn sour in the room and I was growing uncomfortable with the murderous glint in the eye of the man with the newspaper. Thankfully, all this happened just as we pulled into Katoomba Station and I fled the train before the other passengers could source pitchforks.

Katoomba is a quaint village which sits on a plateau looking out over the undulating forests of The Blue Mountains. These mountains are a World Heritage Area and a member of The Great Dividing Range (sort of like the European Union for Australian mountains but without pointless milk lakes, tomato jungles and financial crises). It is a breathtaking area of limestone cliffs and gum trees as far as the eye can see, the oil from the millions of eucalyptus trees creating a blue hue on the horizon and providing the early explorers with a catchy name for the area. 

In an effort to make this blog as comedic as possible, I had timed my visit for the weekend so my three cousins could visit me. On our first day, after much pleading by the cousins, we visited Scenic World. This is a tourist establishment which has made millions out of the fact that 99% of the human race would pay anything to avoid using the stairs. Scenic World offers a cable car and inclined railway down to the valley floor along with a few boardwalks. Its popularity means that of the one million hectares which make up the Blue Mountains National Park, 99,999 hectares are empty, touristless forest while Scenic World’s one hectare of land looks like a page from Where’s Wally.

Despite all this giving out, I have now been to Scenic World twice. My childhood visit led to a life-threatening and traumatic experience. I had found a signpost for a 9 hour hike down into the valley and struggled to understand why my family, which included a 75-year old man and a pregnant woman, might find this hike difficult. It was decided instead to get the Scenic World train (really a series of glorified roller coaster carriages) down to the valley floor followed by a cable car back up. My natural aversion to anything remotely similar to roller coasters made me cautious, but the photo on the brochure showed smiling people with freakishly white teeth riding the train as it slowly ventured down the escarpment. If they enjoyed it, surely I would too.

To celebrate the fact we could make it down the escarpment without ropes, walking boots or machetes we bought an ice cream to consume on our journey. I settled into my seat, taking the mandatory seatbelt to be a sign of a nation obsessed with health and safety rather than an ominous warning of a fiendishly fast descent. The train set off, and before I could say “Jainy mac, this is a fast beast,” we had zoomed down to the bottom, clutching our ice creams tightly. I was horrified, my trust in smiling stock-photo-people quashed forever. I spent my time on the valley floor in a state of shock, wondering whether the awaiting cable car would also decide to travel at the speed of a bullet. 

On this visit, the train was mercifully out of service so I recounted my tale of horror and betrayal to my cousins as we queued for the cable car. Their immediate observation was that my ice cream would have blown away if I had been travelling at the speed I claimed, shattering the credibility of my deadly descent and making me out to have been a scaredy cat in my youth (which, incidentally, I was).

Not wishing to have any more of my childhood traumas rationalised by a 6 and a 12 year old, I quickly drew their attention to the blue ocean of forest beneath us. Youngest expressed his disappointment about the colour of the mountains. We had been talking about ‘the blue hue’ of the escarpments for days and he had been led to believe that he would find mountains as blue as Iggle Piggle. 

We were squeezed and pinched down a queue onto the cable car carriage and took in the outstanding views of the Three Sisters and Mount Solitary, a tabletop of rock towering above the valley floor like weetabix in a sea of milk. The carriage was already crowded when a tour guide pushed her way through the doors, crushing her tour members against the wall. As all the seats were taken, I sat on a step near the railing. Within minutes, Youngest was informing me that using a step as a seat was an act of gross misconduct, or something along those lines. I refused to move and he began to take it rather personally. His tone developed from that of an indignant citizen to the shrieks a toddler would make if they were forbidden to put their hand inside a shredder just because they felt like it. His face had soon turned sunset-red, contrasting wonderfully with the blue hue behind him. His cries faded when the cable car plunged into the canopy, leaving its inhabitants blinking in the half-light of the forest floor. 

“Alright, beautiful humans, I love youse all, have a safe trip back up,” the tour guide concluded as we waited for the doors to open. I looked at her as though she had announced her intention to eat cement. What a wishy-washy thing to say and what a leap of faith in the human race to profess her love for a carriage full of people who, for all she knew, could have committed the most heinous of crimes. It must be unconditional love if she could profess it after her commentary was drowned by the wails of Youngest’s ear-piercing voice box. And would she still profess her love for us if she knew that, metres from where she stood was a man who had the audacity to eat crisps in the quiet carriage of a train? There are few things in life which are less forgivable. If she knew all this, would she even wish her tour group a safe trip, let alone profess her love for them? 

Before I could ponder such naivety further, we found ourselves grabbed by Scenic World employees, shoved against a green screen, photographed and released into the valley floor. The cousins posed for a photo on a bronze mining cart before they realised that they hadn’t eaten in a couple of hours and were therefore nearly at death’s door. Middle and Youngest crawled their way along the boardwalks, periodically collapsing, before it was time to send them to the Hungry Children Recovery Unit. Oldest lasted longer, the brave soul. We walked as far as a bridge called Cook’s Crossing but by then his hunger had caused him to rewrite Botanical labelling, scientifically classifying Hot Chocolate Trees, Milkshake Gums and the McTree. He was hallucinating and in desperate need of some fast food to revive his sinking spirit. As we began to head back I took one last lingering look at the path which ran on into the bush and into the unknown.

We caught up with Middle and Youngest, who had found a small park overlooking the valley (and who, I should also assure you, were supervised). They were squeezing hours of entertainment out of four plastercened grottos which stood in a corner of the park. Youngest opened up a shop in one, which sold anything but seemed to specialise, for reasons beyond my comprehension, in blankets. His shop did very well for several minutes until Middle took up residence as a squatter on the shop roof. The shop soon closed, not because of any legal dispute with said squatter, but because the shop owner had gone rock climbing. Soon all three cousins were perched on the grotto roofs arguing over which of them should get the highest seat. Fearing that things would begin to turn into a cheap James Bond remake, we quickly decided it was time to go. 

As we had not planned dinner, we stopped at what has to be my favourite grocery chain in Australia. Shopping in Woolworths is a very wholesome experience. Perhaps it's just that their green-handled trolleys make me think of lawnmowers and summer grass; maybe it's just that I like watching the cold air being pumped into the vegetables with such force that it becomes white steam (a bold yet affordable hint at a quality shopping experience ). However, shopping with the cousins added a certain stress to the occasion. Our trolley was commandeered by Captain Youngest, who’s restricted height ensured the bright green trolley bar was the sum of his vision, greatly affecting his steering ability. He was too proud to admit that his steering the trolley like a car in Grand Theft Auto was causing problems but he agreed to give Middle a go at the wheel if we promised to buy what he called a “giant mini roll”. After much confusion over this paradox we realised that he was talking about a swiss roll, which is basically a giant version of a Cadbury’s mini-roll.

Middle’s trolley skills also left much to be desired, so much so that when his father accused him of bumping into three people he protested “no, I only hit two!” 

By the time we got to the checkouts, the trolley was festooned with price tags which had been dislodged from various shelves after the trolley had rammed into them. We left the staff to put the store back together. On our way back to the cabin, we stopped at a lookout to admire Mount Solitary stained in gold by the setting sun. I gazed longingly down at the valley I had come so close to finally exploring, feeling the same frustration I had felt at being told I couldn’t take my family on a 9 hour hike in the bush all those years before. The valley was mere metres below me and yet it could have been as distant as the moon. But it was hard to stay frustrated with a vast horizon and the sight of three relentless relatives wrestling on the ground. I might not have made it down to the valley floor but I had witnessed hallucinations from near starvation, inspected a pop-up shop run by a kid who was far too young to legally sell produce and had a stranger confess their undying love for me into a microphone. Today had been a day for the bizarre, tomorrow was a day for hiking. Suitably recovered, I followed the others back to the cabin, ready to gorge on a giant mini-roll. 

Sunset on Mount Solitary