david taus

Climbing Mt. Solitary

Sydney is a big city with McDonald’s and Starbucks. I’m not on the other side of the world to walk past fast food joints. Off to the Blue Mountains.

The Blue Mountains are a mere 2 hour commuter rail ride outside of Sydney but are far enough away to be otherworldly. They are protected World Heratige sites and encompass a sizable area bordered by a dozen or so small towns. Each has positioned itself near a certain attraction there: the Jenolan Caves, the Grand Canyon (not THAT one…), the Blue Gum Forest, and arguably the most famous of them all, the Three Sisters. There you find the sleepy mountain town of Katoomba.

Katoomba was my kind of city: gear shops everywhere, pubs with live music nightly, a food co-op, a music store, and a world-renound national park 5 minutes walk south of the city. The YHA hostel there is amazing, probably one of the best hostels I’ve been to. There was a ballroom-sized common area with couches and beanbag pillows and a gas fireplace, a reading room, and an enormous kitchen that bustles with activity from around 5:30-8:00pm. It’s great to cook in the hostels. People are scurrying around asking for extra pinches of sugar or borrowing spatulas or something, and everyone makes enough food to go around. Everyone also has the foresight to bring in a bottle of wine which inevitably gets passed around during and after cooking. The kitchen stays impossibly orderly and clean as well; I’m not quite sure how it happens. Part of the joy of staying in Katoomba was bumbling around after dinner trading stories with the other travellers.

But the Blue Mountains. It was at elevation, maybe 2500 feet, but significantly colder than Sydney. It felt like November in New England up there, and most Australian families on school vacation just hung around the hostel. I made for the mountains after I got settled and had a nice hike down into the valley. Katoomba is situated up on a ridge, and as you walk into the park the ridge drops off abruptly into a gum forest below. There are several lookout points throughout, one being Echo Point with a view of the fabled Three Sisters.

Three Sisters? More like the Three Disappointments. No offense to the Aussies, of course. But geez. I’ve been spoiled on Utah, you see. The most famous rock formation in this World Heritage site consisted of three blunt spires of rock. I kept thinking: Bryce Canyon- The 20,000 Sisters.

Were it any concilation the steep descent into the rainforest was amazing. It was steep, possibly the steepest trail I’ve ever hiked, and immediately after disappearing under the rim the wind and cold subsided and things became damp and green. It was an excellent transition. The rainforest itself looked like some of the shady valleys you’d find in the White Mountains with gum trees in the place of the standard maples or oaks. It wasn’t the exotic wild that I was hoping for but still a welcome break from Sydney.

I stopped off at the visitor’s center to talk with a ranger about doing some backcountry overnights and all I found were two nice old ladies hellbent on talking me out of the idea. They tsk tsk’ed me and pushed dayhikes on me to the point that I backed out of the overnight idea. It was cold, probably 30’s at night, but I felt the need to justify that extra 15 or so pounds of camping gear that I brought. I settled on an extensive dayhike: Mt. Solitary. It is the entirely visible mesa-like mountian directly ahead of you if you’re standing at Echo Point.

I posted my intent to hike the mountain at the hostel and found Mathieu, a Frenchman who’s been travelling the world working at wine vineyards. We set out the next morning and dropped into the rainforest for our attempt on the mountain. We got to the ridge and started scrambling up huge boulders but Mathieu got cold feet and backed out. I pushed on a couple hundred feet more, but turned to see a storm moving in quickly. We slid down the ridge and took cover in the rainforest. We managed to avert the storm.

I’m happy to say that I never made it up Mt. Solitary. Nor did I spend the night out in the forest. Instead I had great night at the hostel talking sports and politics with some Brits and Scots. Mathieu and I even intercepted a guy from India on the way back up. He took a photo of the three of us with Katoomba Falls in the background, and I couldn’t help but think what he’d do with the picture and how utterly improbable it was to have those three people in the same photo in some rainforest in Australia.

The intersection of human narrative is mind-boggling when you’re travelling. You brush ever-so-slightly against another human life but only for a moment, then you are gone. You share something of some level of significance but then you pack your bag and leave before they wake up. You climb Mt. Solitary, but together briefly.

I left Katoomba this morning and have been travelling. I’ve started my push up the coast with the help of an unlimited bus ticket that will eventually take me to Cairns. In this prelminary stage of things I think I should have resigned myself to the interior; New South Wales in July is a rainy, cold place not unlike coastal New England in the autumn. I’ve been on a rickety bus with a broken transmission for the past six hours and now am in Forester, a sleepy beach town that apparently has dolphins in its small harbor. The town is completely dead at 7pm on a Sunday night; I’ve ventured out with a girl from Austria in search of food and drink and have only come up with a sandwich shop about to close. It’s rainig and windy and fairly cold, but on the plus side the Pacific is blocks away and the hostel has surfboards for us to use for free. I’m under mandate to try surfing, and I will, but it might not be here, now, in the cold and rain.

The hostel in Forester is all but deserted. I’m sharing a dorm with an Aussie visiting his dad and a Japanese guy biking from Brisbane to Melbourne (think Boston to Atlanta). A far cry from Katoomba. I spent a good deal of the bus ride reading up on the tropical wonders of Queensland and the starkness of the Red Centre, which helps me through this stopover in Foreseter. Some comfort, then: I boiled water and made tea. Short of climbing into your tent in a National Park, it’s really the best way to end a day on the road.

Posted by davidtaus at July 10, 2005 07:12 AM | TrackBack