Kind of Blue

A radio microphone can be deadly in the wrong hands. For our ten hour round trip to the bewildering Blue Mountains – New South Wales’ sprawling eucalyptus rainforest 260km (161 miles) west of Sydney – a rabble of English, Scottish, Swedish and Japanese tourists unknowingly form a captive audience for the idle chatter of Nick the bus driver. As a burly, knowledgeable scout leader, he would be played by Brendan Gleeson in the film version, doing his best attempt at resigned, quiet contempt. Nick’s gift for rhythmic, hypnotic narration has been perfected over the years to resemble that of a soothing day nurse: it’s the sort of measured tone you need when you’re administering some form of heavy sedation.

After an hour of staggering through Sydney’s ceaseless traffic and suburbs (over 600, apparently), it quickly becomes apparent that Nick’s patience for the job exhausted many years ago. Although he’s impossible to ignore, threads of monologue seep through, like when you're skipping through the stations on an AM radio. From Nick’s take on Sydney’s infrastructure crisis to predicting the weather forecast, the next thing I remember hearing was about the research into his family tree. “Fire destroyed the records… so many facilities these days… traced back to the 1500s…”, and then later, “You may be an adult but you’ll always be my child.” I suddenly started to envy the Malaysian lady in front of us for not being able to understand English. “My son’s six foot one… seriously, 30 years of age and he won’t leave home…” And so it went on, and on, and on.

The weather is a concern, of course. If cloud sets in over the mountains then visibility from the designated viewing platforms will be seriously limited, particularly the one over the fabled Three Sisters - a famous procession of three tall rock formations. But then the Blue Mountains has always been regarded as a world onto itself: encompassing over 4400 square miles of dense, fiercely unremitting terrain, the valley resembles a boundless sea of green from the higher reaches with gorges some 760 metres deep, and is practically impenetrable from the inside. This would have been the view for those first European settlers who within 25 years of claiming Sydney had expanded so far north and south (to the natural boundaries of the Hawkesbury River and the Royal National Park in the south) that the only route left for development was west, directly into the path of the mountains.

Kent born farmer and wine maker Gregory Blaxland is credited as the first European settler to cross this dividing range, leaving in 1813 with fellow explorers William Lawson and William Wentworth, and “attended by four servants, with five dogs, and four horses laden with provisions, ammunition, and other necessaries,” according to his diaries. The expedition only succeeded after the team listened to the advice of the local Aborigines who directed them to higher ground and to avoid the dry river beds, which had led so many previous expeditions into complete disaster. So formidable was the fear of the forest that prior to Blaxland’s successful crossing, the Blue Mountains were regarded as the ultimate deterrent for any escaping convicts. At ground level it’s easy to see why: not only is it vast, sheer and dense, but it all pretty much looks the same.

People still get lost in it today. In 2009, a nineteen year old backpacker from London left a Katoomba hostel on a 10 mile hike and wasn’t seen for 12 days. While living off seeds and berries, a team of 400 people fought through thick fog and bitter temperatures in the height of a New South Wales winter to try and locate the boy. His father was clearly less than sympathetic when he was finally reunited with the boy: “I can’t say I’d kill him because it would just spoil the point of him being back,” he said to the press. “But I'm going to kick his arse.” According to Nick, the teenager, called Jamie, was originally part of one of his tours. Once we had reached Katoomba ourselves and had been released from another one of his inane ramblings, I can easily understand why Jamie chose this point of the trip to quickly make a dash for it.

Katoomba is an idyllic township which now shuttles tourists deep into the bowls of the valley thanks to a couple of ingenious methods. One is a hair-raising cable car some 200 metres high, which is obviously quite unnerving, but positively breezy compared to the alternative: the World’s Steepest Railway. This train drops you down 415 metres of track from a nearly sheer cliff face at an angle of 52 degrees at the sort of white knuckle pace that could only ever have been designed for freight, rather than, you know, humans, with families and respiratory systems.

Upon the discovery of coal in the range, Katoomba became a key mining town from 1878 until the late 1930s, despite the mines being located in possibly the most awkward place on the planet. But human endeavour is never stronger than when commerce is concerned, so the staggeringly powerful train dates from roughly the same period, used to transport coal from the valley depths where some 100km of tunnels wind their way through the rock, all picked and blown and smashed by hand. We travel backwards up the thing in a practically vertical state, dragging us to the top of the mountain like some strange train wreck in reverse. It’s completely terrifying.

But then you’re catapulted back into a gift shop so quickly that it’s as if the violation was just some scary nightmare. Too quickly, actually, as we soon found ourselves away from Nick’s grasp and with time on our hands. This is where we tend to resort to a brand new game where we think of alternate messages to write inside the wrappers of Mars Dove Chocolate Promises, which usually contains trite and nonsensical whimsy like, “Money talks, chocolate sings” and, “Too much of a good thing is wonderful”. I personally can’t wait for the day when a disgruntled Mars employee rolls into work and replaces all the messages with things like “Have a shit day” and “Go fuck yourself”.

While dozing on the way back into Sydney, Nick effortlessly relies on his successful capability of disengaging his mouth from his brain to keep his passengers awake. I distinctly remember regaining consciousness at one point and hearing, “…the standard procedure is to take on as much ballast as you can,” before trying to think of more messages to write inside chocolate wrappers. “You’re going to get fat” seems somewhat appropriate.