As for me, I can drive 30 miles from my house and see a beach. I pointed the wrong-side Toyota west.
Motorway 4 takes you from Sydney's western suburbs in typical expressway fashion for about 15 kilometers until it becomes the Great Western Highway, or State Route 32. The expressway goes from six lanes to four to, occasionally, two or three, depending on whether you were going up or down hill. The road gently winds upward through Blue Mountains National Park, taking you very quickly from metropolitan Sydney to rural Australia.
The Blue Mountains are not mountains like, say, Colorado or Utah; they're much more akin to the Appalachians of the Carolina-Tennessee border, or even the Ozarks of my youth. The land is heavily forested, and majestic rock bluffs ascend to overlook the trees and plants.
I stopped at a petrol station just outside Penrith, a town that appears to be in that transition between rural outpost and suburbia, not terribly unlike many small towns in the United States. I bought a liter of water and, owing to the red rapidly rising on my right arm, a bottle of sunscreen.
A few kilometers farther and all evidence of suburbia was gone. Just past Springwood, I slowed down for a Saturday morning flea market -- again, not unlike something across which you'd stumble in Mount Vernon, Mo., or Plant City, Fla. I stopped and bought a bag of homemade trail mix, but passed on the hubcaps, third-hand books and furniture.
The next town was Wentworth Falls, a very well-preserved small town with a train station, a hotel and a cafe. A road sign pointed south to a "Blue Mountains National Park Conservation Hut." I turned left (very carefully, of course) and made my way down to the conservation hut.
The hut was a typical state-park concession stand and trail head. From the hut, you could hike several trails of varying length and difficulty down toward the falls for which Wentworth Falls was named. I picked a trail of apparent medium difficulty and began descending.
It started out as a typical trail through the woods (the bush, as they call it here). Wooden planks had been laid for steps on the gentle downward slope. About 10 minutes into the walk, I came across the first "scenic lookout," and scenic it was. I was looking down on miles and miles of trees, about 300 feet below me, between two rock bluffs, each about a mile long. I felt like I could see all the way to Antarctica.
Worth a thousand words, and then some. I can add nothing more.
The trail's descent became a tad steeper from there. Then a tad steeper. Then, metal steps at such an angle that they might better be described as a ladder. With the midday sun shining above me and the temperature in the low 90s, a thought crossed my mind: At some point, you're going to have to come back up. I made a note of that thought and descended the stairs/ladder.
The stairs/ladder. Going down was the easy part.
The stairs/ladder rounded a corner to another stairs/ladder, then the trail leveled off again. I was now standing under a rock overhang. The temperature went down about 10 degrees as the forestation became thicker. I was now walking in dark shade. Water trickled down a steep rock to my right; the very beginnings of a waterfall.
I kept walking down the rock, toward the sound of a bunch of people who sounded like they were having a really good time. I couldn't see them, but I had been hearing them ever since I was on the stairs/ladder. I pressed on to find the source of the excitement.
The trail led me, about 10 minutes later, to a steep, slippery rock, down which water was descending at a rapid pace. This was where the people were.
They were rappelling, two at a time, down this rock, starting at a point about 250 feet up and ending in a pool of water about 8-10 feet deep. The rock was nearly vertical, and shiny with the water coming down. I wanted to tell them I knew of an easier way to get down here; just be careful on the stairs/ladder. But they seemed to be enjoying their method.
You can't tell from here, but the guy on the left nearly killed himself -- and the woman to his right -- on the way down. He seemed to have been somewhat ill-prepared for his vertical adventure.
I stood and watch, transfixed, for about 20 minutes. It was a group of college-age men and women, obviously part of a group; they were all wearing the same color wet suits and helmets. They were very serious about what they were doing. All the noise I heard was not whooping and hollering; it was instructions being barked from the guys holding the ropes just up from the landing pool.
After I determined that there was pretty much no way I would have ever had the athletic ability or the balls to do what they were doing, not 20 years ago and certainly not now, I headed back up the rock.
As the dark shade became bright Australian sun, I referred back to the note I had made about coming back up. And just for the record, yes, it was lung-splittingly difficult. Several stops later, I made it back to the conservation hut, in roughly half-again the time it took me to get down to the waterfall.
The thing that struck me as I was resting back in the hut: What I had just seen was strikingly beautiful, but not amazingly more beautiful than, say, the bluffs around the Lake of the Ozarks, or the woods around Blue Spring State Park near DeLand, Fla., or Caesar's Head up in Carolina. But it was a reminder to me of the incredible scale of the world. I was standing on a trail that could have been in the Ozarks, and I was standing 10,000 miles from home. It's really not a small world, yet it somehow is.
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