Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Sydney Central to Wagga Wagga, departing 7.42am
My second trip to Sydney was also a successful one in that I had genuine catch-ups with people. I'm sitting on the train now and I'm trying not to give in to my increased appetite. Along the tracks there is usually a dug out wall of yellow/orange sandy soil, topped with army-coloured, long, untrimmed grass and usually a farm fence. I have no idea who lives on the properties around here, or what is done with all the spreads of the greener rain-fed grass that you get used to on the XPT train, but it gives me an idea of the size of rural Australia.
I am discovering Pink Floyd about 15 years later than everyone else, just as I did the Beatles. But it's never too late, as they say. Never too late.
Sometimes the plains out the window spread up into hills and it is not the rain-fed grass you see but the unkempt stuff that you find next to the tracks and craggy rocks placed here and there. This is the scenery my father and I passed driving south to the snowy mountains on our skiing trips. I'd sit quietly in the front – we didn't talk that much, but it was ok – and dream of stopping the car and just running and frolicking across the plains. Of course to do that, I'd have to be a free and independent adult in my own car with my friends. In first-year uni, I asked John on our ski trip to pull over so I could do just that. It was something I had always wanted to do, I pleaded. That may have been around the time I lost my adventurous spirit...
...And by the time I was sitting on a plane to Vietnam en route to Taiwan, I was doing it perhaps not out of adventure but out of stubbornness. I was adventurous in my ignorance of what was to come, and I coped alright with setting up a life in Taiwan, yet something was always missing, and had been for a long time. Enjoyment of life. Everything was an effort, done in spite of myself. I am courageous and brave, I told myself. I can do amazing things with my life despite feeling like shit all the time.
That time I drove into the mountains and feared for my own safety was adventurous, yet it wasn't shared with a friend. A lot my so-called adventures have been spent alone.
Rusty barbed wire fences and piles of fencing wood and a strange rock that looks like the beginnings of the native Australian Stone Henge. Stone Henge meant nothing to me when I saw it, but I listened to the audio guide and sat and pondered it for as long as the organised tour allowed. Losing interest in the world is a sign of depression – however I just thought I was a boring person. Boring and unattractive. But never mind.
More unkempt grass. A small dam with clean, fresh looking water. I am proud of the wattle trees I see in a line along the tracks. The barren remains of trees, in a group. I would like to see them on the night of a full moon, with no other light but the moon, when everything does in fact become silver.
Like on my little beach at the beginnings of my travels. I did not use the internet for a record time of 5 days. At midnight every night electricity for the entire beach was turned off. Before I discovered I could buy candles, I went to bed at lights out. That meant trying to read as much of Shantaram with my eye on the time while I braced myself for the sudden pitch black that struck the beach when the clock did strike twelve.
I see a white horse in a paddock out the window and remember the Hangzhou hostel and begging my friend to explain Chinese philosophy to me. I remember that I will stop writing soon, and head back to the buffet carriage to buy another coffee. Speeden up my metabolism; keep me high while I come down. Keep listening to Pink Floyd. Keep discovering the things I spent almost 10 years not. ¶ 20:41
My second trip to Sydney was also a successful one in that I had genuine catch-ups with people. I'm sitting on the train now and I'm trying not to give in to my increased appetite. Along the tracks there is usually a dug out wall of yellow/orange sandy soil, topped with army-coloured, long, untrimmed grass and usually a farm fence. I have no idea who lives on the properties around here, or what is done with all the spreads of the greener rain-fed grass that you get used to on the XPT train, but it gives me an idea of the size of rural Australia.
I am discovering Pink Floyd about 15 years later than everyone else, just as I did the Beatles. But it's never too late, as they say. Never too late.
Sometimes the plains out the window spread up into hills and it is not the rain-fed grass you see but the unkempt stuff that you find next to the tracks and craggy rocks placed here and there. This is the scenery my father and I passed driving south to the snowy mountains on our skiing trips. I'd sit quietly in the front – we didn't talk that much, but it was ok – and dream of stopping the car and just running and frolicking across the plains. Of course to do that, I'd have to be a free and independent adult in my own car with my friends. In first-year uni, I asked John on our ski trip to pull over so I could do just that. It was something I had always wanted to do, I pleaded. That may have been around the time I lost my adventurous spirit...
...And by the time I was sitting on a plane to Vietnam en route to Taiwan, I was doing it perhaps not out of adventure but out of stubbornness. I was adventurous in my ignorance of what was to come, and I coped alright with setting up a life in Taiwan, yet something was always missing, and had been for a long time. Enjoyment of life. Everything was an effort, done in spite of myself. I am courageous and brave, I told myself. I can do amazing things with my life despite feeling like shit all the time.
That time I drove into the mountains and feared for my own safety was adventurous, yet it wasn't shared with a friend. A lot my so-called adventures have been spent alone.
Rusty barbed wire fences and piles of fencing wood and a strange rock that looks like the beginnings of the native Australian Stone Henge. Stone Henge meant nothing to me when I saw it, but I listened to the audio guide and sat and pondered it for as long as the organised tour allowed. Losing interest in the world is a sign of depression – however I just thought I was a boring person. Boring and unattractive. But never mind.
More unkempt grass. A small dam with clean, fresh looking water. I am proud of the wattle trees I see in a line along the tracks. The barren remains of trees, in a group. I would like to see them on the night of a full moon, with no other light but the moon, when everything does in fact become silver.
Like on my little beach at the beginnings of my travels. I did not use the internet for a record time of 5 days. At midnight every night electricity for the entire beach was turned off. Before I discovered I could buy candles, I went to bed at lights out. That meant trying to read as much of Shantaram with my eye on the time while I braced myself for the sudden pitch black that struck the beach when the clock did strike twelve.
I see a white horse in a paddock out the window and remember the Hangzhou hostel and begging my friend to explain Chinese philosophy to me. I remember that I will stop writing soon, and head back to the buffet carriage to buy another coffee. Speeden up my metabolism; keep me high while I come down. Keep listening to Pink Floyd. Keep discovering the things I spent almost 10 years not. ¶ 20:41
