jenolan caves

I am in Katoomba, a freezing mountain town 100km west of Sydney. I have come to chase the blues away. Last night, I stayed up until 2 a.m. chatting with Sonia, and then followed our mutual agreement with one ear cocked to make sure the snoring from the Canadian in the next bunk over remained unbroken, and then fell into some sort of half-sleep, half-waking dream state until it was time to rush to the grocery store for yogurt and then rush back to the hostel for the bus trip to the Jenolan Caves.

On the way there, I put in my headphones and listened mostly to Queen and then a little bit to Marvin Gaye and James Brown. I’ve been traveling already for over a month, and I have learned so many facts, useless facts, facts about founding dates and founders and hotel draperies, facts that crowd out my marginally more useful knowledge of judicial estoppel and how to tie overhand knots and the number of bushels in a peck. One fact that entered my head today, and will be gone by tomorrow, was that a man by the name of McEwen escaped the penal colony and lived in the Jenolan caves region for ten years, until he emerged to steal a horse. Then he was pursued by the authorities and he decided, instead of surrendering, to ride himself and his stolen horse off a thousand foot ledge now called Govett’s Leap. Or something like that—I didn’t want to pause for too long from Freddie’s voice, so I only occasionally tuned into the bus driver’s commentary.

We passed by a non-functioning Volkswagen Bug that had been painted pastel colors and bore a sign reading “LOLLY STORE.” Morrissey came on my headphones and, for the second time this trip, made me laugh aloud. He is describing a horrible seaside town where it is silent and gray every day, where your clothes were stolen, a place that they forgot to shut down, wondering why Armageddon passed by this place, and then he invites you, “Come, come, you’d be appalled."* Everybody, give “Every Day is Like Sunday” and “The Last of the International Playboys” (“I never wanted to kill / I am not naturally evil / Such things I do make myself more attractive to you / Have I failed?”) a fresh listen.

The drive to Jenolan Caves was frightening, down a winding road next to a cliff that had blind curves and only enough room for one car. The driver laid down on the horn every time we went around such a curve, but I didn’t believe that our tooting would be enough to stop a coach coming in the opposite direction from caroming into our front end should it drive in any way besides the most prudent. For this section of the ride, I looked down the cliff to the side, and focused on Freddie. We made it just fine.

I did two ninety minute guided tours, one of Lucas cave, the other of Orient cave. Another useful fact that I have learned is that the limestone in these caves were created from the fossils and chum and coral and exoskeletons on the sea bed being pressed with mud by the weight of the ocean into sedimentary rock, a process called diagenisis. Then the oceans receded, and streams came in and cut away the softer bits of this rock, and the caves in which generations of tourists have hit their heads on such cantilevered bits as “Head Rock” and “Concussion Rock” were thusly formed, 450 million years ago. Other than this—it’s very dry in Australia; I’m very dehydrated; I had a headache all day; so I remember almost nothing else of the tours except for the impressions that the formations left in the part of my brain used for visual processing. I snapped blurry, uninteresting photos and scribbled madly into my memo pad these nonsense words, all in a stream: “Head Rock, Concussion Rock, House of the Tooth Fairy, The Bishop, I am surrounded by vulvae, shawl rock, Cleopatra’s Asp, petrified forest, Hercules’ pillar, sparkling that cannot be located, kangaroos and emus cannot walk backward, skin tags, flowing, droopy, rippling, melting, popcorn, crystal, shawl, clear, muddy, columns, helactites, stacks, nativity scene, cones, rim pools, ripples, cupolas, holes, ruts, pits, sheets, slides, boulders, canyons, pancake batter, ochre, turkey, kangaroo’s backside, tonsils, curtains, baleens, orange, translucent, Medusa.” This is a shopping list for the best fucking party in the world; come, come, you’d be appalled.

A Japanese woman befriended me and we had lunch together and made small talk and took photographs for each other and walked near each other in the caves. On the bus, two Aussie women from Newcastle whom I suspected buttered each other’s toast if you know what I mean (I mean lesbifriends) befriended the two of us and told me a story about the minor scandal when Belinda Neal, the wife of some important minister, made a ruckus in a restaurant when she didn’t get seated as she wanted. She actually said, “Don’t you know who I am?" Sonic directed my attention yesterday to the clip of Ernie Anastos saying “Keep fucking that chicken!”, so I am up to date now on the viral hits on both sides of the Pacific.

We all sat up front on the equally hair-raising bus ride back up the winding route and the two Aussies and the bus driver took turns exchanging quips and lusty cackling. The ride back to Katoomba sounded like this: “A coach bus is a smoother ride than a minibus. So – size does matter!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “Another coach driver, poor guy, drove a minister down to the caves and halfway down a woman in the back started screaming hysterically. Poor driver was sweating all the way down!” “Ah ah ah ah ah!” “We made it to the top! Drinks on me!” “Ah ah ah ah!” “I like the adrenaline rush, don’t you?” “Adrenaline? Ah ah ah ah!” I fell asleep to this and woke myself up with whimpering.

* A Google search reveals the lyric actually to be, "Come, come, nuclear bomb." Morrissey is inviting bombs to erase this pitiful resort. Still I prefer my version of these misheard lyrics.