I stood poised on a sandstone rock at the top of Mt. York, my arms outstretched like wings and my toes just inches from the edge of a sheer cliff. I could not see the earth directly beneath me—which collided with the vertical escarpment several hundred feet below—but in the distance I could see it fade into a misty blue forest of eucalyptus trees. Nothing but a transparent breeze separated me from the panoramic painting.
Just as I inhaled slowly, allowing myself to melt into the oily canvas before me, I was interrupted by the sound of rubber soles sliding against sandstone as one of my classmates climbed up on the rock beside me. Another student followed. Then another.
After nearly a dozen students had found that scenic cluster of rocks off the trail, I resigned to the reality that I was neither an explorer nor a fearless mountaineer—I was on a class field trip, and it was time to return to the bus.
Sliding into my seat on our spacious coach, I lamented to one of my like-minded friends about the lookout at Mt. York, a tourist stop in the Blue Mountains. “It’s my own fault... but it’s really hard to appreciate all this. Being on an organized bus tour with a bunch of other Americans...” My friend sort of nodded in agreement. Being a bit more upbeat than me though, I suppose, he just turned to watch the film playing at the front of the coach and didn’t engage in the conversation further. I was left to ponder this question, this question of why it was all so hard to appreciate—and why I feel I need to appreciate it, anyway—on my own.
Nearly a century-and-a-half before my visit to the Blue Mountains, Rachel Henning wrote in a letter home about a similar feeling. Although she writes poetically of view as she descended Mt. Victoria, a peak near Mt. York, describing “seas of forest and fold after fold of mountains covered with wood,” she goes on to describe her disenchantment with the landscape.
“I should have enjoyed it more,” she writes, “perhaps if I had been walking, instead of in a loaded coach coming down a steep hill over the worst road you can imagine,” (76).
I gazed out the tinted windows of our tour bus, watching the blurry scenery sliding by at 70 km an hour. I should have enjoyed it more, too.
After a very speedy lunch in a little town called Leura—about which I know nothing except that it is a relatively nice place to eat a meat pie and some chocolate—the coach came to its next stop. We had arrived at Echo Point, and were informed that we would have ten minutes to go have a look at the Three Sisters, an iconic rock formation that I had already seen in every advertisement for a tour of the Blue Mountains.
Camera in hand, I filed off the bus with my classmates and followed a smooth footpath leading to a fenced-lined concrete slab. This slab was glued to a precipice not unlike the one I had stood on at Mt. York—except there were more than just a few college students wandering around on it. The lookout point was swarming with people.
Somewhere beyond the wall of tourists and coin-operated binoculars, a smoky purple canyon stretched out to the horizon. Softened by a dense forest of eucalypts, it wove gently around thick, orange plateaus and jutting sandstone formations. Among those formations was the Three Sisters, posing silently for the constant strobe of camera flashes from a mob of DSLR-wielding visitors.
I pulled out my own DSLR and snapped a picture—maybe I would be able to appreciate it more later.
One of my classmates tapped me on the shoulder, indicating that I should turn around to pose for a photo. I too easily peeled my gaze from the valley, pivoted around, and smiled for the shot. Thankful, at least, that this tourist-beset lookout point had an accessible ladies room and a shop to buy some water, I wandered around for a bit and then headed back to the coach.
As our tour group left Echo Point for the next attraction, I didn’t even look back for a final glance. Flipping through the photos on my camera, I found a shot that was framed quite well; it captured the Three Sisters and the vast Jameson valley without even a single baseball cap or gift shop in the foreground (Above). I romanticized a time, maybe a century ago, when this could have been the view that I actually saw—when I could have stood alone at echo point and seen nothing but that sublime valley in all directions, a velvety backcloth for the three jagged rock formations that fanned out dramatically from the canyon walls. Then the movie began to blare through the coach’s speakers once more, and I quickly let those romantic notions evaporate from my mind.
I know better than to think that way, anyway. Historical accounts from visitors to the area, at least from Western visitors, do not always align with this fantasy of a magnificent, un-tourist-touched landscape. Thomas Cook—a man who would have seen the Blue Mountains long before they were sewn up by threads of paved roads and dotted with tour busses, scenic view points and inns—never once spoke of the beauty of the landscape in his memoirs. When he describes his sentence of 14 years Transportation in Australia in the early 19th century, he laments at length about the closeness of quarters with the other convicts, and he writes only of the Blue Mountains’ “severe cold” and “precipitous ridges” (18).
I suppose this makes sense, given that he was not in the mountains for leisurely sight-seeing but instead to carry out a sentence of hard, forced labor. Still, Thomas Cook’s account of the Blue Mountains is quite different than the types of descriptions that you might read in a present-day travel brochure.
In Cook’s case, it may have been the circumstances of his experience in the mountains—harsh weather and even harsher treatment—that caused him to omit the beauty of the place from his account. I may also have been the company, the hundreds of other convicts that were “guilty of almost every offence against the Laws of their country” (28), and whose close proximity he so clearly detested. Or maybe—contradicting the very principle that drives expectant tourists up to the peaks of Mt. York and Echo Point to observe that awe-inspiring landscape promised in their guidebooks—he just didn’t have a reason to think it was beautiful at all.
Was it because I had these high expectations in the first place, because I would be willing to pay to see these places, that I was set up to be just a little disappointed?
Maybe mine was like the case of Rachel Henning. Perhaps it was the journey that made the Blue Mountains so hard to enjoy. The curse was not, of course, that the road was too rough, but instead perhaps that it was too easy—just another disposable adventure to check off on my trip’s itinerary.
Or maybe this was like the case of Thomas Cook—that I was so distracted, at times even frustrated, by the company with which I traveled—that I simply could not enjoy myself in the Blue Mountains that afternoon.
As our tour bus glided through the mountains towards our last and final destination, an theme-park like attraction called Scenic World that promised “The Ultimate Blue Mountains experience,” I began mindlessly flipping through my photos again. I found a picture that I had taken at Echo Point. Posed in front of a backdrop of koala-filled gift shops, public toilets, and crowds of tourists, a sandstone rock jutted peculiarly out of the pavement. It was one of the most interesting and striking sights I had seen that day; etched across its face were these words:
“When I reached the lookout at echo point, the light was thick and golden,
as if it had passed all day through a butterfly’s dusty wing”
The phrase surprised me—the way it so poetically described the scene, the golden light that shined as though passing “through a butterfly’s dusty wing.”
It must have been a brilliant moment when the author of those words reached the top of Echo Point and looked out over the Jameson Valley, to inspire language like that. Maybe this visitor, at whatever point she reached the summit, had found the twinkling of awe that I had been expecting and hoping to find all day. Or maybe this rock and the words carved into its face were just another attempt to tell us, the countless, expectant tourists that visit to the Blue Mountains, exactly what we should find.
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