Dispatches from the Antipodes 2

Wherein our hero discovers many mysteries and many glories...

The farm outside Oberon, for all its beauty, was an experience of the Blue Mountains in only their more subdued and pastoral aspect: fields and hills, ponds and streams, a gauze of frost across the morning grass and streaks of orange across the evening sky, the deep delvings of wombats and the high soaring flights of cachinnating kookaburras and screeching cockatoos—you know the sort of thing I mean. To view the mountains from, say, Govetts Leap or from the overlook of the Three Sisters at Katoomba is quite a different matter; there the experience is one of genuine awe, of the sort one feels on looking down into the Grand Canyon or up at Glacier Peak. The prospect is vast and beautiful and quite impossible to do justice to with my iPhone’s camera; the size and depth and color of the scene simply refuse to be captured in the flat glaze of discrete pixels that digital photography produces. I can only report the vertiginous feeling the sight induced in me at each stop along the way, and my sense of ineffable gratitude to the composer of the spectacle.