If you go out in the woods today...

The weekends are becoming a hobby project of looking up old railways. This has the potential to become a socially threatening addiction, however it's in the embryonic curiosity stage and can be easily contained. If it spreads beyond weekends and starts to include some serious library time I think some action will need to be taken. A night of good music venues, good friends and plenty of dancing should bring me back in line.

It came about that I wanted to see one today. I was shown a portion of the track from a 4WD. Now, I've not done very much time in one of these vehicles. I'm more used to dragging my arse along the ground in a Subaru than anything else. The realm of the 4WD enters something new into my passenger experience... height. Firstly, how the fuck do you get into it when there's no steps? Trucks have ladders on the sides. This courtesy should be extended to the smaller vehicles that still escape my normal height range. Once I get into it there's another world. Things that loom scarily in front of the bullbar suddenly disappear under the wheels. Inclines that I would be pissed off to attempt on foot flash by easily. All the while, though, my inner short person is screaming. I'm in a box, hanging on for dear life because nothing is on my level any more. It's now in the world of below. More than that, you get to view below from a variety of angles depending upon the track.

There was a portion that was better done on foot, so I went back. It was a nice, easy stroll. A one way stroll on a set of railway tracks through a pocket of bushland. To get back to my car I was looking at covering the same ground. BORING! thinks Vic. Let's make this interesting.

So I wandered away from my rails and onto one of the many bike tracks through the bush. To me, the Australian bush is a wonderland of life. The squiggly tracks left on the gum trees, the way the bark lifts from their surfaces and curls before falling in a litter around their bases, the way the light plays through the sparse cover their leaves offer... it's all beautiful to me.



Look a little closer in that litter and there's another world of beauty and colour... fungi. I don't know enough to identify these things and don't currently have enough inclination to look them up. I'm looking for two kinds when I go hunting: interesting and pretty. All other details are unnecessary.



Meanwhile, the sun has slowly been plotting a course to come up behind me again. The path I have chosen to wander starts to go full circle. Even worse, it develops a tendency to wend it's way back and forth across a water course involving some steep gradients. Bastard, thinks Vic, and Vic starts to wish for it to either meet the railway track again or meet a road. The sun was getting lower, threatening to take my directional reference with it, and my track had more bends and convolutions than a bowl of spaghetti. Bastard.

When I got to the road, finally, I discovered I was a mere six hundred metres from the point where I had turned around to return in the direction I'd come from. In all the time I'd been wandering this spaghetti trail that was the outcome. Fuck this, I thought. I sat down and called for a lift back to my car. Selfish, yes. Lazy, yes. Lucky it hadn't got dark? Fucking oath.