Notes From The Road...

I'd never really been comfortable with the entire concept of a 'holiday', you must understand, I never really saw it. No camera will fit down my throat to show you the strange flavours of new foods I try, or the fuzzy, humid air that clung to my skin in the sub-tropical north when we got as far as we could go.

In typical family fashion we visited the Taronga Western Plains Zoo, here are my snapshots, but I have no time for a thousand words each to give them any substance at all.

Juara, his name is "champion" in Indonesian, the same language I studied for years and never once came across the word. the curiosity in this picture does no justice to the creature or his namesake, it was simply the best shot...

The Giraffes with their smooth velvet noses and great liquid eyes, thickly framed with lashes darker than soot. You cannot tell from the photo how graceful they were, like dancers, they moved.

Mam's photo, I did not see the Meerkats, My only report can be that Mam smiled as she spoke of their bright eyes and chittering fastidiousness.

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The hours in the car were long, the shudder of the car made it feel like my bones were dissolving into my flesh after days of it. Rising each morning in strange places with strange smells eeking through the sunlit canvas; stifling heat and lashing rain that should have made my windows shudder, if only I had been home.

The treasures found along the way make journeys worthwhile, like the roadside monolith that stole the sky, we waited 10 minutes just for the right light to take the photo, but it does it no justice, unfortunately

Or my Sleeping Giant, hidden in the mountain rockface with a mysterious smile on his slumbering lips.

Ah yes, the mountains, they too were beautiful beyond any human ability to comprehend, the lifethreads energetic and busy on their green forest skin, while deeper, through the stonespine of the plain it flowed slow and strong like a secret lifeblood river...

The Dorrigo National Park had more whispers than twisting vines, each a tiny forest secret that, teasingly, it will not tell...
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The people I met, the melodies I played upon my battered guitar, even the pier I sat on smelling the sea, the little memories I keep... my camera caught these, to be sure, faces and places, but with not even the substance of a parting smile.

L.