Day 570 | Geehi Dam NP campsite: all to myself except for March Flies
32 km | zzOz total: 18,833 km
After my grind it out day yesterday, today was mostly spent in an upwards progression, somehow wasn’t so bad, I must have psyched myself for a big day of hard slog.
Major work is being done on some hydroelectric installation that the road was originally built for and I’ve chanced on one of the short windows of access, it’s closed for most of the year to any non-construction traffic, lots of heavy machinery on the tight difficult road apparently. The dirt road was OK, no complaints there, the traffic, 30 or so 4WDs and one lost lonely 2WD, the driver stopping, momentarily, to insist I visit Olsen’s Lookout, which I timed with my lunch break, a splendid Top Ten view that sadly too few people get to experience, views in the national park that were once similarly panoramic are now often treed out, can’t touch those trees, but not this one.
I had some strange thoughts about travel sitting there, how viewing from a moving car, everything a blur, life a blur, not focussing but just scanning constantly, flickering, a totally different experience on a bike at my snail’s speed today, the sweat pouring out, the glasses, lens, dripping, body totally drenched, muscling that caravan up the slope, a hundred stops to gather breath, or just to stop.
I had an hour at the lookout, sometimes looking, sometimes munching, I’m not saying I’m better, a more pure person, people can choose however they want to live their life but the modern world can have that tendency to isolate you from nature, you are there but so fleeting as to be in a dream.
A huge day for me, full immersion style, for others it’s just half an hour through a tall tree forest, whizzing by sealed in a cocoon, sounds and smells muted, passing by the world mostly in that other, more effortless, space, the realm of the enclosed machine, some good music, conversation, another biscuit, too much momentum to stop spontaneously, and even then too briefly, the sounds of the forest still not recommenced from their noisy intrusion when it’s time to move on.
Our hurried, blurred, smeared visual perspective is taken for granted now, that’s the way the world is, you are here, standing in this place, this colossal view, but thoughts are elsewhere, your mind agitated, no repose, little time for contemplation except in retrospect, and then noticing your absence, there’s lots of have-tos to consider, no hope of slowing the mind to take in what stands so magnificently before you.
I’m not judging: just saying.