jonath.co.uk

Wednesday 5th Nov 2003
Australia, Day 17

So this must have been at Winyard station . . . 72 Australian dollars (I paid for two 36 dollar tickets) at 10:42. This covered a return trip from Winyard to Katoomba and something else . . . some kind of red London bus (Routemaster?), does circuits around Katoomba and all the typical interesting tourist places . . . this ticket meant we could get on and off this bus as we pleased. I have a feeling Rob was a while at the post office (Pitt Street) this morning, as I tried to eat this crazily-packed sandwich that I had bought from this place in another of these food courts (this one almost opposite our hotel, Hunter Street) . . . a very, very nice sandwich, but difficult to eat . . . contained, as it did, ham, mayonnaisse, grated beetroot, grated carrot, some watercress-style stuff . . . maybe tomato, maybe cucumber, maybe some lettuce stuff . . . god, I don't know. Receipts, it's just receipts.

18:15 . . . Katoomba Book Exchange, 34 Katoomba Street . . . bought this cookery book for Rob (?!) and Whit for myself . . . started reading it . . . started reading many books. Checked my e-mail . . . nothing interesting.

And this one doesn't even have a signature . . . yeah, I remember that train back from Katoomba to Sydney and that girl testing her boyfriend, Anthony, for some exams (they can't have been older than 19) . . . god knows . . . I smelt history, geology, astronomoy, biology, chemistry, physics . . . loads of stuff, and this poor guy hardly knew anything . . . but this girl wouldn't shut up . . . relentless, and far too loud . . . they even started going on about isobars when the girl eavsdropped into Rob and I talking about the cafe we had just been to in Katoomba, Isobar. $24.10 well spent, on beer and nachos, as we waited around for this train we now found ourselves on. A joke I saw in the toilets at Isobar . . . no, not Isobar . . . somewhere else . . . a cafe along the main road, before the Three Sisters and all that . . .

A guy on this road-trip, yeah? He stops in at this cafe for a bite to eat. A break, if you will. Pops into the toilets, into one of the cubicles. Sits down, relaxes. Then he hears this voice, from the cubicle next door, "Say, where you're heading?" and the guy, a bit freaked, but thinking that p'raps this is how people behave 'round here, he replies, "Oh, you know, I'm just on this road trip . . . I'm travelling all over," so the other guy is like, "You here for long?" and so he replies, "Erm . . . what here? No . . . I'm just . . . you know . . . a little break before carrying on . . . got two hundred miles to do today yet," and so there's this pause . . . and then the guy who began the conversation goes, "Look, I gotta ring you back. Every time I try to speak, this freak in the cubicle next to mine answers. I'll catch you later."

At the time, it made me laugh.