So much for the city

Clayton is telling me how he is training to be a pilot. Up ahead, the road is straight and clear, he guns the engine of his car and my head is pressed into the back of the head-rest.
"Is that right?" I say through gritted teeth. "What sort of plane are you thinking of flying."
"Oh," he says, breaking again, my head lolls forward, I blink stupidly, "Commercial airliner, you know?"
"Seriously?"
"Hell yes." He says. "I get this flight license, I'm a millionaire. Seriously."
He takes the next bend at heigh speed and I cling onto the handle by the door. It comes off in my hand.
"Oh, that's broken." he says helpfully, settling the car behind a slow four-wheel drive monster. Already he's impatient.
"I can just imagine that." I say, eying the traffic ahead nervously, "Captain Carlyle."
He turns to look at me in horror.
"Oh, shit." he says, "I hadn't thought of that."

Anyone who has met Clayton already knows what sort of car he has. It's black, it's low, it's shiny and is one red-flashing light short of addressing him by name. He picked me up in the morning with the intention of 'getting out of the city and seeing some desert'. Getting out of the city proves a little easier to discuss doing than to actually get done. A new motorway not documented in the road-atlas in the car is apparently the best way to get to the Blue Mountains, but where it might be found is anyone's guess.
Eventually we pick a direction and stick to it and slowly the city falls behind us and the altitude starts to increase. By road, the Blue Mountains appear stealthily, the view is shielded by an increasing density of trees and only the physical feeling in the base of the gut tells you that you're climbing higher and higher.
The view from Katoomba is worth the distance, but other than the rock formations of the Three Sisters, it is one of those landscapes which is better to view first-hand than to photograph. From Echo Point, the valley drops away in a series of crags and the basin below is thick with forest. To the right, the cliff edges arc round and across the valley the mountains rise from the tree layer in jagged shelves. It's beautiful, particularly on a clear day, where the blue sky, the green trees and the rich, red and yellow earth each conspire to create a physical spectrum before the viewer, but attempting to compose a satisfactory photograph proves to be a challenge. Getting the depth of the trees and the height of crags is a tricky thing to do through a viewfinder where there is either too much green or two much blue and not quite enough red. Better, perhaps to just stand and stare.
Standing and staring is, of course, a popular past time. Being a Sunday, the crowds are out in force and the spectacle is accompanied by a jittery soundtrack of babbling tourists and clicking and whirring cameras.
We do not stay for too long, I have a semi-formed plan to come up here again at some point and maybe stay a few nights, preferably mid-week with my camera-cleaning kit to hand, perhaps.

Clayton drives on. Further West, we drop out of the hills and the landscape becomes less green and more yellow. Parched grasslands interspersed with the white-trunked Eucalyptus trees which look skeletal and bone-like in the heat.
"This," says Clayton, "Is the real countryside."
We stop at Bathurst, which is nice and clean and has a wild-west feeling of streets running straight to nowhere. Away from town, the countryside is hot and humid farmland, but still not desert. Clayton looks faintly disapointed. We drive on and the sun starts to set, shifting the colours of the scenery around us as it inches towards the horizon. By magic hour, the fields are on fire, the green of the Eucalyptus is rich green, almost black and the sky has become one of those delicate porcelain blues which set everything else off. The sun drops completely and we are left in darkness.
Clayton overtakes three trucks along a single track road. The car overheats and we pull over, the trucks zoom past smugly. At the next service station the water is topped up but we do not buy more fuel and so, somewhere out in the middle of nowhere, a red light pops on, a warning in Japenese.
"What's that?" I ask.
"Out of fuel." he says.
"You're kidding."
"Nope."
At the next junction we slide off the freeway in search of a gas station. The place looks sparse, shacks drift by at the side of the road. It does not look very welcoming.
"Have you seen Wolf Creek?"
"Oh man. Don't."
The Mobil sign guttering in the darkness proves how welcome the ugly scars of civilization and consumerism can be. The guy behind the cash desk, has no teeth of his own and tells us with no little enthusiasm about a car crash down the road. It turns out that it happened very recently indeed.
"In fact," he says, "You should pass it on your way up the road."
We're half surprised that he does not charge us for the privilege.

We get home some two hours after we were expecting. Kings Cross is lit up in all its gaudy, gory glory. The traffic crawls through it as though the road were covered in treacle. We reach the hostel and I roll out and into bed. The next day it rains and so I stay there.