ARE SIGHTS WORTH SEEING?

I'm pretty tired, got a bit carried away with walking and it was a 
warm day. The power was off, a planned outage for line works, so I 
prepared orders yesterday (Sunday - actually I forgot and rushed it 
all late Sunday night, ho hum) and took the day off today. So after 
tossing up various electricity-free activities I gave up and went 
for a drive, because as I realised when writing my last post 
(tree-top-tilde idea) I hadn't done that for a little while. I 
settled on going to the town of Forrest to visit a dam, it's been a 
while since I visited a dam - hopefully one day I'll finally get to 
one with a hydroelectric power station attached. Anyway there was 
this van on my tail and that always stresses me out so I turned off 
to a small road to let it pass, had that dangerous old "I wonder 
where this goes" thought, and spent the next hour slowly winding my 
way not to Forrest, but through a forest, on a gravel track which 
was in fairly good condition but narrow and full of blind corners, 
so it's a good thing I only encountered one other vehicle.

Anyway it was all great fun - you really feel in the forest on 
those gravel tracks, without the sort of divide that exists on a 
paved road, and without any signs of habitation like fences or 
driveways - especially on a misty morning. But then the Jag decided 
it'd had enough of crawling around undignified tracks, dodging 
kangaroos and wallabies, and perhaps more to the point negotiating 
all sorts of different inclines, because it lit up the gearbox 
warning light. The sudden prospect of getting stuck in the middle 
of a forest on one of those roads that look in the map like someone 
scribbled dotted lines on a page of green really does sharpen one's 
objectives. So I took a proper look at the map and found a route 
out of the state park, which I nervously followed.

The more civilised road that I got on to turned out the be built 
leading to a waterfall. So seeing as I got onto it almost at the 
end, I decided to let the Jag recover from its ordeal while I took 
some waterfall photos.

Unusually for one of the sites I visit, there was a fairly constant 
stream of visitors making their way up and down the steep steps to 
the bottom of the falls. There was an upper viewing platform before 
the worst of the steps. The falls were very tall and nice, though 
the upper view through the trees forced a particular camera 
position, rather limiting the creativity of composition. Looking up 
at the valley rise though, overflowing with vegitation and vast 
trees escaping from the earth, I couldn't help but think that it 
_could_ all be a facade. Everyone else there hadn't driven through 
miles of empty forest tracks stretching on behind the valley wall, 
there could be a whole city there and one wouldn't know. But even 
in the stretch they did pass through coming from the nearby coastal 
town, did they see it? How easy is it on the paved roads with their 
signs, centre lines, and traffic, to ignore it all? To be focused 
on just getting to this waterfall, the proclaimed attraction, but 
to forget the area, the actual place itself, in context. But of 
course maybe I was just trying to justify the sillyness of my own 
course in getting there.

At the bottom viewing platform, which I got to having passed some 
older couples struggling their way back up (not that I looked so 
dignified past the half-way point back again either, but it was 
easy sailing downhill), a young woman and the wife of an older 
couple there struck up a conversation. They were both doing tours 
of the sights, and after agreeing how pretty the waterfall was the 
young woman rattled off some others she'd seen along the coast: The 
Twelve Apostles (no not _those_ twelve apostles! The twelve rocks, 
err well there used to be twelve rocks, oh never mind), London 
Bridge (no not _that_ London Bridge! It looks like, err well it 
looked like, oh never mind), etc.

Again this made me wonder about the way people tour places, and 
whether there's any real purpose to it. Do you really understand 
anything new from seeing sights? Is it really achieving anything 
more than would looking at photographs at home?

This I'll admit does soon degenerate into my usual nhilist pit 
where there is seen to be no point to doing anything. I may also 
have simply been bitter that I hadn't been the one striking up a 
conversation with the young woman. But it has made me question my 
own mental sight-seeing checklists, filled in no small part by 
frustratingly distant hydroelectric power stations. I'm a bit 
embarassed about how small the arc of places I've visited in the 
last few years has been, but is there anything really purposful 
about travelling off to some particular sight and coming back 
again? Is it better just to meander in a vage area around where you 
live? Or should there be some narrative to one's journey - like the 
dam I wanted to visit, which I came to as the source of a river 
that I often walk along in town.

I don't know. Anyway the Jag didn't show any more warning lights on 
the trip back, so hopefully that rest was all it needed. I went 
back on the sensible route via that coastal town, stopping for 
lunch and my long walk along the beach, watching more women of 
course, and stumbling upon some sort of living art display which 
seemed far more wanting for a point than anything else that I've 
mentioned. But I did find an op-shop, so I got myself a bag full of 
old DVDs - even Season 2 and the Christmas specials of The Office 
(UK version) to follow up Season One that I picked up at the tip 
shop. So that gave the trip a true point at least, after all who on 
Earth would question the obvious value of sitting at home watching 
old British comedy repeats? There were _three_ copies of The Office 
Christmas Specials DVD there by the way - and it's not like it was 
a huge DVD section - strange. Oh and I got five seasons of the 
German detective show Inspector Rex for free. Someone at the 
op-shop thought the boxes looked like VHS tapes, so had labelled 
them free, even though they were actually DVD box sets. They 
charged me $1 each on the two actual VHS tapes that I picked out 
though - op-shop logic is funny sometimes. The concept of Inspector 
Rex always seemed a bit silly to me, but it was popular on SBS for 
a time, and I was young then, worth giving it a go if it's free.

Maybe I should have stopped while this post still had a point. Oh 
well, I'm tired.

 - The Free Thinker