Humans in the landscape

There are some disadvantages to travelling alone - hotels and car hire are disproportionately more expensive, conversations with my companions are in my head rather than for real so I don't get corrected when I misinterpret things, it is difficult to share the wonder of a moment - but there are advantages too. I can change what I do on a whim, I eat what and where I like or not, I talk with strangers... For me the main advantage is silence. Or, rather, listening to its impossibility.

I left Sydney on an early train for the Blue Mountains and spent most of the day in huge, calming landscapes that neither I nor my camera is capable of recording. I was going to link to a Google image search but I've discovered that others people's cameras aren't up to it either. The mountains are vast humps of sedimentary sandstone, cut through again and again by water so that torrents down mountains pour into streams in small valleys that join as rivers in deeper valleys. In places the sandstone contains seams of shale which, because it erodes faster, causes massive rock fall. Apart from the orange-glowing cliffs that this leaves, with hundreds-of-metres-high waterfalls tumbling over them, everywhere is covered in trees, mostly eucalyptus whose oil gives a blue hue to the distance. Behind the mountains are more mountains, then more.

I spent four hours walking along a cliff-top, listening to streams far below, the sudden rush of a waterfall as I rounded a bluff, the songs, caws, chirrups, calls, knocks and insistences of birds, different-shaped leaves responding to the breeze, with insects as the drone to everything.

Towards the end of my walk I reached a viewpoint just below the landing stage for a cable car which apparently swings its crowd of passengers on a glass floor over the treetops in front of a waterfall. The viewpoint was crammed with people with their backs to the view, taking photographs of each other, telling each other to smile, shouting to others to join the picture, laughing, arranging camera swaps and different groupings. They were exhilarated and happy and their photos will prove it. They will never hear the waterfall, the birds, the leaves nor the insects but when they get home they will see the trees and cliffs behind them. They were fascinating, especially since they spoke a language I don't understand, but I was so entranced watching and listening to them that I failed to take a picture of them.

Instead, and since I cannot show you what I heard today, here is a less transitory way that humans have made their mark on this landscape. It reminded me of cave painting.
Edit: I'm pretty certain that all this is recent graffiti.