While walking from the car park to Lion Rock, an ambulance drove slowly past. That’s ominous we both thought as the child bride’s and my psyches blended together resigned to a path of mutual destruction on the mountain casting its overwhelming shadow over us. Not to get too melodramatic, ambulance or no ambulance, we are going all the way even if it kills us. Okay, not to dramatise things too much, we’ll keep going until the discretion that supposedly comes with maturity gets the better part of valour.
It’s 187 metres high and sticks straight up out of the ground and it’s apparently a 1200-1300 steps climb, depending on where you start counting. I prefer to rationalise it along the lines of 3 metres per floor which means it’s the equivalent of a 62 story building. Would I contemplate climbing the fire stairs of a 62 story building? Only if I was retarded. Apparently you can say “retarded” and “gay” now that Trump’s been re-elected. I was offered considerable encouragement by the rather diminutive lady at my side. It was a magnificent physical effort on her part considering she has such a soft arse relative to my buns of steel.
There are historical and religious places all over this rock including some incredibly detailed and saucy wall paintings in a cave half way up a smooth vertical escarpment. How the painters (and punters) got up there in the first place in many years BC, I’ll never know. But they gave the rest of us plenty of incentive to get there to see what perky used to look like pre-implants. In Australia we have an increasing number of rocks and mountains that are off-limits because of some religious significance or whatever even though they pre-date people by millions of years and as Australia’s early indigenous people didn’t have any written languages there’s only word of mouth stories to indicate a relationship between these places and some mythical thing. The Buddhists and Hindus are much more sharing of their religious heritage.
Here, people get to experience the history and mysticism by being in amongst it although on finally getting to the top of Lion Rock, those things were furthest from my mind. I didn’t have the energy to suck a barley sugar and thank God for blood thinners. If I was going to have another stroke (or TIA or transient ischemic attack as happened the first time), this would have been the time. We both felt pretty proud of ourselves to have made it until we saw some of the others who also made it, some wearing thongs. That feeling of deflation rapidly passed when we remembered how old we are. And it extended to that feeling of smugness as you go down past the sweating, weazing climbers going the other way. Going down is much easier than going up, right? Speaking of sweat, when considering the rather sparse hand railings, mine is now mixeed with the DNA of about a million other people. So even if I was permitted to climb a very old rock monument in the centre of Australia, I’d give it a swerve because that itch has been well and truly scratched.