Current mood:

patient

Travelogue Melbourne - Upper Ferntree Gully to Epping
Sunday saver tickets let you travel anywhere in the Metlink network, all three zones, all day on Sunday, for $2.50. This is twenty cents more than if I were to buy a Zone 1-only ticket for two hours. There are over three million people living in the catchment area of this ticket, though perhaps only two million living within easy reach of services that run on Sunday. Today I used this ticket well. I travelled from Mt Dandenong to Epping, then Epping to South Oakleigh. For Perth people, that's about the equivalent of Mandurah to the Perth CBD to Joondalup, then Joondalup through the CBD again to Cannington and on to Ferndale. For $2.50. I saw a lot of the city in a single day, and yet somehow still very little.


The friends I've stayed with in Ferny Creek on Mt Dandenong give me a lift to the closest train station at the foot of the mountain. From their house above, Melbourne is a sea of mist and fog, solid cloud below where we stand in the tall forests. As we drive down the switchbacks we slowly begin to see more geography, the mist surrounding us and seemingly thinning at the same time, becoming more transparent from within. I look up at a slope of forest, and can't tell if the mist I'm seeing between me and it is a thick blanket over me or a thin blanket spread the distance from it to me.

At Upper Ferntree Gully Station the train will be about fifteen minutes, so I go to look at the market being held in the station parking lot. I'm carrying my travel bag (sports bag sized), my sleeping bag, my laptop bag. A man stops and looks at me, and says "Coming or going?" I tell him I've been here, and now I'm going to Epping. He tells me that Epping is no good - it's all blue sky and thistles. I look around me at the mist that hides nothing yet makes everything seem grey and wet dark green, at the sky too white and misty to show any hint of the sun's presence, and think that blue sky ain't all bad.

I get on the train, and open my laptop - it's an hour's ride to the city. I have work to do, and I can get a chunk of writing done in one hour and get paid for it. But the screen decides to play up. It's nothing but flickering lines, flickering too unreliably for me to work out how to get into the system check menus. Stopping and starting it again does nothing. So I resign myself to watching Melbourne pass by for an hour. It starts industrial through Boronia and Bayswater, then goes light commercial through Ringwood, then stays pretty steadily suburban domestic from Mitcham onwards. All of these are colour schemed by the same decorator - shades of grey, white, and damp dark green. Melbourne's a big city, and visually one place seems to look very much like another over much of its area - self-replicating suburbs slowly spawning endless in the humid fog.

An hour later I change trains at Flinders St. Well, I try. It takes a while. Melbourne's public transport system tends to rely heavily on you already knowing how it works. After exiting platform 2, I spend a lot of time walking backwards and forwards with all my bags in the subway between platforms looking for one marked "Epping", and failing to find it. You can only see the signs that name the train lines for each platform when you're actually at each platform, and there's nothing to say whether you should walk left or right from any given platform to find the one you're after. Eventually I give up, walk up onto the Sandringham platform (number 12) and all the long way along it and up the far-end escalators to the concourse above. There I walk back and forth along all the platforms looking for signs. On the concourse, each platform is signed with a screen telling you the next train leaving from that platform. This doesn't help you if the line you want is not the next train on a platform - and most platforms have at least two lines that stop at them, sometimes four. So I still don't know where the Epping line leaves from, but at least I know it's not a next-train. So I walk out to the far side of the concourse where there are tall electronically-controlled flip signs (very much like the job board in Hudsucker Proxy) hung from the ceiling. They list every line. Epping is platform number 1. I find platform number 1 (which had been not visible in the subway), and in the intervening minutes its screen has changed to say that an Epping train will leave in eight minutes. I catch the train.

The train's quite full, but there's an outflux at Clifton Hill. There must be some kind of fun run or marathon on today - I see a lot of people clutching identical sponsorship bags and wearing runner numbers attached to the fronts of their shirts.

I haven't been to Epping or on this train line for about a year. My first job interview was out this way, with the City of Whittlesea. Then, I didn't know anything about the areas I was travelling through. Now I know a lot of the names. Northcote, where a lot of students live. Preston, where I've been for pizza and which has markets. Thornbury, also a desirable suburb for rentals. Merri station is by a crossing of Merri Creek, which I now know is one of the better known creeks with more active environmental groups and more organised funding - not least because it outlets into the Yarra River. Then there's Lalor, Thomastown and Epping itself - various shades of urban, suburban and industrial. I still haven't been to the historic homestead at Thomastown, though I selected it as a visit location this time last year.

And the scenery has changed from the first leg of my trip to this leg. The suburbs around me no longer theme in dampness, with dark moss green running through the water-created cracks. It's still the same decorator, but they're in their off-white phase. Definitely a drier look.

I get off at Epping, the end of the line, still toting my three bags including the useless laptop. I've been travelling now for about two hours, from east to centre to north, along the axes of a quarter of the city. I look vaguely in one parking lot for Brian, then in the one on the other side of the tracks. I don't see him in either, but I stand there looking vaguely at both of them and trying to work out where I am in relation to anything I remember from the map. As I'm standing and gawking with a bag on each shoulder and one in my arms, an older couple come up to me, clutching the Metlink transit brochures. One asks me "Bunnings?" I look at him blankly. He repeats himself in a thick foreign accent, and I realise he wants to know where Bunnings is. I smile and say I don't know, I'm not from here. I'm not sure what in my current presentation in any way implies "local". But perhaps, to them, I look like a Melbournite.

Brian comes, and takes me to his place for lunch and a wander in the state park across the road. The sky remains white and grey. But eventually, as promised, I see thistles.