Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Steam Train Adventure (~jinghan)

“June seems to be quite popular for birthdays.”

“It’s makes sense.”

“How so?”

“Spring.”

“June’s not spring! … Oh wait…”

—

It’s been three days since my last exam and I still haven’t started studying for my next one. Instead I am making nefarious plans for the birthdays of various friends. Tomorrow is my friends birthday and we know that if we do not drag her out she will spend the day studying. It is therefore our responsibility – nay – duty to drag her out.

What is the best time for a sleep over? In the middle of exams? Sure! Why not?

*text-message-bleep*

“Good morning! It’s misty outside! It’s beautiful! Say happy birthday to G– for me. I’ll see you girls at breakfast.”

“Arg. Morning. What mist? There’s just the sleep in my eyes.”

Eventually the two of us roll out of bed. And lo and behold: it is actually misty! There’s a beautiful pastel shroud over everything, and the birds are twittering away and it’s about the temperature of the top-shelf of my fridge. We drag our arses to the train station leap into the warmth of the train when it (finally) arrives and head to Box Hill to meet the boys for breakfast.

The shop that we were planning to have breakfast at seems not to have opened yet. Damn. We bully our friend into writing “WHEN DO YOU OPEN?” on his news paper and to hold it up to the glass of the restaurant. The kitchen hands either are un-amused or deliberately ignoring us. My newspaper friend is highly embarrassed. But the rest of us find it highly amusing.

We sit down to breakfast and gift exchanging. I notice a birthday card hidden in the folds of the news paper.

“Uh.. I’ll just go get some money from the ATM,” my friend says only slightly shiftily.

“Gee, you took your time. Did you rob a bank or something?” we joke, when he gets back (with a now-signed card.)

The restaurant is empty except for a chinese couple who seem to think 10am is a great time to order a large bowl of noodles in steaming soup. (Why not?) We order fragrant tea, red bean filled “pancakes”  and Chinese “doughnut sticks” which we break apart with our fingers and drip into hot sugary soy milk* licking the oil from our fingers afterwards. Inertia keeps us in the restaurant for quite a while.

We take a metropolitan train to Belgrave. The scenery outside the window shifts from suburban streets to eucalyptus covered hill sides. The train horn blares and echoes as we pass under a tunnel and we all delight in the novelty of the sound.

I have always loved the idea of the end of the train line. When you’ve been catching the trains for years and years between those same few familiar stations, it’s like going to the edge of the world. Belgrave is everything I hoped it would be. The end of the platform just disappears into a gate and becomes a path. You walk straight through onto a path that winds it’s way through peaceful trees until you get to the Puffing Billy ticket office.

Oh I didn’t tell you that we were going to Puffing Billy, the stream locomotive, did I? That’s okay, we didn’t tell my birthday friend where we were going either. And coming from Perth, she had never heard of Puffing Billy anyway.

Here is where our previous inertia gets us into trouble. The tickets for the train we were supposed to be catching are sold out. Just catch the next train? Problem: I need to get home by 5pm to receive some other guests at home. And the next train won’t see me home until 6pm.

We by tickets for the train anyway.

We watch the first train depart. Delighting in the mass of white steam rolling out of the locomotive engine. And the puff and wheeze of the valves as the train pulls away. We wave at all the little children hanging out of the windows of the carriages.

With extra time on our hands, we find a cafe in Belgrave and order burgers and milkshakes and eggs benedict with hollandaise sauce… oh and fairy bread. The waitress smiles to herself as my friend adds this final item to the order.

Stuffed with food we head over to pick a carriage to sit in. We discuss the mechanics of railway gauges and sit on the window sill hanging out legs out the side of the carriage even before the train starts moving.

And when it does: it is amazing. Rolling hills, stark white gum trunks reaching out into branches that are hung with strips of fallen bark, houses with verandas perched on slopping ground – all to the backing track of a soothing chug chug.

We get to Lakeside, where the train will rest for 45minutes before taking us back to Belgrave. One of my friends makes a excited comment about aqua bikes and speeds off towards the lake ahead of all the rest of us. We race across the lake, almost get called out of the lake for bumping into each other, and are warm and out of breath by the time we get back to shore.

We look at the time. Three minutes before the train leaves. We make a dash for it, arriving huffing and puffing and cram into a already full carriage near the engine.

We are more subdued on the way home, our limbs are limp and everyone is occupied by some private thought. I hug the window frame and watch the steam roll out of the chimney of the stream engine and onto the ferns and flowers beside the track. It reminds me of perhaps a scene from A Midsummer Nights Dream. I keep my eyes peeled for a sign of Titania, Oberon or Puck.

It’s dark by the time I get home. As I’m walking up the street I get a phone call. “Hello?”

“I’m on your street. What number was your house again?” It’s one of my guests that I was supposed to be receiving an hour ago.

“Thirty Five. Haha, actually I’m only just walking home right now as well.”

“Oh actually I think I see you ahead of me on the street.”

I turn to look behind me. A figure is making their way up the street. And we head to my house together and laugh about it with the other guests.

I go to bed tired but happy. A truly adventurous day full of joy and peril. Who would have thought it’s the middle of exam period?

—

*油条 a traditional Beijing breakfast food, it’s basically deep fried dough. I like how the soy-milk offsets the oiliness of of the “doughnut sticks” if my friends did not enjoy this, they were too polite to say so.