Sunday Run (2)

Endomondo Running Workout: "23.42 km in 2h:16m:27s"

This one nearly killed me, phew, the last 2K was not fun. Still, the time/distance much better than I thought, so in fact, what I thought was a bad run turned out to be a good run. Maybe I set off too fast.

It had been raining all night, so the intensifying effect recent rain has on smells was very evident. There's lots of eucalyptus en route and the gummy aroma was strongest along the river; lucky really, because so was the not-so-vaguely faecal smell of mangrove - is it the swamp itself, or does the swamp just trap the passing drainage overflow? The odd thing about smell is that it's really the change that you notice; after a while a constant smell, no matter how vile, recedes into the back of one's consciousness.

After the river there's the smell of a bay beach, salty like an ocean beach, but danker, more earthy. A surprisingly large number of people out, given the early morning rain.

Best though was, just coming up to Marrickville road on the final stretch, a massive blast of incense mixed with yeast, just behind the strip of shops near the Victoria St intersection. The yeast is easy to understand, there are two excellent bakeries at that end of the street (see the "Croissants" entry elsewhere), but here's no obvious source for the incense. There is a Buddhist temple in Marrickville, but it's on Livingstone St., just opposite the Orthodox church. This was domestic incense, a reminiscence of muggy mornings in the inner city of Guangzhou, a solitary foreigner on a private journey.