Sugar, Rum and Red Meat - The Healthiest Side of Australia

I spent the better part of Thursday on the Bruce Highway. I was far enough north now that alternative routes were becoming fewer and fewer. The downside to riding the Bruce, of course, is traffic. The Bruce is Queensland's main highway and as a result commercial and leisure traffic of all kinds passed me by - everything from sixteen wheeler trucks to a fleet of over thirty Harley Davidsons were in show for the day. The Harleys even waved. The Queensland sunshine, apparently, was contagious.

I found a respite from the frenetic pace of the highway on a sideroad to Bauple between Gympie and Maryborough, the next medium-sized town 70 miles north. Bauple is a town grown up around the sugarcane industry. Almost all of mid-northeastern Queensland is sugarcane, and I'd been smelling the stuff since even before Gympie. The smell of large quantities of sugarcane is not unlike the smell of molasses, which made for sweet, and pleasant, riding. Bauple, it turns out, is actually not named for sugarcane, in spite of its obvious central role in the local economy. Instead, Bauple, and Queensland generally I found out, is the original home of macademia nuts, originally called Bauple nuts. Sure enough, the general store in Bauple sold plenty of Bauple nuts and kept a grove of Bauple trees out the back.

After a mandatory couple of handfuls, my route eventually returned to the Bruce Highway for another 30 miles or so past Marborough to Childers, an old gold-mining town. Reaching Childers felt good. I'd just knocked off my first century of the trip, arrived well before sunset, and had the chance to camp out at a backpackers in Childers that was as new and modern as a backpackers could be in spite of the town's small size. I learned later that a previous backpackers had actually burned down in Childers, and the new one had only recently been built. I noticed an unusual plethora of non-smoking propoganda in this hostel.

Childers to Miriam Vale brought me through Bundaberg. For anyone who has ever visited Australia or New Zealand, the name Bundaberg is synomymous with Australasia's most successful spirit, Bundaberg Rum. A tour of the rum distillery was certainly in order, and I did so learning just where all that sugarcane I'd been seeing from the road was actually headed for. And no tour of any distillery or brewery is ever complete without a couple of product samples, so I did.

Whether it was the rum or a tailwind that crept up later that day, I'll never know, but the next 80-odd miles simply flew by. Covering 115 miles that day, I reached Miriam Vale shortly after sunset, bunking in at the only pub in town, the Miriam Vale Hotel. Virtually the entire town was gathered at the pub for Friday Night Raffle. It was a conspicuous event, with the grand prize a case of Bundy Rum and cola (which I'd actually sampled earlier that day). After ordering from the kitchen a hearty meal of chicken kiev and various breads and salads enough to feed a table of three, I returned to the bar for a "extra" sampling of that Bundy rum. Who knew if it was really the tailwind? Tomorrow was another long day and I wasn't taking any chances.

Another bright and clear day opened on this morning, with the temperature eventually climbing past 80 degrees F. Long stretches of the Bruce Highway passed, with roads straight as an arrow for up to 3 miles at a time. For the first time, I began to get a sense of the hugeness of Australia. Over 30 miles would pass without a break in the scenery whatsoever. Vast tracks of land swept by. So much land that much of it wasn't even fenced - neither farmland, nor pasture, nor national park. Just open savannah for miles on end. Riding through it was surreal.

Rockhampton, my destination for the day, marked another milestone. Just before reaching Gladstone, a port city en route to Rockhampton, my speedometer had finally clicked over its 1,000th mile and reset itself back to zero. Rockhampton was also just 4km north of the official 23.5 degree S lattitude line demarcating the Tropic of Capricorn, meaning that the next few days would techcnically be "tropical." The air still felt pretty dry to me. I'd picked up another water bottle on the route in fact to combat the combination of heat and dry air.

Rockhampton is unofficially the "beef" capitol of Australia (or even officially, I'm not sure, all I know is that there are at least a dozen signs and pro-tourism billboards proclaiming this on the main road into town). I decided it was the proper night to tuck into a good steak.

It happened that the NZ All Blacks game was on, and at the pub over a (very good) steak I wound up in conversation with a diverse bunch including an Aussie, a Brit, a Kiwi (sporting, naturally, an All Blacks jersey) and myself, the resident Yank. After a good harassing of the Yankee's commander-in-chief, it turned out that Graham, Phil, and Matt were good blokes in Rockhampton on contract for a few weeks work with the local power company before returning to home along the gold coast. All, in turned out, were rabid All Blacks fans. I discovered then that the All Blacks, the winningest team in rugby, are actually almost as popular in Oz as in New Zealand.