Cairns

It was another bright and sunny day as I wheeled out of Cardwell. I could feel the lattitude change truly now. The previous night the temperature had dropped no lower than 75. Talk about a change from the mountains four weeks before. During the day at least, the heat was broken by wind coming off the cooler hills west, and the final stretch of road was right near the coast and its breezes.

The start of the day was, I admit, slow going. By this point I was well and truly tired. The last day to Cairns was slated to be 190km, around 120 miles, the last of a string of centuries as I'd been making up time since Brisbane.

The last 120 miles, however, was fantastic. Nature had put some true texture in the landscape for this stretch and the cane fields gave way to proper rainforest, broken by occassional banana plantations and those now oh-so-welcome hills. I stopped several times to fill water bottles in the heat, which reached around 90F at midday, and took time to savor these last few bits of cross-country cycling with as much daylight as was available.

By the time I approached the signs marking the last 40km to Cairns it was starting to feel like the end of a trip probably should. I had had a certain share of rough spots and a certain share of high points. Australia had shown off its legendary sunshine and along the way I got to see a fantastic region of the world, slowly, with time to savor it. I even regained some fitness and learned to appreciate the rhythm of life on the road: waking early, cycling late, eating, sleeping, and living off the bike, never covering the same stretch of road twice.

This will be my last entry. In total, the trip covered 1,770 miles and passed more cows, cane fields, and coasts than my chip-seal numbed brain can recall. Tomorrow I begin a PADI class and preparations to see the Great Coral Reef. In a future update to this entry, I'll add an Ofoto link with a photojournal of the trip including pictures and captions for things that don't appear here.

Thanks for coming along for the ride.

P.S. Added 9/24/06, the link to Ofoto is: http://www.kodakgallery.com/Slideshow.jsp?&mode=fromsite&collid=48011918106.219102792206.1161724310299&conn_speed=1

Eating One's Way up the Queensland Coast

Townsville has to be one of the nicest looking towns in Queensland. The inner city is separated neatly from the suburbs by a long lazy river and a series of parks that surround the more commercial areas. There are no franchise businesses in the main part of town and the entire down is dominated by what has to be one of the most classic climbs in northern Queensland for hikers and climbers, Castle Rock. Castle Rock is an enormous monument over the city, sits practically on top of the center, and in a stroke of rare and forsighted real estate management, is pure parkland but for a small memorial building at the very top.

My plan to wake before sunrise and hike Castle Rock was foiled by the fact that I found the trip up to Castle Rock was a full 90 minutes, and also, in fairness, by the previous night's pubcrawl. Add to that the one hour return and I would burn a lot of morning daylight, and I still had around 110 miles to Cardwell that afternoon.

So I canned the morning trek in favor of sitting down to breakfast at a cafe close to the hostel which served what has to be one of the most ingenious brekkies I've ever come across in Australia or anywhere. A concoction called Strawberry Bruschetta. I'll spare the details, but it did involve lots of strawberries, honey, raisin bread, and rich cream. I justified the purchase with the fact that I'd be burning off calories later that day, enjoyed a leisurely coffee, and looked up at Castle Rock with that sort of smile that says, "wow... eating food is really much more fun than burning it."

The section from Townsville to Cairns is bordered to the west by World Heritage listed rainforest, making for some spectacular views. Though Australian road crews apparently have a habit of finding the absolute flattest stretch of pavement on which to put highways even in the midst of what were the only hills in the area and a novel chance at some climbs had I been given the opportunity. However, I couldn't complain about the green forest to the west running into cane fields to the east, or poking through the occasional break in the fields, a view to the ocean for the first time along the highway in several days.

At midday I got caught by what was an obvious tourist trap. A roadside cafe called "The Frosty Mango" that had been advertising to me via billboards since Townsville. Sated as I was by the berry fix I'd already had that day, the day was hot, I was in fruit country, and by 11am figured I it was time to cave to the advertising. True to its name, Frosty serves mangos by the crateful. And of all the fruits of the world, I do love mangos.

I had the mango pancakes with the mango jam.

Followed by a dish of raw mangos.

And for dessert (such a "meal," naturally, deserves dessert), a mango smoothy.

By the end of it all I was in fruitified heaven.

Riding a little bit slower out of the cafe than into it, I covered off the rest of the ride to Cardwell that day with one instance of a great view out to Hinchinbrook Island, a national park just off the Great Barrier Coast that is (in flatty flat Australia) characterized by some truly pretty mountains. I stopped in Cardwell, went to the beach, took photos (seeing something with texture in the landscape, nice as all those cane fields had been, made me camera happy), and finished a day characterized as much by food as by cycling with a proper dinner at the local restaurant. Naturally, with fruit for dessert.

The Beer is Fizzy, but the Land is Flat

Australia, let it be known, is bugger-all flat. Even after coming off the Marlborough stretch the road from Airlie to Bowen was pancake flat. Table-top flat. Calibrate a an Ace-Hardware-level-to-it flat. As I had in the mountains, as I passed by the field upon unending field of sugarcane on the road up to Bowen just how necessary it really was that I had those two gears (the top and the bottom that I'd used so profusely in the mountains) since now I was hardly ever moving out of the one gear smack in the middle.

Thankfully the road to Bowen had nice wide shoulder, and I was blessed with what had to be the best Queensland day I'd seen yet. The temperature was about 75 degrees F, sunny, and dry to the last kilometer. I rolled into Bowen about 4pm and put up at the local pub, a place where there were a heap of other backpackers there for fruit-picking work.

I arrived feeling good, and had a couple of bundy's and rum with a few of the other backpackers. The main pub in Bowen also has a massive pokies - the Australian version of slot machines - room, and I dutifully dropped a few coins to compensate for having been lucky enough to buy drinks at half price.

Only one thing got in the way of an otherwise great day. The evening concluded (or failed to conclude) with having drawn a bunkmate that night who snored like a sick cow. And believe me, I had passed a lot of cows by this point and knew what a sick one sounded like. Don, a pleasant bloke by day, breathed not so much in that deep rhythmic and even peaceful way that some snorers do but in a way that sort of went "grraahhhhiiiiiiiiggggrriiiiiiiaaaaayyyyyybbb," with each syllable taking slightly longer or not as long as the one before it, adding an infuriating unpredictability to the whole enterprise. In some sense it was a good thing I needed to get up early for a long day ahead.

I got out of bed at 5:00am and shuffled off on my earliest start yet, 5:45am. It was slated to be a longer day than usual. The longest ride of the trip in fact, taking me all the way to Townsville, approximately 140 miles. I had breakfast at the only place in little Bowen that was open that time of the morning (technically the shop wasn't open, but the Aussie woman inside was kind enough to let me graze since she couldn't believe a tourist really showing up at 5:30 in the morning). I picked out a hearty basket of fruit and rode off with the rising sun warming the road as I went west along the Bruce Highway towards Townsville.

The day was uneventful but for the fact that the Bruce turned out to be under constant construction. I passed at least a dozen road crews, which, believe it or not, were actually a pleasant change of pace if for no other reason than the need to concentrate on something other than the steady churn of trucks on the road. I was still riding incredibly flat terrain, and standing on the pedals periodically just because changing gears felt good, and novel, even if totally unecessary. And I passed a vast number of cane fields. And cane trains. And cane trucks. And cane processing facilities. If I had any doubts about how Queensland made its money, I had my answer now. Cane (and fruit). But mainly cane.

Townsville turned out to be a very pleasant town. I checked into a small backpackers, and, to celebrate the relatively long day, had a pubcrawl with a couple of the gents at the backpackers. We got back late, I made a quick dinner out of takeaway noodles, and turned in again with only two days separating me from the final haul to Cairns.

Into the Bush

Rockhampton, in addition to being my protein and Four X Lager fix for the week, was also a demarcation point in the map up the Australian coastline. From Rockhampton forward, there would be considerably fewer places to stop and refuel. In particular, my map showed a red ribbon of 190 miles to Sarina, a section of highway broken only by a Whipporie-sized dot called Marlborough and the occasional dirt road leading off to one of Australia's coal mines several of which were located up here. This was the one and only way north short of traveling almost 600 miles west and detouring by going back up and over the Great Dividing Range. The land along this stretch would be true bush. Windy. Desolate. Surreal. Much as I'd first come to Australia looking forward to tracing line after long line of beach, coasting along on sea breezes with the smell of saltwater in the air and gelatos at every rest stop, it was this side of Australia that I'd actually come to appreciate much more. It was these vast stretches of unbroken terrain, the ability to look out over miles of earth in any direction and see nothing at all. It was the sensation of riding a bike, mind and body engaged in the discipline, across these vast tracts of wilderness that are otherwise impossible to find for us city-dwellers. On my map at least, I was staring down 190 miles of it. I couldn't wait to get started.

First things first though, I needed to provision a few extra liters of water. After a round trip around Rockhampton during which I saw all of this bustling metropolis' three city blocks (picking up a hearty breakfast at a local cafe as well), I headed off. My first stop was Marlborough, the only stop along the way that would have rooms. True to proper Queensland weather, the day had started off brilliantly sunny and turned to rain by midday. In the midst of this, I have to say that the stretch between Rockhampton and Marlborough is probably the friendliest stretch of highway I've ever ridden. Cars tapped their horns, some backpacker vans rolled down their windows to shout encouragement, and standing on the pedals in the middle of the rain brought back memories of training for Lake Placid and IMC. I saw my first roadside kangaroo. I was feeling good.

I reached Marlborough about 5 o' clock and took a room at the one and only pub in town, the Marlborough Hotel. A small place, there were only 3 other guests at the pub, one dusty-looking road worker and a couple on their way up to Cairns from Melbourne on holiday. Jim and Ann were their names, and after talking a bit around the bar we had dinner together. Ann was a tremendous Australian rules football fan and for the first time, I got a glimpse of exactly what Aussie-rules football is all about (it's still essentially a no-holds-barred version of rugby with an emphasis on kicking field goals, but at least I can say that with confidence now). Jim was an electrician looking at buying a campervan soon for that much-dreamed-of trip all the way around Australia.

The next morning I woke up at dawn, collected my things, and was rolling by 6am. One thing that is true about cycle-touring is that your day is dictated by the sun. With sunset happening around 5pm due to the winter months, for these long days I found myself getting up earlier and earlier to take advantage of the available daylight.

The ride to Sarina was truly brilliant. Immense stretches of wilderness veered off to the right and to the left. Traffic was light to nonexistant. Roads as long as three miles ahead, straight as an arrow, characterized most of the day, and the only sense of distance I had was my speedometer showing how many miles I'd gone and how many left to Sarina. There were almost no road signs. Even fewer roadhouses. I encountered two on the way and filled all of my bottles at both. I was drinking through close to two bottles an hour and refueling with whatever cheap roadhouse eats I could find. I had a lot of Coke and M&M's.

Having put on an average of over 100 miles a day for the previous five days I arrived at Sarina and was, frankly, tired. Fortunately or unfortunately, there isn't much to do in Sarina. I found a place to do laundry, a pub to hole up at, a salty-looking pizza joint for fuel, and watched a weak but mildly entertaining episode of Australian Geographic on TV before going off to bed.

The following day I rode to Airlie Beach and proper city again. Airlie is a harbour and sailing town, and yachties were out in full force on the sunny 80 degree day that I pulled in. Much like Noosa and Byron, Airlie is hugely popular with international backpackers, and is the gateway to Australia's infamous Whitsunday Islands. It was a great day for a stroll along the beach, a foolishly expensive fruit smoothie, and a relaxing quiz night with a heap of other backpackers at the hostel I was staying. I had four more days to Cairns and was beginning to count down the miles from here. About 400 remaining in total. After another day to Bowen along the north coast, it would be three days through Townsville and on up the corridor of rainforest parkland that lines the road to Cairns.

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.

Gympy and Gympie

My plan to leave Brisbane Monday got unfortunately, as they say, "stuffed." Riding out of town through the Botanic Gardens on a crisp morning (Queensland or no, I was glad to have that fleece), I got to the suburb of Ashland Grove. Brisbane, beautiful and extremely liveable city that it is, still has miles and miles of Pizza Hut/KFC/used car lot/strip mall sprawl as any big city does, and I'd gone about 10 miles through it when BAM! what had to date been an inconvenience in my knee suddenly became a real and most unwelcome pain. I felt like someone was trying to take a screwdriver and pry loose my kneecap.

I hobbled to the side of the road, stretched, limped some more, and generally did an excellent job of looking like a gimp-cyclist in front of several dozen passing cars. I hung around a road-sign-come-stretching-tool for perhaps fifteen minutes before mounting the bike again.The trouble was still. A jolly voice in my head said, "Yeah, you're gonna have to fix that." I was.

I pulled into a bakery, the closest to a convenient chair I could find, and sat down to think up some options. Caloundra, the day's target, was around 70 miles away. I had the option of returning to Brisbane, which I didn't like, but returning would give me a shot at finding a respectable bike shop able to check my positioning, which I had started to believe might be causing the trouble since my couple of trips to the gym so far hadn't been having the desired effect. It was looking like Brisbane was the better idea.

As luck would have it, I found a surprisingly excellent bike shop called Lifecycle on my tentative ride back into the city. Blair, the proprietor, was able to set me up almost right away and comment on my position, making changes here and there all the while answering questions with the succint yet thorough answers of a real professional. Blair's changes didn't provided immediately relief, but it certainly gave me hope for the following day. And after an update (of course, I was in a bike shop after all) on the progress of the Tour, I set out on the road again in considerably better spirits.

The session with Blair had taken almost two hours, and there was little left to do but amble "home" and set up again in the hostel for the night (in a bit 0f true Australian generosity, Blair just smiled and charged me only $20 for the entire fitting when I offered him double that). I stopped at another bakery, this time with hunger as a motivator, and brought out one of the pages of my atlas to look over. A fit-looking guy in his 60s came over and said hello.

It turned out his name was Tom, who was a cyclist himself. While we chatted about trips we'd done and races we'd lost, Tom informed me that I'd probably just gone to the most professional bike shop in all of Brisbane and spent two hours with its top bike fitter, a guy who'd been doing fittings for over 20 years. I was thrilled to hear it, now even more confident that I wouldn't be trading one injury for another in the next few days.

Tom insisted on leading me back to his house to call up some maps he had of the northern suburbs of Brisbane. Having spent almost as much time looking at my atlas (meager on suburban detail) as I had cycling during my brief 10 miles of out and back from the city, I was only too happy for a dose of local knowledge. I followed Tom back and figured out a way out of the maze of Brisbane suburbs that would be on good road with good shoulder. Now I was really psyched.

I waved goodbye to Tom, and since it was now mid-afternoon, I parked the bike at the hostel and tooled around Brisbane. I walked through downtown, had a pizza slice from a local takeaway place (a slice , I was still filling a quota that hadn't been met in NZ) and spent the better part of the evening at the hostel's bar, swapping stories with the likes of other travelers and looking forward to the day ahead.

The next day was clear and sunny, and I made excellent time out of Brisbane, thanks to Tom's directions. I ventured through the Glass House Mountains, a scenic stretch of road that passes by a series of monument-like rocks that rise up out of the otherwise flat forestland east of the Great Dividing Range, and rolled into Caroumba just after midday.

By this point the knee had seemed to improve a bit. There were some sections it flared but 80 miles that day had gone by more or less okay. I was feeling good.

There isn't much to Coroumba, and the next day I didn't hang around long. I was keen to make up time where I had lost it in Surfer's and Brisbane, and wanted to get to Noosa, a spot the sounds of which reminded me even before I got there of Byron Bay. Noosa is another piece of Australia that has been keen to reject franchise businesses and over-ambitious resort developments. When I got there, it was just what I'd hoped - small funky shops, cafes serving cappucino with just that little bit of chocolate on top, passers-by who looked cheerful, many of whom on bicycles themselves. I liked it.

I liked it very much.

I had a cappucino.

Then I had a sandwich.

Okay, two sandwiches.

Filled up, I got a move on. Tempting as it was to stay in Noosa I had time to make up and it felt like a sin to leave leftover daylight when the sun had been setting consistently eac h day at 5. I was already looking at taking a bus through a substantial section of the Capricorn coast to make up lost time, and didn't feel like losing any more daylight than I had to.

I took out my iPod and played it while I rode up Noosa's pain-and-pleasure hill, named by its local triathletes who host a weeklong festival culminating in a race here each spring. Still dodging the Bruce Highway (formerly the Pacific Highway, but now that I was north of Brisbane it had changed names), I rode backroads the rest of the way to Gympie, and at the night-owl hour of 8:30, am already getting ready to crash.

"Paradise"

I decided to spend the next two days on the gold coast. For one, my supply of spares and patches had dwindled over the previous day, and I wanted to find a bike shop to replace spare parts, do some routine maintenance, and find out about good cycling roads north of the gold coast onto Brisbane. An even more important equal consideration though, was that I hadn't been able to get over the irritation that was still in my right knee. I'd been riding the last two centuries or so more or less on yankee mulishness, and it seemed like a good idea take stock of things.

The YHA in Coolangatta turned out to be smack beside the gold coast airport, turning the morning into a brekkie with other backpackers broken every 10 minutes by the loud WHHHHHIRRRRROOOOOOM! of planes taking off from the strip about 500 feet away. I decided if I was going to have a break in the ride, I would at least do it in a more peaceful spot.

I rode north to Palm Beach and found an amiable cycle shop that let me into their backroom to do my own mechanic work while the other staff filled the hours with Tour gossip that I was only too happy to soak up. I left the shop and took a leisurely and enjoyable ride up through the various beach towns of the gold coast, Burleigh Heads, Miami, Mermaid Beach, Broadbeach, until reaching the "capitol" of the gold coast, Surfer's Paradise.

A bit about Surfer's. Las Vegas, whether it knows it or not, has a rival for the title world's tackiest, silliest, most footloose, most plastic, most brightly lit, and most bizarre city. Surfer's Paradise sits like a giant vacation high-rise set on a beach, a sort of Australianized hybrid between Las Vegas and Los Angeles . There are dozens of theme parks, an equal number of timeshare resort monstrosities, and more opportunities to relieve yourself of dollars (gambling or otherwise) than an NYC nightclub promising "cheap" drinks. Surfer's is the same place where, riding into town, I saw signs for hotels going by such names as "Aruba Aruba," "The Pink Flamingo", and "The Swingin' Saloon."

In spite of the glitz and glam, I found a relatively quiet backpacker's on the border between Surfer's and Broadbeach. I used the break to get some errands done. I bought new warm-weather clothes (only a day into Queensland, I was already sweating in my heavyweight mountain fleece and jeans). I tried out a gym to see if I could get the knee joints to cooperate with some carefully applied strength training. I bought a new book (I had finished Roff Smith's Cold Beer and Crocodiles, an account of a cyclist's journey around Australia, and picked up something lighter still, Down Under by Bill Bryson). I even had another go at surfing, but happened to pick what was apparently one of the worst possible days on the gold coast that year for surfing (so the guy behind the counter at the rent-a-board said as he went on about something to do with onshore and cross winds and "soft" waves and the like). It was also raining again. The net result was me getting quite wet with a lot of windblown saltwater to the face, but little surfing.

This morning, thankfully, the sun broke through the clouds yet again and the enormous strip of Queensland beach that is the gold coast shone brilliantly. I had a dip because... I just had to. Today I'd intended to make it to Brisbane, so I saddled up and made headway up the remainder of the Gold Coast highway, past the last of the high-rises and beach scene and onto the circuitous backroad network that I had mapped out for a sans-highway ride to Brisbane. As it was, I ended up on the Pacific Highway for some portions anyway, but by weaving, sidewalk hopping, and culling more than one favor from a local gas station attendant, managed to maneuver my way up to Brizzy with a minimum of fast traffic.

Crossing over the Brisbane Harbor Bridge some sixty miles later, I enjoyed the first (in awhile) stretch of straight road and a magnificent view of Brisbane city wrapped on three sides by the large and lazy Brisbane River. Tomorrow will be on to the Sunshine Coast, and maybe a chance to "cross train" some more if the weather and waves cooperate.

Zen and the Art of Bicycle Maintenance

Thursday morning opened with another bright and sunny day. This was the eleventh day in a row of sunshine. Surfers were out. The air was dry. My toes were in the sand. I sat outside with a capuccino. Vacationers, yogis, hippies, all manner of happy people went by. I resisted every temptation (there were only a few) to move.

Move, however, I eventually did. In spite of Byron's appeal I was keen to reach the Queensland border, only 50 miles away. I planned to stop for the night in Coolangatta, the southernmost point of the Gold Coast and the beginning of a stretch of some of Australia's most famous beaches.

Packing was quick (one of the benefits of going light is that you don't have much), and I clipped in for the ride out of town. I planned to take the Pacific Highway as far as necessary and then turn inland, cycling a now all-but-abandoned backroad running alongside the Tweed Coast, which would take me nearly all the way to Coolangatta.

It hadn't occurred to me to wonder about my luck with the weather so far. Aside from a couple of last minute schedule changes and an unexpected hitch-hiking excursion to fabulous Lawrence, so far my luck with the weather had been fantastic.

Murphy knew this.

After less than an hour of cycling, the inevitable started. The rain was mellow at first, but failed to let up and the traffic on the Pacific Highway grew agitated. I gratefully reached the turnoff to the Tweed Coast in short order after the wet began, and avoided the prospect of challenging drivers to an on-road duel for fair share of shoulder. Shortly after hopping on the turnoff I starting making the descent eastward toward the coast. I hit a long downhill and picked up speed.

As I wheeled through the mist on the empty road, I saw ahead of me a seemingly harmless wooden bridge. No drama, I thought. I'd passed lots of descents in the mountains and just as many bridges. But just as I was freewheeling toward the bridge at the bottom the descent I realized there was something different about this one. For some reason on this bridge the builders had left thimble-sized bolts sticking up from the wooden planks staggered in a crisscross pattern. Inevitable to avoid - car, bicycle, little red wagon, all would have hit. I nailed the first one at probably 35 mph, then the second, then so many more I couldn't count them. The rest happened fast.

While the impact wasn't enough to throw my balance, it was enough to blow both tires with the kind of sudden WHOOSH! that lets you know your luck has run without even bothering to look. I pulled over and surveyed the damage. At least the treads on the tires were still intact but the inner tubes had blown deep holes. Drat. I hopped off and set about changing tires.

Then Murphy's sense of humor really got going.

At first I was optimistic the rain would just an acceleration of the steady stream of droplets already coming down and would pass even before I was back up and riding. As it turned out, the rain came down still harder, drenching a bike and rider already slick and grimy from pulling, pushing, levering, and squeezing out a tolerable service job on two blown tubes. Since I carried a patch kit in addition to spares, I was still OK for supplies but the rain was making a proper mess of my gear. I hopped back on the bike and kept on down the road.

About 5 miles later I heard a low-pitch grumble. It was... you guessed it... another flat. By the sound though, this one hadn't been a puncture. Instead it seemed to be a slow leak. Slow leaks are the worst.

Back on two feet, I scrapped the slow leak tube (a slow leak can't be patched, making the tub totally worthless) for a punctured ones, patching the hole made by the bridge with my kit. With almost an hour of daylight lost to maintenance, I carried on down the highway until...

"Ngaraaaaaaaghhh!"

I looked down again. Unbelievable. I rehearsed the routine yet again. Step down. Lever on. Tire off. Tube out. Pump. Find the hiss. Patch. Tire on. Pump. Go.

The next happened before I even got up on the saddle.

It took about fifteen minutes for me to figure out what as happening now in this most recent exhibition of the wide world of ways to flat a tire. It turned out that the top of the valve in the tube was leaking air where a screw-in section was threaded into it. I applied all the force I could to twist the screw-in section tight. Despite the good half-cup of rain I must have put in the tube doing it, the screw-in job worked. I was rolling agin.

The constant on-and-off however, had taken its toll on my available daylight. The rain had lessened but I was still pretty well drenched, and the sun was now setting. I clipped on my night-riding lights, prepared to ride out the last 40 miles in relative dark.

Traffic, at least, had nearly disappeared and the rain had all but ceased by the time twilight turned to dark. With the moon obscured by clouds, the night was almost black. The road was earily silent, haunting almost. I was all alone in total darkness with just the sound of waves crashing only a few hundred feet away.

I rode on in the relative calm and solitude. Frustrations faded. For the first time in almost two weeks I was totally without cars. Without foreign lights. Without intersections or breaks in my rhythm of any kind. After the day so far, the experience was zen-like. Over an hour passed. Two lights appeared ahead in the road, so far off on the arrow-straight road I couldn't tell how far away. Approaching them I felt like a ghost returning to the world of the living. They turned out to be marking another wooden bridge. I passed it (without flats), and plunged into darkness once more.

When the lights of Coolangatta finally appeared, I felt a sense of tranquility that not even the remote roadways in the mountains could inspire. Neither noise nor traffic nor flourescent city lighting disturbed me. I checked in, going about the mechanics of setting up a bunk for the night with robot-like ease. I fell asleep, the sense of acquired peace taking me to Nod almost instantly.

Byron at Last

Leaving Lawrence the knee still felt a little rough, and a section of the road back to Whipporie (driven over the night prior) was dirt anyway, so I walked a couple of the kilometers between. It was slow going back up to Whipporie, but by the time I got there it was lunchtime so I could, this time, take the station owner up on his ham on white advertised on the chalkboard outside the door. I did.

I passed through Casino (which has no casino, incidentally, making it an even sleepier town than my next stop, Lismore) netting about 60 miles that day. Lismore was only about 30 miles from Byron Bay, which I planned to ride early the following morning and make it into Byron in time to spend the day there where I planned to get off the bike for a bit, and maybe even get wet in the surf. Or in a generous interpretation, cross train.

I rolled out of Lismore at 7:30, getting into Byron just after 9:00am with plenty of daylight. Byron was (and is) a vast change from the hinterland. This was suddenly proper Australian coast. Backpackers spewed forth from buses running the circuit from Brisbane to Sydney. Tie-dye t-shirt shops and fruit smoothie outfits decorated main street. There was traffic. There was actually a selection of hostels and internet cafes. Roads are designed to lead to Byron, as opposed to towns growing up around the road that's there. I was in a proper city again. There was a bookshop. A local cinema. I felt like I'd just stepped off a plane.

With the afternoon in Byron and the temperature at a pleasant 75 F, I wandered around a bit and found a surf shop willing to rent boards and give surf lessons for an extra fee. Having done a miserable job at surfing once before, I took the board and the lesson together, finding my trainee group included a fresh-off-the-boat Irishman, a family with a brother and sister, and a 10-year old girl who was being looked after by the surf school instructor.

The 10-year old wasted no time in abusing the egos of all (particularly the men) in the group by standing, walking end-to-end, switching up feet mid-air, and generally doing tricks on her board while the rest of us struggled to keep balance in the 3 foot swells. Afterwards I decided to work out kinks in the body with a yoga session (Byron, very possibly, has more yoga studios per city block than any other city, it's that kind of town). and after some very cathartic stretching wandered back to the hostel, showered, dug out the atlas, and figured out the next day's travel.

A Cautionary Note About Reading an Australian Atlas

Grafton, a town about 45 miles to the north, I thought was a modest goal for the day. Following a 10am start, allowing the sun to warm the bitumen to a comfortable 15 C (~60 F), I rolled out of Coffs Harbour through the (now genuine) orange and banana plantations that covered the route to Grafton.

For this stretch I had turned inland, trying to avoid as much as possible a ribbon of road called the Pacific Highway which runs the length of the Australian coast and eventually becomes the Bruce Highway north of Brisbane. This road is the central artery of eastern Australia, carrying not only cars, vans, and campers, but semi-trucks, tractor-trailers, and wide-loaders moving the the bulk of Australia's population up and down the coast for both work and play. Traffic is at a chronic 100km/h (or more, depending on how young or hurried the driver), cars are frequent, shoulder debris is rampant and particularly on the south side of Brisbane along the Pacific, it is a fearsome road for cyclists.

I made good time to Grafton along the inland road, west of the Pacific Highway, in spite of riding up hills with a disproportionate weakness to my right leg giving the sound of the chain in the cranks a nifty "crr-ANK crr-ANK" until the downhills came and I freewheeled again.

I made such good time in this lopside fashion in fact that I arrived in Grafton about an hour faster than expected, with enough daylight for another 20-odd miles before sunset. The knee was even starting to loosen up some, and the pedals were turning over faster now than at the beginning of the day. While there was little between Grafton and the next major stop up, Casino, a dot on my map called Whipporie, written in the same size font as the towns I'd found plenty of lodging in in the mountains and just shy of halfway between the two, looked like a good place to spend the night and put a little time back in the bank after my layover in Coffs.

Fortune, however, must have more fun with cyclists than with drivers.

If my road atlas had one font size smaller for place names than the one used for Whipporie (which it did) I would have found it hard to justify labeling it a "town" (which it also did). Upon arriving at Whipporie I found the "town" consisted of one petrol station; one bulk agricultural products store (the petrol station); one a la carte cafe (also, inside the petrol station), and a truly useful used kitchen appliances retail shop conveniently located inside the petrol station. With the sun down, the temperature dropping, and another 25 miles yet to Casino which I would have to ride in the dark, I asked myself whether I was in need of petrol, chicken feed, ham on white, or parts for my In-Sink-Erator. Lodging, unfortunately, wasn't an option.

While I was asking the petrol store owner about the nearest alternative place to stay, a couple of pickup trucks rolled up driven by two men who hopped out to briefly enjoy a cigarette and a beer at the picnic table in front of the station.

I tallied my options. I could keep pushing on down the road to Casino, another 35 miles in the dark where I was bound to be a surprise to just about any driver on the road where cyclists were still about as scarce as yetis, even in this cold. Or I could turn around and head back to Grafton which would be shorter, but with the same obvious hazard as above. Or I could put on my best Aussie New England manners and try my luck at getting a hitch.

It turned out the two men that had just rolled up, Greg and Arnold, were on their way south through Lawrence, a same-size dot but one that did have a pub and one with proper rooms for rent (I knew this because I'd sorta started the conversation in this direction). I looked at the truck full of tools and bits. Then at my bike. Then I looked at Arnold. He guessed my predicament and in no time said in a "ah-hah" moment voice, "SUURRE, just pile yer stuff in the back and we'll drive ya on down to Lawrence. Fred will take care of you."

I didn't know who Fred was but I sure hoped he had a room.

I piled my bike in the bed of Arnold's pickup and after some skepticism about loose tools and whatnot in there with it, myself as well. Arnold turned out to be a conscious driver and took it carefully for the trip to Lawrence, slowing down before bumps and road bends to prevent the cargo from careering out of the bed. Arriving in Lawrence, Fred (who, I had found out after calling the pub in Lawrence from the petrol station, was the pub's owner) turned out to also be running a pretty good bar business that night. I shouted Arn0ld a round, who drained it and promptly returned the favor. Fred then joined us, conversation turning over politics, local news and brushfires (which, I learned, were a very big deal after 5 years relative drought). Arnold eventually motioned himself towards the door, and I not long after headed around back to my room, in time for a hot shower before turning in myself.

Knees and Peas

I woke up that morning with one of my culled Australian atlas pages still lying on my chest. The air was a bit warmer in Bellingen in the mornings than it had been in the mountains, and I wanted to get an early start to hopefully make it to Grafton, about 80 miles east and north via Coffs Harbour on the coast.

As I set out for Coffs, where I'd intended a long lunch on the coast before the longer segment to Grafton, I felt an ache creep into the ligaments of my right knee. As the kilometers rolled by, the ache became a twang, and the twang didn't take long to become outright throbbing.

I pulled over to the side and surveyed the damage. My mileage the day before hadn't been too great, but there had still been a few rollers past Ebor before I'd hit the descent. No movement and the pain immediately subsided. I could walk around too, but back on the bike the ligaments were playing like guitar strings. Reeling in my mind how I'd been pedaling the past few days in combination with the mileage I'd done before the trip and I was pretty sure I'd run up against injury from a too-rapid increase in mileage. I decided to push through to Coffs Harbour and consider putting Grafton off a day. After all, the month was still young and I could afford to lay up a bit before I got to Queensland. There, when the distance between towns got longer, I'd have less chance to adjust my travel plans on the fly and hole up wherever I chose.

My spirits, ironically, were buoyed by humor around the fantastic tackiness that is Coffs Harbour. Intending to avoid the sort of resort-development-gone-bad that characterizes certain tourist towns worldwide (I'd heard Coffs Harbour would be no exception), I couldn't help but chuckle at a larger-than-life banana advertising an indoor ice-skating rink (by then the irony of voluntary experiencing more ice struck me as enormously funny), a giant windmill that advertised what had to be the tiniest motel on the entire highway, and row upon row of huge (artificial) orange trees apparently celebrating fabulous orchards that were probably knocked down some years ago to make room for... huge and artificial orange trees now in their place. It was all part of driving into the resort-mecca that is Coffs Harbour.

I called it a rest there. I checked into a youth hostel and, digging around my stash for vitamins I'd purchased the night before, wandered off to a grocery store for a bag of ice and ended up buying frozen peas. I used the peas to ice the knee, and with some daytime left to kill, wandered out to the beach (on two feet now rather than two wheels) and up on the pennisula overlooking the harbor. The view was good, the fish and chip shop at the base of the pennisula even better, and I killed an afternoon eating slow, rotating peas around, and being bemused by the idea of heading to a city another 1,300 miles north after having difficulties pulling off a problem-free 250.

I chased a quick advil with a beer cadged from a bottle shop on the way back to the hostel, took care of laundry and some sundry to-do's, and headed off to bed in the hopes that tomorrow would see better luck and some fresh miles.

Descent out of the Mountains

The town of Ebor has the highest altitude in New England, and at 7,000 ft marks its highest settlement. Though it would be another 40 odd miles or so before the rolling hills were done with, afterwards would begin a tremendously long descent through a cavalcade of climates: barren scrubland to tall sand-colored grasses to forested pasture, and finally tropical rainforest as the rain-drenched eastward side of Great Dividing Range spilled toward the coast. This part of Australia is some if its most beautiful, making the long haul uphill worthwhile and becoming my favorite stretch of cycling so far in years. Passing through dense, tangled canopiesa tangled green canopy stocking hundreds of species per square foot, I let the bike freewheel for large portions taking bend after downward-sloping-bend while hundreds of different birds and small animals chirped, gurgled, and dashed through the canopy above me.

My free-wheeling came to an end in Bellingen, a hippy town that receives much of its climate from the coast. It was a fine 20 degrees (70 F). The air had lost its aridness, seeming to warm the temperature still further and had Bellingen been actually on the coast, I would almost certainly have gone for a swim.

One thing held me back from pressing on to the coast, however. Having lived the last 10 months in New Zealand there was an appointment I simply could not afford to miss that afternoon, the kickoff of the All Blacks versus NZ's "western island," aka arch-rival Australia. I bunked down in Bellingen early and grabbed a barstool at the nearest pub.

The full-to-firecode pub nearest the hostel went silent as the All Blacks did the haka - a ritual dance that commences every All Blacks game. The haka is Maori. Fierce. Serious. Performed by guys (many of them Maori themselves) surely big enough to make a meal of most people. And for a country of roughly 4 million people, New Zealand has a habit of thwomping others in professional rugby whether 3, 4, or in the case of Australia, 5 times its size. The All Blacks game this time turned out to be no different with NZ fracturing the Wallabies (literally in fact, professional rugby rarely goes a game without stretchers on the field) 32-12. I left the pub grinning with trans-Tasman loyalty.

I made dinner that night at the hostel kitchen, swapping stories with a fellow cyclist named Roger and ecologist-turned-permanent-traveler Thomas, each of us sharing a mutual fascination with the Australian road keeping the three of us up into the night. When the Southern Cross finally tilted vertical at about midnight, I turned in for the night.

Of Ice and Icing

Morning in Uralla was a nice hot breadth of -6 degree air. After two nights in Tamworth, I'd gotten in the habit of looking out the window before stepping outside to see if there was frost on the ground, then gauging the time it took me to get out of bed accordingly. Today though, there was enough frost on the window that I couldn't even see the bloody frost on the ground. A 70 mile uphill slog was sounding right now about as good an idea as a hole in the head.

The pub, as most pubs that provide accomodation in Australia do, provided breakfast that morning and so after fetching together my gear, I wandered down to sniff out some corn flakes and tea. To up my spirits, I wandered across the street, consciously avoiding a look at the hazy peaks in the distance, and found a bakery open where I bought a cupcake with some jolly pink icing on it, a cup of coffee, and a newspaper. "The Armidale Express" reported little very exciting (keen as I was, cupcake in hand, for the school bake sale that happened to be that Saturday) but did make a mention of the latest Tour news, which psyched me up enough to down the last dregs of coffee and head across the street to get sorted for the road.

I got rolling around 10am, just as the sun began to burn some of the frost off. The day actually warmed to about 13C by midday, and I made good time to Armidale, the next town up. Armidale had, amongst other things, a bike shop where I replaced my used spare and bought a bit of advice about the upcoming section to Dorrigo.

"How's the road up there?" I asked the 20-something behind the counter.

"It's good road mate, lots of switchbacks, the club uses it for training quite a bit."

"Oh?" I asked, trying to sound casual while processing the idea of doing the remaining 60k's on somebody's else's favorite hill ride.

"Yeah, it's a good road. Mostly rolling from here out, but then switchbacks up to Ebor. Where are you staying?"

"Dorrigo."

"Well, it's a bit rolling after Ebor."

I assured him how pysched I'd be to see what he meant by his frequent use of the word "rolling."

At this lattitude, sunset comes around 5pm. Leaving Armidale at 2:30 would thus give me about two-and-a-half hours to get to Dorrigo, so I didn't linger any further.

The road to Dorrigo was indeed rolling, in other words more of the now-familiar huge gear or tiny gear that had characterized the trek to Uralla. By the time I reached the 20k to go mark to Ebor, the chronic up and down had taken a toll and I was starting to run behind schedule. I made plans to stay in Ebor instead of Dorrigo to avoid riding at night.

I had dinner there. Actually I had two dinners, taking full advantage of the Ebor pub's ample kitchen, and went to sleep.