Sunday 2 July. Mount Victoria · Lake Lyall |34 km|
[A clear but chilly day with rain threatening and the occasional shower. Busy highway, with no shoulder or verge in places. Very uncomfortable on the bike and not used to towing a trailer]
I jumped in and bought a blue Yamaha model EF1000iS petrol generator, for the not very good reason that it was on special around the corner at Sydney Tools for $1,230 – I really wanted the equivalent Honda unit (because they’re red).
Then I had to get a trailer to carry it in. The only one available off-the-shelf in the whole of Sydney, or so it seemed, was a cute little number with the rather catchy name of “Topeak Journey”. It was hanging up on the wall on sale for $630 from Glow Worm Bicycles which is also around the corner from where I was staying. I snapped it up even though I was a bit wary because: (a) it was only half the price of all the others I’d looked at on-line; (b) it had no suspension; and (c) it wasn’t very robust-looking.
And jeez, it really took me by surprise when I got back on that bike with the loaded trailer hitched on – the handling characteristics are…let’s just say, totally different.
And so it was with a great deal of trepidation that I wobbled off mid-morning from my daughter Abbie’s place on a cold and clear winter’s Sunday to catch a train at Sydney Central Station for the Blue Mountains. In my novice road-train state, I wasn’t quite game enough to tackle the mountain ascent under my own steam just yet.
But first I dithered about for a couple of hours buying a warm woollen base clothing layer (that is, a new pair of Icebreaker Long Johns to replace the ones I lost on my previous trip), and so missed the 12.18 train to Lithgow by 5 minutes. The next train wasn’t due to leave until 2.18; however, there was a 1.18 train that went as far as Mount Victoria and I thought that it might just about do, and so settled on that one instead. Getting the bike plus trailer on and off the train and platform and finding somewhere acceptable to lash it down on the train were no easy matters, but the rail staff were helpful and my fellow passengers were quite accepting of the inconvenience.
It was only 26 km but a scary, hilly and exhausting ride in my unconditioned novice state to Lake Lyall via Lower Benfells (where I woofed down a steak pita, the only food I’d eaten all day in my state of nervous excitement), and I arrived completely frazzled at dusk (5.20pm) into the lake campsite. It was cold – damned cold – and so it was straight into the tent by 6pm in all available layers of clothing, and inside a double-layered sleeping bag (where I found, crumpled up between layers at the bottom, the ‘lost’ pair of PJs that I had just spent 2 hours unnecessarily replacing).
Monday 3 July. Lake Lyall · Black Rock |33 km|
[Very cold, with intermittent rain. Road was safe due to no traffic. No verge, but a good shoulder]
My neighbours at Lake Lyall, a part-time dad and his two sons on a bonding school-holidays camping trip, left out a bowl of water as an experiment to see it would be frozen solid by morning. It was! But considering how bloody cold it was, I still managed to be up and away from the campground just after sunrise. I was in full winter regalia, including balaclava and thick gloves.
Almost immediately I came to a long steep hill that the locals refer to as “the Double Dipper”. It defeated me half way up – I just couldn’t make it, or even get the bike turned round to go back down and have another crack at it.
Fortunately for me though, after only a short while to indulge in a bout of despondency and self-doubt, a local lad came along in his ‘ute and stopped to help me. After we took the rear panniers off and unloaded the gen set from the trailer I was able to climb the rest of the hill under my own steam. Meanwhile, he’d taken off with all my gear in the back of his ute, that we’d agreed he would drop off somewhere at the top of the hill.
When I arrived to the top of the hill a quarter of an hour later…he was still there – waiting patiently to make sure I made it up OK and guarding my belongings. How good is that! Thanks mate, didn’t get the name, but his rego is BY02QK and, yes, I do feel very guilty for making a quick note of it before he disappeared up that hill with all my gear.
I stopped at the Tarana pub at 11.30 and put the batteries on charge using the pub’s beer garden power outlet whilst having a really nice, but really expensive ($19.50) steak sandwich and chatting to the locals – Bruce, an ex-shearer who had a career-ending leg-break a year ago and whose painted portrait features prominently on the bar wall, and Jason, a loud-of-voice horse-breaker. Do people still do that for a living? – I guess they do indeed, and it’s only a reflection of my city-bred ignorance that I doubted it. By the way, he charges $154 including GST (that’s IVA to our Spanish friends, and VAT to the Irish) to break your horse, in case you were wondering. See – you learn something every day.
I stayed at the pub (charging-up, not drinking) until 2.15; the weather was iffy – overcast with intermittent rain – and a camping spot not too far away at 15km had been recommended.
I arrived at the recommended campground at 3pm, and what a good recommendation it was too. Known as Flat Rock, a place of local aboriginal significance on the Fish River, there were already half a dozen high-school-age young locals camped there in two tents (term break, apparently). It’s a magical place, and I remember feeling very alive and lucky to be there – time standing still, a perfect gibbous moon, and through my binoculars I could clearly see the mountains and craters on it.
There was a bit of trouble during the night, with youths sneaking around my tent (I’m a very light sleeper) me yelling at them and an unsatisfactory response (“just looking for our mate” – yeah, right), and, earlier, noisy parents in their noisy cars coming to drag off their noisy daughters, as well as a few rainy patches, but no big deal.
Tuesday 4 July, 2017. Flat Rock to Sofala |74 km|
It was late when I left Flat Rock – 10am – after exploring around the granite rapids and chatting to Steve, a semi-retired lawyer from Sydney who was photographing the site for a compendium on aboriginal sites that he intends to self-publish. He said I could camp on his allotment at Sofala if I wanted to, and gave me directions to it.
I passed through Kelso, a suburb on the eastern fringe of Bathurst, by 11.30 and pushed on until I finally ran out of battery at the 57 km mark at the bottom of a big hill.
That was a bit worrying – such a short range! But, well, it was quite hilly and there had been a steady head- or side-wind from the NW the whole way. I later checked this performance against the Bosch ebike range assistant and it seems about right for those conditions if I’m honest, so it’s just something I’ll have to get used to and forget about those 160 to 200 km range days I’d been fantasizing about. (Not that I wanted to do 180 km per day, mind you – my ‘natural’ limit is about 130 to 150 km in good conditions – just wanted to avoid the necessity of having to charge up in the middle of every single bloody day).
But anyway, oh good – now a chance to finally try out the new en-route recharging capability afforded by my blue suitcase generator. This I duly proceeded to do, at a non-descript location behind a heap of road-gravel on a slight bend at the bottom of a big hill. Using a double-adaptor I charged both batteries simultaneously for 2½ hours and restored about 4 bars of battery (that is, 4/5ths complete charge), and completed the remaining 17 km into Sofala, including the very steep and long 5km climb into Wattle Creek, by 4pm.
Steve wasn’t at home but I pitched my tent down by the river behind his shack anyway, and gave the batteries another good charge for 3 hours or so to restore full power. It was hard to get used to the ambience-destroying noise output of the generator these first few days, and I had to pace out a distance of about 100m down-wind before I was satisfied the generator noise is no longer audible, and that’s a bit of a worry.
Wednesday 5 July, 2017. Sofala to Lue |83 km|
[The days are beginning to heat now, up but still pleasant. Road narrow, winding and hilly in places and no verge or shoulder, but little traffic. Starting to cover some decent daily distance now, and more comfortable on the bike]
Steve had returned during the night and after I roused him at a respectable hour to say thanks and goodbye he insisted on preparing a full Irish Breakfast.
Hey, and just as well I was so well fueled up too – thanks Steve – because the first hill out of Sofala is a real killer, and then there’re lots more of them, as I crossed over from one valley into the next heading north (all the valleys trend east to west, as you’d expect on the western slopes of a north-south mountain range), and the strong buffeting westerly winds continued unabated. Steve’s an interesting character – provides his legal expertise pro bono for any cause that takes his fancy, his most recent success being to challenge and help defeat a proposal to store nuclear waste somewhere nearby – I probably would have been on the opposite side of that argument on purely scientific grounds.
Rylestone and Kandos are both pretty towns that I passed through, with good basic traveler’s facilities. Most of the time I was in SPORT or TURBO mode, so I guess 72 km putative range (ie the distance actually travelled plus the remaining indicated range) sounds just about right for those conditions, as per my check on the Bosch range assistant , and I charged up again on the genny from 2.10 until 3.30 out in the middle of nowhere.
About 10 km after my charging stop I came to the village of Lue and, after checking with the locals at the pub, decided it was OK to set up camp for the night in the grounds of the town hall, but I was a bit nervous about doing so and kept a pretty low profile [although the generator was on full blast again for 3 hours till 7.10pm to give a full charge].
Thursday 6 July, 2017. Lue to Dunedoo |121 km|
[Open country now, and making some good distance]
It was freezing cold this morning at 7.45 when I got back on the road again, but I have to say the night was passed tolerably well inside my cosy little MSR Elixir2 tent, with woollen socks, woollen long johns, short-sleeved woollen T-shirt, long-sleeved woollen T-shirt, woollen jacket, woollen buff and woollen beanie all on (everything’s wool – got it?), and inside a 2-layered down sleeping bag (not wool). I needed the (Gore-Tex) gloves on this morning too, to dismantle the tent and get on the bike without my hands sticking to the tent poles or handlebars (OK, maybe not quite THAT cold, but it was still numbingly chilly).
But within 10 km the cold was all but a faded memory, and a pleasant 15-18°C was making for an enjoyable ride – that and the fact I’d finally left the Blue Mountains/ Great Dividing Range behind me by now and the countryside was opening out nice and flat.
However, all that good stuff went to pot for the last 30 km of the day – with hills AND head-wind both back again. Even so, the bike’s battery range improved to a daily best of 100km, and I reckon without that last 30km of hard yakka it might have even been up around 130 km. Getting better.
I re-stocked in Mudgee (at ‘Woollies’ – Woolworth’s Supermarket). It’s a nice place, Mudgee – and I also loitered in Gulgong too (that’s the town on the Aussie $10-note, in case you didn’t know – or at least it used to be, when decimal currency first came out in Australia in 1966, and the town is still living off that moment of fame). Gulgong also had a nice vibe to it.
In spite of the improved range, I did still need a road-side re-charge using the genny for an hour before Dunedoo, where I arrived at 4pm and booked a tent site at the council caravan park for $20, after trying for a room at the pub (only $35, but fully booked-out). It was a nice spot in the caravan park too, right adjacent to the open-sided camp kitchen, which I was able to make use of to spread out all my belongings. But on the downside, my tent was pitched right under a bright street lamp, and the campground itself was afflicted by the noise of big trucks thundering past all night long.
I’d been on the lookout for more gas canisters for my Jetboil stove at every town I’d come to, but to no avail. Now at last in Dunedoo I found some. The local hardware store had gotten in a case several years back and not managed to sell any, so the storekeeper gave me a special deal – any number of them I wanted for $2.20 each, so I lashed out and bought 3 for $6.60, which would have normally cost $33.00. [Update: and I think there’s something rather uncanny about those canisters: I’ve been using them quite often, and as I write this 6 months later, in February, 2018, they’ve all still got some gas left in them. Explain that.]
Friday 7 July, 2017. Dunedoo to Binnaway |88 km|
[Comfortable riding, until I forgot I was entering Cat-Head territory]
I had to wait an hour this morning for everything to thaw out (including me!) but finally got away at 9.30, stiff and tired and well rugged-up, but soon started shedding gear as the day warmed up. Not much sleep due to that bright area-lighting pole next to the tent and those big trucks whizzing through town all night long, but glad to be adjacent to the camp kitchen area where I could spread out all my stuff to get organized without worrying about it getting too wet from the heavy dew. Overall, my first night’s paid accommodation was well worth the $20.
Mendooran is a bit of a soul-destroying place and I was feeling pretty low at this point. I couldn’t make up my mind which way to go, but in the end made a snap decision to just start heading north pronto in the general direction of Lightning Ridge to get away from the cold.
All good, though somewhat boring, riding until about 8km before Binnaway when I lost steering control due to a front wheel puncture. I figured this happened at the Mollyan turn-off 10km back when I pulled over to take a snap of Uranus and parked on a patch of Cat-Heads. ‘Three-cornered Jacks’ we call them in South Australia, Cat-Heads here, Bindies in Queensland and, most descriptively I thought, is the ‘proper’ name of California Puncture Weed. They are the curse of cyclists everywhere. The prickles shed from the plant and always land with at least one spine pointing up, and the upward-pointing one easily breaks off and then works its way into the tyre and tube (or foot, as the case may be].
It took me two pump-ups to limp into Binnaway, already quite late by this time, and pitch tent at the free council overnight camping area alongside the Castlereagh River. There, I discovered I don’t know the first thing about how to even remove the tyre to get at the tube, nor could I figure out how to remove the complete wheel to get at the tube either. In desperation, I called Rick at Eurocycles, the guy who sold me the bike. He didn’t know either. So I spent a sleepless night worrying about how I’d get it fixed in a small country town over the weekend.
Dusk dispels the dark thoughts:
Saturday 8 July. Binnaway to Baradine |88 km|
[A straightforward run – once I got the bike back up and working again]
Well, I was down at the local servo/workshop, Meyer’s Motors, by 7.30am on the Saturday morning to get an early look-in of their time before any other customers arrived, to see if they had either the tools or the know-how to help me out. Matt, the owner, came along at 8.15 with his right arm in a sling from recent shoulder reconstructive surgery, which didn’t auger too well for me if it was more brawn than I possessed that might be needed to get the tyre off the rim.
Fortunately though, John, who owns an actual e-bike (and not just any e-bike, but a “Specialized”, with front suspension and all) lives in town. Matt, obviously, knew him and called him to come on down, and between the 3 of us we eventually did figure out how to remove the front wheel, take off the tyre, repair the punctures (there were two) and put it all back together again. It wasn’t all that straight-forward either. The system for attaching the Suntour AION front suspension fork is a bit unusual (and later was found out to be missing a key component) and had to be delicately forced out of the axle. The wide, heavy-duty, Schwalbe Rock Razor tyre has a very firm grip on the Alex rim and it takes a bit of confidence to break the bead without, well, breaking the actual bead. So, thank you Matt and John. You were both very considerate and helpful.
I tucked in to a lovely bacon and egg roll at the pub (I know, I know….simple pleasures/ simple minds) and finally got out of Binnaway at 11.30am. Binnaway itself is in a bit of a dead-end dying-out phase, I fear, but it is going gracefully and there is evidence of enough civic pride to keep it going for at least a bit longer.
My next big town, Coonabarabran, has no such fear of dying off any time soon, and is a clean, pretty and dynamic sort of place. Funnily enough, just coming into town there was a ‘road block’, sort of, of greenies protesting against CSG (Coal-Seam Gas extraction, and some signs said (oil shale) fracking – maybe they were conflating the two issues), and I received a mighty cheer when I powered on by – as being a like-minded individual who shuns the devil’s hydrocarbon, I guess. Little do they know, huh. I thought of doing a U-turn to go back and give them a little lecture on the benefits of the oil industry, but let it pass. I’m improving.
I did a roadside stop for an hour at 20 km past Coonabarabran to recharge and pushed on to Baradine, arriving at 10 to 5. An awful miserable place, and my first port of call, the pub, only confirmed the aura of desperation about the whole town. I was told the council caravan park 3km out of town might receive me, and they did. Not only that, but it was the one occasion of the year when the place was really hopping, due to the Baradine Camp Draft being held that weekend. People – well-heeled country folk, cow- and horse-people all – come from hundreds of miles around in their mighty impressive rigs of caravans and horse-floats, to compete, for little or no prize money, in corralling cattle over a set course on their horses. Bit like a grown-up version of Babe mustering sheep. Actually, they select one out of a herd of 7 cows penned into a small area, cut it out of the herd and then try to make it go around a figure of 8 course in the main arena.
I stayed in a shared cabin but with my own private en suite bed/bath room and partook of a good roast dinner with the assembled throng. All in all, a very pleasant experience and I met some very nice people.
Sunday 9 July. Baradine to Pilliga |76 km|
[The first half of the day was great – the best yet: no traffic, good road, straight and flat. Then I hit the dirt section, and it wasn’t good dirt either: loose gravel on a high camber, so neither traction nor direction were ever under complete control, which became problematical whenever another vehicle came by in either direction (there weren’t many, but positively peak hour compared to the earlier part on the good stuff)]
I did some washing and watched some of the Camp Draft competition and then left Baradine at 11am and still managed to roll into the Pilliga hot springs by mid-afternoon. The pool is OK – a proper swimming pool under a canopy, water temperature in the low-30s, and it’s a haven for grey nomads parked up in the RVs and caravans.
I ducked into town (5km round trip) for an exorbitantly-expensive steak sandwich and some cool drinks. And had lots of swims in the hot spring. Camp site is a bit so-so. Not so attractive and all fine white dust.
Everything finally clicked! Best surface yet – hard-packed black soil surface, just following 2 wheel grooves. Range around 150+km, and sat on 26km/h in TOUR Mode 9th gear most of the way with a slight following breeze].
Into Pilliga for another expensive steak sandwich and a couple of iced coffees, then hurtled off along 60 km of straight flat black-soil road through the quaintly-named locality of Come-by-Chance.
I gave Walgett a miss and moved on 10km to the Barwon Inn, where I paid $110 for a nice room.
[Weather warming up, but not oppressively so – yet. Tarred road to Cumborah (the Lightning Ridge turn-off) is OK because of not much traffic; last few km of dirt are corrugated and pot-holed, and a bit hard on the bike’ suspension as well as my arse].
I had a great sleep and a great shower at the Barwon Inn, and moved off reasonably early and onto Grawin by early afternoon. I saw lots of emus along the way, and a few kangaroos too.
Pretty dismal surroundings (dry scrub with a lot of cacti and prickles of every description) but at least lots of firewood, but anyway I set up camp a couple of 100 metres away from the Grawin Club in the Scrub and went over to the club for a drink, where I straightaway fell in with Paddy and John (Hay).
John, is an old Grawin hand (member number 4 of the Club) and lives most of the year in Numurkah, Victoria, where he has a trucking business, but still likes spending the cooler months up on the opal fields. I’m sure he hasn’t done any actual opal mining for a looong time. He’s getting on a bit – 84 – and while physically fit, his mind does tend to wander. He’s quite the gentleman and very kind and straightaway invited me to come and stay at his camp in one of the 3 caravans he has there, so after a lot of drinking and all of us much the worse for wear, we went and packed up my stuff and I followed him in his car the couple of km over to his place. The van on offer left a lot to be desired, but it sure beat the tent anyway. There I met ‘Martin’ – not sure if that’s his real name – a 68-year-old Australian of German extraction, who lives cheek-to-jowl beside John in his own caravan compound that he keeps scrupulously neat and tidy. John’s is less so.
And so there I stayed for the next 3 weeks. Read all about it in the next installment.
-ends-