Thursday 16 November, 2017. Wudinna to Lake Giles |123 km|
[It’s all wheat country around here – gently rolling barren hills. There was a strong wind from the starboard quarter, and it was surprisingly quite cold actually].
I charged up on the generator at a roadside stop with only 55 km travelled, and yet still had to do so again at the 103 km mark at Kimba – that tells you how strong the wind was. I got a 6-out-of-10 steak sandwich and a couple of 1-out-of-10 crumbed chicken drumsticks from the deli while I waited.
After already making it to “Halfway Across Australia” at Kimba and chowing down on my sick-inducing deli food, I was emboldened to push on. I decided to wild-camp and ended up 20km past Kimba at Gilles Lakes Conservation Park. I chose a secluded spot in dense scrub about 500m off the highway near the park entrance track, and got to enjoy a relatively peaceful night that was only interrupted a couple of times by the occasional larrikin speeding by in their souped-up ute shooting at anything that moved. In the stillness of night it seems like they are close by, but in reality were probably at least a couple of kilometers away from me.
Friday 17 November, 2017. Lake Giles to 20 km past Iron Knob |93 km|
I fairly leaped away from Gilles Lakes at 7am (no sign of any lakes, by the way), and was raring to go. It was still all rolling hills, but through mainly uncleared sparse scrub country today, and for once the breeze, although not quite so strong as yesterday, was behind me and I made 75 km in just over 2½ hours, nearly all the way to Iron Knob in fact.
However, things then started to go belly-up, as I got a slow puncture in the rear tyre 15km before town. and had to pump up the tyre 3 times to get there. Well, that’s an exaggeration – town! – ghost-town more like it. No: ghost-dump!
Whilst Iron Knob is still the base for a working iron ore mine, the mine is on a much-reduced scale from its heyday, and there’s not even a bloody shop – of any description – in town anymore. All fly-in/ fly-out workers I guess. Anyway, I soon enough found and fixed the puncture – hmm, still leaking – found and fixed a second puncture – still leaking. A patch upon a patch upon a patch from earlier repairs was to blame, so I replaced the tube with a brand new Innova thick-walled puncture-resistant one straight out of the box – which promptly blew a big hole under the valve stem when I tried putting air into it. Bugger! So it was back to the old tube again. I fixed it yet again, and this time it held – or at least, it seemed to hold, and off I went again towards Port Augusta. Goodbye Iron Knob!
But less than an hour out of Iron Knob….pfttt….. the rear tube went flat again, and this time I was in the bloody middle of nowhere. I found a new puncture and patched it, but then the valve stem broke clean off while I was re-inflating rthe tyre. Bugger, bugger. No more tubes left.
However. being ever the clever and resourceful chap that I am, I called a bike shop in Port Augusta, Flinders Cycles, and cajoled the owner into taking a new tube across to the Ampol Roadhouse in town, where I then organised by phone with the ever-helpful owner, Nareesh (did I mention – Indians own all the Servos?), to give it to a customer coming out my way. The bike man, Campbell by name, Capt’n Slow by nature, took his time about it and protested all the way, but the rest of the arrangement worked like a charm, and voila! by and large a lovely couple, Barry and Kath, came tootling along towing their caravan and presented me with a brand new tube.
BUT – the wrong tube! 26″ with Schräder valve, not 27½” with Presta valve, and a Schräder valve does not fit through a Presta-holed rim (though, I could have just about lived with the smaller diameter). Wouldn’t work. Called Campbell again. He said he’d repeat the exercise, but “at 5 o’clock when I knock off”. Fair enough. I waited. And waited. No one ever did come, and I had to spend the night camped there behind some scraggly bushes in amongst a whole vipoer’s nest of sinister-looking trapdoor spider holes. Water supply was very low, and I had to make do with a one-pot meal of canned Spam, canned corn and canned pineapple, washed down with neat Jack Daniels and popcorn.
Saturday 18 November, 2017. 17 km past Iron Knob to Port Pirie |96 km of riding, 145 km in total|
Eager not to spend another hot day out there in the desert, I was all packed up and back at the roadside in hitch-hiking mode by 6am. But traffic was sparse and no one was interested in stopping anyway, so I decided to walk the bike to a farmhouse that was about another 8km further on, according to a billboard I recalled seeing the day before that was advertised as a farm-stay. But this was not a very good idea because I did considerable damage to the aluminium wheel rim of the deflated tyre.
However, after only a kilometer or so of bike-pushing, a nice Spanish couple stopped and gave me plenty of water – like, about 10 litres left in a 20l cask – thus prolonging my prospects of life for the rest of the day at least. Then, not long after, Mick arrived. He’s an electrician who was returning to Port Augusta from working away all week, and he stopped and after a bit of banter to assure himself I wasn’t an axe murderer, offered me a lift into town. We crammed all my stuff into the back of his ute and lashed the bike onto the roof, and he delivered me the 51 km to Campbell’s bike shop not long after 8am.
Campbell himself arrived an hour later to open up shop, and nonchalantly mentioned that he’d decided to deliver the second tube in person, but had given up looking for me after 35km – that’s weird! He’s taciturn, gruff, grumpy and obstreperous – delightfully so! He had no idea how to reassemble the Rohloff gear-change and would have ruined it by forcing it back on if I hadn’t intervened, but he was also thorough and kind, and more importantly got me going again by 10.30, so I guess he’s alright.
I went to thank Naresh for his help and realised I’d perhaps been a bit harsh on Campbell. That’s because the now-Caltex (not Ampol anymore, as per out-of-date google) service station is quite a ways from the bike shop, and even more amazingly it is located on the wrong side of the road for Iron Knob traffic (thanks google); that is, it is on the Adelaide side of the road and not the Port Lincoln side, meaning anyone delivering a tube to me would have had to do a U-turn, either to get fuel at the Caltex in the first place, or to go in my direction after stopping at the service station. So I was incredibly lucky to find someone going my way, and Naresh went out of his way in being so persistent in explaining my predicament to everyone who pulled in to his bowser for fuel. Thank you Naresh.
I was a bit shattered after all this drama, and since the wind forecast for the next couple of days was decidedly grim, with strong southerlies, I decided to wait it out in Port Augusta for a few days.
But first I was hungry, and then with a bit of good ol’ KFC in my belly it’s recuperative powers were such that I changed my mind yet again and decided to plug on into the wind to Port Pirie regardless. What’s another mere 100km into the wind, after all the headwinds I’d been having lately?
And thus I got to meet Paddy and Mollie, coming (or should it be going) the other way, just after I got moving again.
Paddy’s German – of course, what else? – and Mollie is a Collie. Patrik does a mean U-tube Vlog – very professional, with drone footage and all – and is sponsored by Deliveroo, hence the cargo bike. He wondered what his rig weighed, and so I took him over to the Heavy Vehicle Weigh Station to find out – it went a hefty 260 kg! (mine, with me on it: “only” 168 kg). I even get a mention (as “Peter”) and some footage in his Vlog #008 here – am I really that unattractive photogenic? Yeeshk!
Well, having ‘done’ Eyre Peninsula, I finally got going from Port Augusta at 1pm after rabbiting on to Paddy for about an hour – and headed straight into the feared and fierce wind I’d been hoping to avoid. The batteries emptied 38km out of town (total range only 60km), and I had to recharge for 2½ hours at a god-forsaken, hot, barren, shade-less road siding (called Tower Hill, in case you want to avoid it), which was a shame really, because just 8km further on there is the lovely cool, green, shady road siding of Mowbray Creek. Oh well, never mind. Next time!
But then I got very excited when 11111 clicked over on the odometer a few kilometers further on after much unbridled anticipation. Who said cycling’s boring?
I had to stop again to put some more charge in the batteries just a mere 10 km before my destination of Port Pirie, on that hot and horrible blustery ride with constant traffic and no shoulder, and so I didn’t get into town until 8pm, having covered only 96km for the day.
I used a kinda weird remote check-in system that I was unfamiliar with (the ‘receptionist’, Peggy, actually works from her home in Adelaide and gave me a code to open a key box over the phone after I’d paid for the room by card) to secure a room at the intoxicatingly drab Central City Motel, where I stayed for 2 nights at $89 a night. Don’t get me wrong I loved it! It’s the type of place that the down-and-outs of society get for free. I celebrated with Chinese takeaway and 4 cans of JD and coke for dinner.
Sunday 19 November, 2017. Port Pirie. |No travel|
It felt weird being back in Port Pirie – its the town where I started out as a teenage cadet metallurgist back in the late 1960s at the age of 18. I even tried looking up a few of my mates from those days – I know some of them stayed all their working life at the town’s lead/ zinc smelter and retired there – but drew a blank on the online directories.
Monday 20 November, 2017. Port Pirie to Port Wakefield |162 km|
A great clattering wind woke me up at 5am, and I figured – from inside a darkened room that faced I didn’t know which way – that it might just possibly finally be that northerly change as predicted, or at least north-easterly, so I scurried about in a hurry to get going early to take advantage of it, and by 7.20am I was into the teeth of it – which was a good thing, because I had to do a few km of easting before turning south onto the Port Broughton road.
And so it turned out to be an easy ride to Port Broughton with a following wind – flat and relatively boring, but at least covering some very easy kilometers. At one stage, I was even looking at 220km range (in ECO mode, 10th gear doing 26 kph), but the first cell always seems to last 2x longer than the last one, and by the time I got to Port Broughton, only some 55km down the track and well into the 3rd cell, the indicative full battery range had dropped to 140km – still good, excellent really, but its always mystifying as to why it (my mental calculations of “distance already travelled” + “indicated range”) always drops off so rapidly when down to the last 2 cells.
Port Broughton has a nice seaside resort feel to it – clean and tidy, well-groomed trees and grounds – and I had no qualms spending some time there to charge up on the foreshore in pleasant surroundings at the town jetty. My search for the ultimate Cornish pasty went unrewarded, but the one I did buy from the bakery was just about good enough, washed down by a can of Solo.
Alford, on the way to Kadina, has no services at all but does have a clean and tidy RV stopover/rest area with toilets and cold shower that would be OK for an overnight stop.
The road becomes slightly more hilly and narrower and shoulder-less after Alford, but the traffic was light – in a week or so the wheat harvest will be in full swing and it will be very much a different matter, but with the harvest only just beginning (today), there were only a few trucks on the road to bother me.
The wind, unfortunately, turned WSW and I lost most of the push by the time I got to Alford, such that when I reached Kadina at the 106 km mark, the extrapolated full-battery range was down to only 130km (ie. only 24km left).
Kadina is a big town and looks quite presentable, and it must be prosperous too judging by the 4 hotels on one city block that all seemed to be well patronised on a lazy Monday afternoon. The main central park has caravan-style power outlets all around for the general public – its the first time I’ve seen this – and as I thought I might need to push on as far as Port Wakefield, still another 55km away, I made use of one of them near the rotunda to recharge the batteries for 1½ hours, up to the 4th cell full level.
Not long enough, as it turned out.
It was a hot and bothersome ride after saddling up again, but at least the bartender at the Royal Exchange Hotel had kindly filled up my water bottles out of the bar’s chilled water dispenser for me. My battery management turned out not to be so good – I was pushing uphill against a head wind most of the way from Kadina to Port Wakefield and completely ran out of power with only 10 mostly downhill kilometers still to go, and so I needed to charge up again for ½ an hour on the concrete apron of an electrical switchyard, where the flies were U-N-B-E-L-I-E-V-A-B-L-E !! The worst case of fly-plague by far on this journey, and justifying in one fell swoop the over-the-top $16 purchase of that head net I bought way back in Renmark over a month ago.
I was pleasantly surprised by Port Wakefield. I used to just zoom straight on past it every Friday and Sunday for 2 years back in the late 1960s on my way to and from work between Port Pirie and Adelaide, and always had an unjustifiably dim view of the place. The caravan park down at the town swimming beach is fine, and I had a really nice powered site directly adjacent to the camp kitchen for $20. I plunged in for a refreshing swim as soon as I arrived, and later went over to the pub for a counter meal (not cheap, but good quality T-bone and generous salad bar) but moved away from the foul-mouthed uncouth customers (and even more uncouth female bartender) in the front bar, and dined alone in the dining room.
Tuesday 21 November, 2017. Port Wakefield to Adelaide |105 km|
[A debilitating day because of the heat (up around 36°) and also because there is just about nothing at all to break the monotony of the journey. For the first 40km I had a nice tail wind and good shoulder, but then the wind died off (completely, for the last 30km) and the road just kept getting busier and the shoulder narrower the closer I got to Adelaide].
There is nothing at all, except a Servo (Petrol Station) on the other side of a divided highway at the 50km mark (the village of Dublin), until Bolivar on the out-skirts of Adelaide. I was perishing with thirst by then and grabbed a Dr Pepper at the BP Servo.
It gets awfully confusing for a cyclist coming in from the north on the A1 at the point where it meets the M20 motorway. There’s a dedicated cycleway on the other (eastern) side of the M20, but in order to get onto it, you have to swing round onto the M20 going north then execute a U-turn across both the north-bound and south-bound lanes, and then cross a steep shoulder. At least, that’s the only way I could figure out how to do it. Maybe you’re supposed to execute that manoeuvre at the Penfold’s Road flyover, but that would mean travelling 2km on the shoulder of the north-bound M20, which is not allowed.
I recharged in a pleasant spot opposite the Adelaide Cricket Ground in North Adelaide for an hour, but only to kill a bit of time before going to my booked Airbnb lodging in the inner city suburb of Parkside. I had a rather nice Bûn salad bowl at Mr. Viet café in the CBD to kill a bit more time.
My Airbnb host, Phil, is a laid-back guy in his 60s, who lives with a young Chinese girlfriend, Yulee. They met through his advertising a room for rent! There’s a yuppy pub next door where we went the first night for a drink and meal with friends of theirs, a lovely Zimbabwean doctor and nurse couple who Phil had also met through house-sharing.
-ends-
#36 16-22 November, 2017. Wudinna to Adelaide |578 km|
11,430 km travelled in Australia on this bike in 144 days since 2 July, 2017.
(105 days of actual riding at 109 km/day).