Melbourne was under serious lockdown for much of 2020; here’s what I got up to.
December 2019 to May 2020. Around Melbourne |1,766 km|
I have two eBikes. Both of them are Riese & Müller Supercharger GX Rohloff models. There’s a blue one (called Ziggy) that I bought and keep in Europe, and a grey one that I bought and keep in Australia. The grey one had clocked 1,776 km as of November, 2019; by June, 2020 it still only read 3,542 km. So that’s only a measly 1,766 km of riding in half a year! This was mostly just tooling around Melbourne, with a couple of 120-km trips to the Mornington Peninsula to visit family thrown in.
In March of 2020 we went into lockdown to stop corona virus spreading. At first, termed a ‘Stage 3’, it lasted until the end of May, and the only lawful excuses for being outside were buying food, seeking medical care, exercising or going to and from ‘essential’ work (so-called ‘critical’ jobs only – all “non-essential” business was shut down). So basically I had to stay at home.
I approached it all with a pretty good mindset at first. I even took up walking, which is a big deal for me, and by the end of it I was out walkng 4 or 5 times a week in all weathers and diligently doing a brisk 10 to 12km per day.
But then came the second lockdown, a ‘Stage 4′, that just went on and on until the end of October. To the list of the Stage 3 prohibitions was added a stay-at-home curfew between the hours of 8pm and 6.30am, and no travel at all permitted outside a radius of 5km from home.
To my shame I did almost no exercise at all for nearly 2 months. But when they increased the time allowed outside to 2-hours, and then especially later after they increased the allowed travel radius to 25 km, I finally dusted off the brain and the bike again and began a serious effort to rebuild my fitness level.
I even got a kick out of making all sorts of spiders’ web patterns with my route tracking, and was out on the bike nearly every day, covering long distances.
5 km from home with no spare and no bike pump
Saturday 6 June, 2020. Lilydale · Cliffview Campsite |87 km|
In early June, we were briefly allowed out again when they relaxed the lockdown conditions enough to permit, in theory, long-distance road bike touring within Victoria again. The borders with the other states were still firmly closed.
I didn’t have a functioning trailer anymore, unlike when I rode 17,000 km around Eastern Australia in 2018, and so I couldn’t tow a generator this time around, and would have to rely on accessing mains power along the way to recharge the bike batteries.
I decided to attempt a 1,500km loop – east into the Dandenong Ranges, North to the high alpine region, then west to the Central Victorian Goldfields region and the Grampian Ranges, and finally south to the coast and back east to Melbourne.
To Warburton first: Without any on-board power generation I was worried I wouldn’t go the full 90-odd km distance on a single battery charge, so I took a train part way to cut the ride in half. [Though as it turned out I actually achieved 104 km range anyway and I needn’t have worried on that score].
I caught the 10.35am train from Richmond to the end of the suburban line at Lilydale (11.35am), and from there I rode the Rail Trail to Warburton – 46 km.
Just off the train, I immediately fell in with Justin and Gina, who were riding the rail trail too and so we did it together at a leisurely pace for most of the way; however, after they needed a second coffee stop at Yarra Junction after one already at the Cog railcar café at Seville only 18 km back, I left them to it and continued on by myself.
Accommodation in Warburton was in short supply (ie. non-existent) and, to boot, the mean guy running the caravan park there was distinctly unfriendly and wanted to charge me the exorbitant fee of $60 for an overnight unpowered pitch (with a three-night minimum stay). I declined his offer and decided to soldier on up the notoriously-steep Acheron Way in the direction of Maryville. This was a big risk because there was little to no chance of getting mains power along the way, and it really was a long and steep power-draining climb.
But anyhow, with very little power reserve showing, I did manage to make it to the crest of the mountain range (in full TURBO mode all the way from Warburton) and was then able to ease off the power and cruise on to my aimed-for campsite by 4 pm. This place is called the “Cliffview” Campsite” on WikiCamps – I highly recommend it.
At this time of year it begins to get dark around 5.30 – and it gets mighty darn cold too, so I was keen to have enough daylight left to forage for firewood.
The site is an abandoned quarry from which stone was mined and crushed to make gravel for the road surface. When I arrived, there was already a tiny tent there, but no sign of any occupant. I pitched well away from it but still out of range of any trees that might fall off the cliff-face, I hoped.
Long after dark, at about 7 pm, the owner of the tent trundled up in his small hatchback. This was Yun from Sichuan, China, (via Epping, Melbourne, where he now lives) and we shared a nice campfire and had a long chat about the universe and everything.
Sunday 7 June, 2020. Cliffview Campsite · Maryville |17 km|
It was still bitterly cold by the time I packed up and left the campsite at 8 am. I had suffered from the cold during the night too, even though I wore every stitch of clothing I had with me: including 2 pairs of socks, long johns and trousers, a long-sleeve T-shirt, 2 jackets and a woollen beanie. Yun was well ahead of me – he’d already gone by 7 am when I poked my head out – I think he must have suffered even more from the cold in that flimsy tent of his.
The allegedly cold-weather Thermalite gloves I wore cycling that morning are definitely not wind-proof (or waterproof for that matter) and my hands were completely numb soon after getting going. I resolved to buy some proper cold-weather cycling gloves for my next trip.
I’d like to report it was an easy run down into Maryville, but the last 5km did involve some hill-climbing on a near-depleted battery and therefore at the lowest level of power assistance to conserve battery. But boy, those first 12km downhill were bitterly cold, and I was seriously looking to thaw out and relax a bit when I got to Maryville.
But in Maryville, at the caravan park there, it began to dawn on me that itinerants like me travelling around aimlessly don’t really fit well with the COVID rules of the day. I had to fill out a detailed questionnaire listing the places I’d stayed for the past fourteen nights as well as my plans for the next fourteen. To top it off, they didn’t allow any camping anyway (because the ablutions block was out-of-bounds due to social-distancing rules etc., etc.), and so I had to take a self-contained cabin for $79.
This cabin was one of a row of four workers’ ‘dongas’, as we call them in Australia. They were picked up second-hand from an iron ore mining company called Fortescue Metals, so I noted from the name still emblazoned on the side. To be honest, I was a bit relieved about not havingto to spend another night in a freezing tent in the middle of winter, and the room heater in my donga remained on full blast for most of the day to defrost my frozen extremities. The bottle of Wild Turkey I bought from the local Foodworks store helped too (but I only drank about a third of it, just so you know 😑).
Monday 8 June, 2020. Maryville · Lilydale |104 km| and then the train home
I got away from the Maryville Caravan park on full batteries at 8.45am, and retraced my route of the previous day by making the 30km, 765m climb to the top of the range and coasting down into Warburton. Then, I zoomed back along the Rail Trail again to Lilydale – covering the entire 87 km at a creditable 23.4km/h – and all that fueled by just one 500ml bottle of “Dare” Triple Espresso milk coffee! Not bad, eh. With 20 minutes to spare I caught the 13.05 train back to Richmond and then cycled the 2km back home.
Hmm. So much for my first foray back into the world of cycle touring then. It’s obvious that it’s not really practical to go touring around Australia in the current COVID situation, not without me hauling my own power source around anyway, so that I can recharge the bike batteries and stay away from all the rules and restrictions that govern caravan park usage.
June to November 2020. Around Melbourne |2,650 km|
So we had just that brief glimmer of freedom for 2 weeks in June when I made my abortive attempt at getting away, but then the virus escaped quarantine from among returning travelers and we had to endure another harsh ‘Stage 4’ lockdown until 8 November, 2020. We were only allowed travel within a 5km radius of home throughout August and September, and it was heavily policed too.
I got back into the habit of almost daily walking during this period, covering about 6 or 7 km in my allotted one-hour-(and-a-bit😉 ).
The above track is fairly typical of my neighbourhood walks throughout July and August.
Then, by about the middle of September, the state government increased our exercise time allowance and also increased the allowed travel radius to 25 km. This enabled me to get back on the bike and make some more interesting spiders’ webs.
I can’t say I was all that diligent about exercising daily, or even most days, especially in the depths of our Melbourne winter lockdown without any end in sight 😒. But nevertheless I survived, and I think I did a fair job of maintaining a level of fitness that at least allowed me to get back into proper cycle-touring mode once the conditions allowed it.
-ends-
#76 2020: The Time of COVID |4,624 km in 11 months|