Change of plans: To cut a long story short

June 9, 2015

I was up again before dawn and cycled another moonlit hour until daybreak. With it came a very strong and cold wind, blustering its blustery ways directly out of the east. I sighed. I only had myself to blame. The previous day, in a moment of ill-thought-out passion, I’d said to myself that even a strong headwind would be alright if it would get rid of the flies. Now I had my wish.

After twenty kilometres I was in the town of Merredin and even though it was cold I stopped and fixed a couple of slight problems with my bike whilst I waited for the tourist information to open. Once it did I was able to get a free map of the Nullarbor, although this was rather a superfluous item, given that the Nullarbor consists of one very long road with no towns on it. I was also able to ask if they knew where I could use wifi and was told that if I sat opposite the local Target store I’d be able to use theirs. This I did, and I immediately looked up the wind forecast for the coming days. Headwind. Headwind. Headwind. Headwind.

I headed on out into this wind and it was absolutely demoralising to be battling so hard into it. I was averaging ten kilometres per hour at full effort, and with 4,000 kilometres ahead of me it was mentally draining as well as physically so. My legs felt so tired and my knees had started giving me some considerable pains, objecting to suddenly being thrust back into such intense action after a couple of relatively easy months. But there seemed little point in saying “Shut up legs” now, when my brain itself was objecting to this whole exercise and looking for a way out too. The reality was that my whole plan to cycle to Gold Coast by the 9th of July was entirely based on the assumption that I would have tailwinds the whole way. Everyone had insisted it would be so. In reality I was faced with the exact opposite. I had headwinds and there was a lot more of the same to come from the looks of the forecast. It was day four and I was already feeling beaten.

Then I came up with an idea. If I couldn’t get to Gold Coast by the 9th of July, and I almost certainly couldn’t, then I’d just have to bring the 9th of July to me. Or at least, to Melbourne. That was closer. Not very much closer, admittedly, but I could probably get to Melbourne by the 9th of July, even without any help from the wind. Yes, this was my new plan, I would head to Melbourne instead.

I felt very much better about things after I’d come up with the new plan - it now felt much less like I was chasing the impossible. I was back on the main highway, which had quite a few trucks but generally wasn’t too bad. It was a mixture of farmland and bush and was mostly quite boring. The most exciting thing that happened all day, and it is stretching the point to use the word exciting, was that I saw the spot where the longest fence in the world once stood. I don’t believe that it would have been a spectacular sight even if it had still been there, but with it now having been removed it was a particularly low-key attraction. Still, I troubled myself to read the information board, and found out that it was to keep the rabbits out of Western Australia. Apparently some idiot, almost certainly British, had brought 24 rabbits into Victoria to shoot for sport. Clearly he hadn’t been a very good shot, because they’d got away and multiplied as only rabbits can, and they’d spread all the way across the country to the edges of Western Australia, where the people had rallied around and built an 1800 kilometre fence to try and keep them off their land. This of course is a typical story of what happens when foreign animals are introduced to the fragile isolated ecosystem that is Australia. It’s the same story with camels. Someone brought some camels over and now they live in the wild. Funnily enough that is my one interesting fact. People ask me for an interesting fact, I tell them that Australia is the only country in the entire world where camels actually still live in the wild. I tell this fact all the time. People find it very interesting. I’m not sure if it’s true.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I cycled into the f*cking wind until I got to 90 kilometres, then I put up my tent and went to sleep.

Today's ride: 90 km (56 miles)
Total: 41,275 km (25,632 miles)

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