Just out of interest how many of you did see that one coming? I’ve set up a little straw poll to find out, do please click here if you’d like to participate.

Anyway, I suppose I had better explain everything. For those of you reading my blog in a sporadic or irregular fashion and those with poor memories may I just provide a brief recap - Dea is the Danish girl who I met in Mongolia, took out on a date in China, and then cycled with in Laos. After this stop-start flurry of global dating she had to return to Europe and then spent four months studying a semester in Istanbul, as I continued my ride down through South East Asia. During this enforced absence we both came around to the opinion that we liked one another very much and that, as soon as possible, Dea should fly out to Australia to join me on my travels. I decided not to mention this plan on my blog – it was a dream so precious I dared not talk about lest I jinx it. Oh, and I also thought it would be a jolly nice dramatic twist if I kept it as a surprise. I hope you enjoyed it.

The original plan was for Dea to fly to Gold Coast, and meet me there on July 9th, but when those ghastly headwinds made it impossible for me to cycle to Gold Coast by July 9th we came up with the alternative strategy. This involved Dea catching another flight to Melbourne so that she could buy her own bicycle and we could cycle the rest of the way to Gold Coast together. All of which I hope has now explained how we came to be crushing a cuddly toy kangaroo as we hugged each other tightly in Terminal 4 of Melbourne Airport.

It was amazing to be with Dea again, but unfortunately almost as soon as we had said hello to one another we had to say goodbye. We’d arranged a place to stay with an AirBnB host in Melbourne, near to Commuter Cycles; the bike shop that was going to help build Dea’s new bike. As Dea didn’t yet have the new bike, she had to take the bus into town, whilst I of course preferred to cycle. After waving her off on the bus I began the twenty kilometre ride, and was soon introduced to the infamous Melbourne bicycle lanes:

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Halûk OkurExactly the same as in Istanbul...
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But despite that false start I was soon on a very nice bicycle trail. It was completely traffic free and ran almost continuously through green parks as it weaved alongside a creek. It was a perfect way to sneak unnoticed into a city. But then I made a slight mistake, almost crossing a bridge over the creek when I didn’t want to. Realising my error I backed up to take the right way and as I was doing so another cyclist stopped to make sure I knew where I was going. He was an interesting-looking-chap, with a bushy beard that put my own to shame. His bike looked set for an expedition, with fat tyres and various bags clinging on wherever they could, though he himself was dressed in very un-expedition-like jeans and shirt. Of course I asked him what he was up to and he explained that he’d just been on a tour from Alice Springs to Adelaide, taking dirt trails across the outback. It was a real off-road adventure to put my own Nullarbor trip in the shade. I told him about it anyway, and said that my girlfriend would be building her own bike here in Melbourne so that she could join me.

“Have you heard of Commuter Cycles?” I asked, thinking he might have come across the bike shop at some point.

“Yeah. I’m the manager there.”

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Once we’d both got over the coincidence we decided to cycle the rest of the way into town together. Will, as he liked to be called, was going to the shop anyway, so it was an easy way for me to go with him, chatting about bikes as we went. But Will wasn’t the guy who Dea had been coordinating the bike build with - that was the owner of the store, Huw, who I met briefly once we got there. But he didn’t have much time and it felt a bit wrong for me to be there without Dea, so I said that the two of us would be back in the morning, and headed off to find her.

We’d booked a room through AirBnb. It’s a bit like couchsurfing or warmshowers, but the guest pays a little bit of money for a room in someone’s house. That means there isn’t quite the same interaction between host and guest, but having paid for the room you feel a bit more free about what you can do. And with the owner of the house out at work, Dea and I had the place to ourselves, which worked out very nicely, as we had an ideal opportunity to get reacquainted with one another. Which is none of your business, by the way.