Wollongong to Melbourne

I have never felt so elated; so excited, so satisfied with a travel experience. I am not quite sure why.
Certainly, one of the factors is our sense of pride in completing the mission that we set out to achieve. We actually did it. We rode from Wollongong to Melbourne, over a distance of 1295 kilometres, following a route that was more or less coastal but avoided all but 200 kilometres of the Princes Highway. We are not super athletes, just a couple of sixty somethings that have only recently discovered that we enjoy cycling, and that if you ride one day after the other, you can eventually ride quite a long way!
Arriving in Melbourne was quietly and smilingly surreal. I say ‘quietly’ and ‘smilingly’ because our entry to Melbourne CBD was via Gardiner’s Creek Trail and then the Yarra Trail, a beautiful tree lined path that meanders along one side and then the other of the Yarra River and didn’t really challenge our cycling skills but instead enabled us to move at a gentle pace. But this was really just the treble cleft where the melody and the rhythm needed to be subdued in order to enable us to maintain our cool, and to get to the finish line without a hiccup. In tension with this quiet control, the bass cleft was playing a more robust tune: shit, we are nearly there; we have really done it; we are in Melbourne.
Arrivals were a source of excitement and achievement on just about all of the 26 days of our journey. The mere fact of cycling into towns such as Ulladulla or Batemans Bay that we had previously travelled to by car was very satisfying. So were departures, especially in the first few days, when the further we travelled away from Wollongong the more we felt the growing sense of adventure and riskiness of unfamiliar surroundings.
But the trip was much more than a series of milestones, of kilometres clocked up, or of difficult ascents climbed. It was also a myriad of simple innovations such as the marvellous rest that can be had on a space blanket that occupies the area of a mobile phone but weighs far less, and yet unfolds to form a blanket big enough for both of us to lie on.
Travelling by bike – being on a bike – enabled us to become deeply immersed in our surroundings. As we pushed up hills at 5 kilometres per hour the senses slowed, taking in intricate details of tiny purple, pink, yellow or white wildflowers, or the gaudy red bulbous fruit on native palms. Smells were acutely experienced: the aromatic perfume of eucalyptus trees in the early morning sun; the sweet smell of freshly cut grass; the anticipatory smell of burning trees, the acrid smell of seaweed; the fetid, swollen hairless corpse of a wombat. Early morning cold stung the tip of the nose, hammered our fingers and sliced at our legs, especially in a rapid descent. The midday sun warmed and then scorched our faces, arms and legs, creating streams of sweat that trickled down our backs and dripped down our foreheads and into our eyes. Droplets of rain crowded my glasses until I was able to wipe each lens with my gloves.
Floral tributes to road accident victims generated a sense of intense fear forcing me to ride past as quickly but as carefully as my legs and arms and eyes and brain would allow. A desire to understand something about the life that had been lost on this bit of road would be pushed out of my consciousness in case the distraction would cause me to fall into the unknown trap that had killed the person whose memory was captured by the little cross and the dead bunch of flowers.
Throughout the nearly four weeks of cycling, the journey felt like a pilgrimage. Each day we were afforded the privilege of meeting people that simply wanted to talk with us or to help us. Perhaps it was the relative novelty – the oddity – of two not-so-young people travelling on bicycles and carrying their luggage in just two bright orange panniers that acted as a magnet. Free of the protective shell that a car offers most travellers, perhaps we were more accessible and more approachable. On the other hand, carrying so little with us, it was highly unlikely that we were going to hang around for very long. Quite clearly, we were on a journey; we were moving through. Whatever the truth of these speculations, we met far more people than we had ever met in any of our many travels over the previous 40 years. Some were attracted by our vulnerability, and very fortunately reached out to help when we really needed it.
The southern exit from Tathra involves a steep ascent that begins on a very tight bend in the road and continues for a couple of kilometres before flattening out a little. Having completed this tight pinch, my thigh muscles burning, we were about 10 kilometres out of town when I realised that I could no longer ignore the scraping sound that the bike was making every time I engaged the brakes. So, we stopped on the verge, offloaded the panniers and attempted to identify what was causing the noise. Our bike mechanic skills are less than rudimentary so it is not surprising that we could not work out what was wrong. Fortunately, and unusually, there was a bike shop in Tathra. Having rung to check that there was someone in the shop that would be there to help us, we decided to ride back.
We were just in the process of reassembling our gear when I noticed a lady glance at us as she drove past in a grey SUV. Then about 100 metres down the road she did a u turn and pulled up across the road from us.
‘Are you ok?’ she called.
With relief outstripping embarrassment, we accepted her offer to take me and my bike back into Tathra. There was just enough room to fit my bike in the back of her car, so Steve rode back. She was a local resident, a nurse that worked in a nearby hospital. We chatted about our trip and her work and agreed that Tathra is a lovely place.
‘Where will you sleep tonight if you have to stay in Tathra?’.
‘Oh, we’ll be ok, but let’s hope that we can get the bike fixed and reach our Merimbula destination’, I said, adding that we had accommodation booked there.
‘Well if things don’t work out as you hope, you are welcome to stay at my place.’
As it happened the problem with the bike was simple to fix and so we didn’t need to take up her kind offer but she wouldn’t leave until we had found this out from the bloke in the bike shop. And then, she left, and I realised that I didn’t know her name or how to contact her to properly thank her and to let her know that we made it to Merimbula safely that night.
We also had among the most profoundly moving conversations with people.
There was the cheery, chatty man in his late fifties who was working in a pub that we stayed at somewhere on the Gippsland coast. He had lived in the tiny town all his adult life and for most of that time had run the local real estate agency until his wife needed to have a series of life saving operations in Melbourne for a failing heart. He explained that the business was being neglected because of the time spent in Melbourne. To recover the cost of her health care he sold the business and took up a job on a gas pipeline construction project in central Australia.
Working on a fly in fly out basis, he did 12 hour shifts for 14 days in a row and then had seven days off. At least two of these off days were spent travelling to and from work in a finely calibrated commute involving bus, train and plane. He explained that if the 14-hour flight from Mt Isa via Brisbane was more than 15 minutes late arriving in Melbourne, he would miss his train and bus connections and have stay overnight in Melbourne. So, the rostered days on were preceded and proceeded by travelling days which lasted at least 20 hours, a schedule that he maintained for two years until their debts were cleared. This was a chapter in his life. His wife needed lifesaving medical treatment and, as a consequence, they needed a way of clearing their debts. There was no braggadocio, nor any resentment, just a set of assumptions about a commitment to love.
There are virtually no off-road cycling trails in NSW, so it was with great pleasure that we travelled on a number of unpaved rail trails through the Victorian part of the trip. The first of these took us from Orbost to the tiny settlement of Nowa Nowa, where we stayed for a couple of nights in a tiny cabin on the shore of Lake Tyers. A short walk across the road took us to the only place to eat, the Nowa Nowa Hotel Motel where we could expect to get a chicken ‘parma’ and chips or perhaps a steak and chips, the typical pub fare for most of the south-east coast.
We were just about to walk into the pub when we noticed two men on bicycles approaching us from the rail trail. Their bikes saddled with bulging panniers, this called for an exchange about travel experiences. ‘Hi, where have you ridden from today?’, I asked the younger of the two, a man perhaps in his early forties, longish brown hair, skinny and with a physique that suggested that this was not a familiar pastime. ‘We started in Orbost; left there this morning’, he responded. ‘I’m not a cyclist. I’m accompanying Casey’. In the background, I caught a glance of Casey talking with Steve. Perhaps in his early seventies, his old cycling shirt and nicks revealed legs that had mastered many a hill. The bike was newish looking – probably hired – but it became immediately obvious from the well-worn state of his clothing and panniers, and the makeshift array of other gear on his bike secured by old Occy straps that he was a seasoned two-wheeled traveller.
‘My wife died just a couple of weeks ago and Casey is her dad.’ Casey and his wife were Canadians living in Hong Kong where they had settled some thirty years earlier to establish a Christian bookshop. Shortly after arriving, they adopted Anne when she was a little girl.
‘They travelled to Australia to be with Anne in her last days. Anne’s mum has gone back to Hong Kong, but Casey had always wanted to take Anne on a cycling tour. So, this trip is in honour of her’.
‘Oh my god,’ I said, shocked by the story that slipped from his lips within minutes of us saying hello to each other.
‘Yes,’ he stoically continued. ‘We only met six months ago and fell in love almost immediately. I’m a graphic designer and she was studying fine arts at UWS. We met at uni. Then she was diagnosed with Leukaemia. We got married when she was in hospital. I can’t believe my luck. It took all these years to find somebody.’
‘That’s terrible. What will you do now?’
‘I’m taking a break from work. After this trip – we finish in Bairnsdale – I will go to Hong Kong with Casey and from there just wait and see what happens.’
The four of us ate dinner together at the pub, and as we were bringing back our drinks to the table I said, ‘I’m Louise by the way’. ‘I’m Quentin’, he smiled.
Our accommodation varied a great deal, ranging from simple motel rooms, a room in a pub, riverside and mountain cabins, an occasional apartment, and even a converted church. After a long day of riding just under a hundred kilometres from Morewell up across some particularly hilly (there really were only a handful of stretches that could be described as flat) and intensely beautiful dairy country, we arrived at a comfortable cottage sitting in a pretty garden behind an isolated residential home located on the outskirts of Koonwarra. Our hosts were a retired couple, probably in their early seventies: she formerly a music teacher and he a farmer. Because there was nowhere within easy walking distance to buy dinner or its makings, the landlady had kindly agreed to provide us with dinner for the first of the two nights we were staying there. The following day was a rest day so we would have plenty of time to take a leisurely ride into the village to pick up some food for the remaining meals. While Steve was out shopping, I returned the casserole dish to the landlady. Naturally, I made a point of complimenting her on the cosy comfort of the accommodation, and she told me with much pride that their guests include travellers from all over the world, including a famous European musician who had been on a concert tour in the region some months beforehand.
I congratulated her on their success. However, her response was not what I was expecting.
‘Actually, it’s just as well it’s working,’ she said, with a look of resignation. ‘We lost all of our life savings a few months ago’.
Responding to my expressions of sympathy and horror, she continued to share her story.
Her husband had invested all of their super funds with a financial planner and had lost the lot. They were not the only victims of the scam. It had happened to quite a few people in the area, and none of them was having any luck in getting any of the money back and not much luck in getting him prosecuted.
There was no malice or resentment towards the financial planner just sadness and a sense of powerlessness about their demise. But, there was something about her expression, which suggested that if her husband had been there in the room, she couldn’t have told me about the situation. His absence for a couple of hours enabled her to act on an impulse to share the burden of this terrible thing that had turned the cottage from an occasional hobby into a necessary source of income. ‘I am so sorry’, I lamely offered.
After about 15 kilometres of green rolling hills the ride from Koonwarra gave way to one of the easiest stretches of cycling through relatively flat, dry coastal plains, taking us back to the salty air of the coast at Inverloch. We arrived at this very pretty little town on the Gippsland coast, a few minutes before 9.00am. This was just in time to have to navigate a path through SUVs dropping kids off at school. Negotiating our way through the traffic, we were brought to a stop at a school crossing where a lollipop lady, a shock of bottle blonde hair and a huge smile, sang and danced the kids across the road, swinging the lollipop sign in time with her song and dance routine with the exuberance and finesse of a veteran calisthenics champion.
A second chance encounter that day was quieter but deeply moving. As we stood overlooking the sand flats outside Inverloch, an elderly man using a walking frame shuffled slowly past our vantage point. We started talking, and, with a heavy German accent, he described how he had observed the changes in the shape of the sand bar and the movement of the waters over the course of the year. His wonder and excitement at the power and mystery of these natural forces was obvious and infectious. As we got ready to leave, he said, pointing to the frame, ‘I use this. I have fused vertebrae in my lower back. But’ – he pointed to the track – ‘I have this. It is the best exercise. And it is free. And the air here is clear. It is the best medicine. And it is free’. And he smiled a beautiful smile.
Phillip Island was really our last destination before reaching the end of the journey in Melbourne. It was also one of just a few opportunities to catch up with friends. We stayed in Cowes, the most significant settlement on the island. It’s here that we spent a glorious evening at a great pizza place called the Fat Seagull reigniting our friendship with Ross and Barbara Fairhurst and the other members of the Vivace Singers, an a cappella group that had impressed the crowds with their glorious madrigals at a choral festival that I had run in Wollongong in late 2013. The food and wine were good. The company and conversation were vibrant, and the madrigals were magical.
Our plans for reaching Melbourne were to catch a ferry the next morning from Cowes to Stoney Point, and then a connecting train to Frankston, from where we would ride the final leg of our journey into Melbourne. But the weather gods played foul with this neat itinerary, and instead we sort refuge in a maxi taxi that took us and our bikes all of the 100 kilometres to Frankston.
This was the first time we had been in a motor vehicle in nearly four weeks. Outside, the rain pelted down, shrouding the scenery that passed by at what seemed to our cycling speed brains to be a phenomenal speed. Inside felt warm and safe. Fortunately, Tony, the taxi driver was chatty and pleasant, the sort of man that had probably done it tough but was grateful for his lot. He was a Collingwood fan and we follow the West Coast Eagles. With footy and parenthood in common, and his curiosity and our excitement about our cycling trip, conversation flowed easily. And then his phone rang. ‘Do you mind if I take this call? It’s my daughter and I don’t like not answering.’ ‘Of course’, we responded.
Within seconds the casual upbeat tone became tender, concerned, encouraging. His daughter, he shared with us, was one of two police officers that had been seriously burnt some 15 months earlier when a gas canister exploded at a flat in Melbourne that she and two other officers were visiting while on duty. She was doing it tough, not just physically but also mentally, and she needed to talk to her dad.
Then he told us about the do at his local pub that some friends had organised to raise some funds for his daughter’s rehabilitation. The evening included an auction of a Collingwood footy player’s guernsey, signed and framed. Tony put in a bid for the valuable icon, but others quickly outbid him until one bloke was triumphant, having paid an exorbitant amount for the privilege. Overwhelmed by the generosity of his friends and others that had dipped into their pockets, he told us that missing out on the guernsey was not a high price to pay. But as he was about to leave the pub, the bloke handed him the framed trophy. This is for you he said.
When we reached Frankston, he pulled in along the curb of a busy street in a standing only spot outside a series of tired grubby looking shops. The scene was one of crowded chaos and miserable poverty. Tony helped us remove the bikes and our gear onto the pavement. We probably should have said our goodbyes quickly so that we could give all our attention to assembling our bikes and loading our panniers. But, the moment was too important. We both threw our arms around him, thanked him for the lift and wished him and his daughter all the best.
August 2016