This ride was a long time coming.

I finished a 5.5 month tour in America in 2014. I figured the next big tour would be in 2020. That would give me long enough to save the cash for another six-month tour. 

But that did not happen.  The world was sick in 2020 and so was I. 

Background

I rode a lot of three and four-day weekend rides between 2014 and when I finally took this ride in 2022-23 (because I've worked 4-day weeks since 2015).  In 2015, I started on a quest to ride a portion of every single road, laneway and track within a 100-km radius of home. I had heaps of fun using a wall map to mark off new roads ridden after every weekend foray. 

Heart

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I started taking my 2005 Cannondale T800 on more and more rough bush tracks where a T800 should never go. In 2016, I even rode 4000 kms of loaded touring, almost all of which I managed on my little weekend tours. 

Then, in 2017, I got sick. Really, really sick. I got a mosquito virus... and then did not recover. And no one could figure out why.  I had all sorts of tests, from a sleep study to a brain MRI to an echocardiogram to a gastroscopy to a pelvic ultrasound to a kidney ultrasound. I had more than 25 blood draws in four years. I saw a bunch of specialists, including an infectious disease specialist, a rheumatologist and a gastro guy. But no one could figure it out. 

I still rode as much as I could, but it wasn't much at all. No one ever can quite grasp just how debilitating the pain and fatigue was that I experienced over that time period. I absolutely scraped myself out of bed every single day for 4.5 years. I had no life whatsoever. I was not 'alive', I just endured.

So that one little mozzie bite was the catalyst for a cascade of health problems, including a frozen shoulder. My poor body was just so inflamed.  I finally found a good GP who believed in me and referred me to an integrative doctor who specialises in chronic fatigue. He gave me the 'post-viral fatigue syndrome' diagnosis (this is what long-COVID is, just for a different virus). He also thought to test me for tick-borne diseases. And voila! I also had bartonellosis. Antibiotics for that bacterial infection cured my relapsing fever, rashes and all the joint pain (which the rheumy had told me was just bursitis). Then, six months off work to let my immune system catch up without additional work stress also helped immensely to start regaining some energy.

The final piece of the puzzle was seeing a functional nutritionist. More testing revealed my gut was really messed up. I went on a six-month strict diet and supplement protocol. Digestive issues, as well as my skin issues, hayfever and asthma that I'd had my whole life, just dissolved away. Combined with the time off work, that strict diet and those dozen pills each day finally saw my energy return. All that inflammation finally receded.

And so, by September 2022, I was ready to go tour again. The world was no longer sick (or at least pretending it wasn't), COVID restrictions were gone, and I was feeling healthier than maybe ever. 

In a moment of fatigue reprieve in 2018 (when I thought I was getting better but was not), I purchased a Salsa Timberjack so that I could take it on all those bush tracks that were really too rocky and steep for my T800. 

So the mtn bike went on a tour of western Victoria and southeast South Australia from October to December 2022. That turned out to be the wettest spring on record. It was also one of the coldest. It was like riding in winter. It was pretty darn miserable, but I persevered, as I was just so, so grateful to have my life back again.

The flooding was so bad, at one point I had no options for forward progress. Every road was closed in front of me. My only option was to backtrack and take an official evacuation route to Bendigo. All the roads I used to get to the evac route closed behind me! I then had to take a train around all the flooding... and try again.

It rained on 38 of the 76 days of that ride. At one point I had rain 14 days straight, followed by four days without rain before another 9 days straight of rain. Temperatures hovered between 10 and 15C for those three months. I literally just tried to avoid hypothermia for about half of that ride.  You can read my write-up of that ride starting here: Unscripted - Western Victoria

The map below is where we went in Oct-Dec after the first week on the road which ended with me evacuating the area and taking the train to get to areas with less flooding (i.e. Warrnambool).

The focus of this journal

After that miserable three months in western VIC, I returned 'home' for a couple weeks over Christmas/New Years before heading off into the Victorian High Country and East Gippsland. This ride lasted from January to April. I didn't cover many kays, but I climbed heaps and heaps of metres - more than 50,000 of them. 

I tried to keep climbing to about 1,000 metres a day or less. Once you get a 'post-viral fatigue' diagnosis, you've got it for life. If you overdo things, you can bring that out of remission and have all the fatigue flood right back. So I was very careful to not go too hard since I was going to be out in the mountains for several months.

I rode all sorts of rough, steep and rocky forest roads and 4WD tracks. I would go 7-10 days between towns while traversing back and forth over the Great Dividing Range.  I'd never carried 10 days worth of food before. 

It was a tough ride, and everytime I would tell locals or bike shop guys where I was planning to go, I would hear: "ohhhhh, that's steep" or "ohhh, I've never seen a cyclist up there".  That always meant that I definitely needed to ride it then! 

Here are a few maps summarising where we rode:

I had an immense amount of fun. To me, riding remote, rough roads where you don't see people for days at a time and have to be absolutely 100 percent self-sufficient is the pinnacle of bike touring. I find riding from town-to-town quite ho-hum. I like the mountains, the trees, the rocks and the bush. People and buildings bore me - that's for the old and unadventurous I think. 

So this tour was EXACTLY what I had dreamt about for the preceding 8 years. I was so grateful to be out there and to have the physical energy to do whatever my head wanted to do. After being so incredibly unwell for so long, I did not take a second for granted. 

I'm not going to write up that tour here since I've written it up elsewhere. But, I rode a whole lot of stuff in one go on this tour that I've not seen written up here or elsewhere. I've seen write-ups of parts of the VIC High Country in one or two-week tours or people following the Bicentennial Trail or the Hunt 1000 route. 

But I've never seen a comprehensive list of services and information... so I thought I'd stick that here in case someone was looking for it. I know this website's demographics tend toward Baby Boomers on big budget tours of Europe and America who would have no interest in something quite this rough, hard and self-sufficient. But just in case someone is out there looking for this info, I'm hoping this will be a good resource/reference guide. 

You'll find a page on the bike and gear I took and what worked really well. Then I'll do a page for each week I rode that includes maps for each day of that week, and a list of what resources are available in various towns along that route. 

If you want to read my write-up of the tour, you can find it starting here (Posts start with some monthly summaries while I was on the road; then full write-up after that with weeks that match the weekly maps and resources that will be shown here in upcoming posts) : Unscripted - Eastern Victoria