June 14, 2015
Snakes and spiders: And Grey Nomads
I was kept awake most of the night by rain, the first that I had encountered in Australia, and also by paranoid visions of mice trying to get into my tent. I’d been told by Awesome-Stripper-Cycling-Girl, (whose name I have changed for privacy reasons) that mice had gnawed a hole into her tent to get at her food. Now here I was surrounded by so much food that there was almost not enough space in the tent for me. But as it turned out the only mice problems I experienced were imaginary, and I was able to successfully undertake the considerable construction project of reassembling all of my food back onto my bike in the morning drizzle.
After I had done this I picked up my helmet, which had been lying on the ground, and screamed. On it was the most horrific spider you could ever imagine, at least the size of a five pence piece, and with a frightening number of legs (about eight or so I think.) It was black and red, which to my mind meant that it almost certainly could kill me if it wanted to, so I threw my helmet away in panic. This left me in a difficult situation, because I then needed to retrieve my helmet and I didn’t know whether the spider was still on it. This was the life or death world of the outback. I needed to ‘man-up’ and, believe it or believe it not, I did. I cautiously picked up the helmet, saw that the spider was no longer residing upon it, and continued, as fast as possible, on my merry way.
I didn’t get very far. I’d left the paved road the previous evening, cycling a couple of hundred metres on a dirt road to find a good camping place amongst the bushes. The dry red dust had been easy to cycle out on, but now the rain had turned it into muddy clay that simply couldn’t support the weight of a bicycle and 28 packs of cookies. There was no way that I could cycle back to the road. I got off and struggled desperately to push the bike through the sticky mud, but it was an arduous task. The tyres sucked up the red mud which clogged in the brakes and finally made it completely impossible to push. Eventually, after straining for a quarter of an hour, I had to concede defeat, and took off the bags and carried them individually to the road before coming back for the bike, which required a considerable amount of cleaning before it was rideable again. It had taken me more than half an hour to go 200 metres.
After that exciting beginning it was another staggeringly uneventful day. I had a lot of pain in my knee first thing, a worrying development that wasn’t going away. I didn’t see any kangaroos. I did meet a couple of Grey Nomads in a lay-by rest area. Grey Nomads are retired old people that drive caravans or motorhomes around Australia. They were making up about half of the traffic out here, the other half being road trains. These were the first that I’d met and they were very nice, no f-ing or blinding or telling me I should dive out of their way or anything like that. They had come across the Nullarbor and they told me that they’d seen a few other cyclists, but not for many hundreds of kilometres. It seemed like I wasn’t going to be getting any company for the long ride ahead.
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I hadn’t made particularly good progress but I was taking it easy as I waited for my knee to recover and I still hoped to make up distance if the winds became more favourable later. I was happy to settle for 80 kilometres and call it a night, but at 78 kilometres I noticed a figure in the road ahead of me. It looked like either a cyclist or a walker, but it seemed unlikely to be a local, given that there weren’t any locals on the remote stretch of road I was cycling on. I could see that whatever it was had stopped and moved off the road, so I pedalled a bit faster to catch up and realised that it actually was another touring cyclist, and going my way too.
He was an older man who greeted me warmly as I came up to him. He was just about to go off and camp so we decided we’d both do so. He introduced himself as Mario. “Like Super Mario?” I asked, as any sane person would. He laughed. “So my grandkids tell me.”
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Mario was a great and inspiring guy. He told me that he’d been cycling around Australia the year before, from his home in Adelaide, up north to Darwin and around the west coast. He’d got as far as the Kalgoorlie area when he was knocked off by a truck, a wide-load traveling without pilot vehicles, and had ended up in the ditch. He’d not been too seriously hurt, but he’d had to abandon his tour, or rather to postpone it, because now he was back to finish what he’d started and cycle from here back to Adelaide across the Nullarbor.
I was cautious looking out for spiders as we each set up our tents, but Mario insisted there was nothing to worry about on that score, and seemed more concerned about wild dogs. “What about snakes?” I asked. “Oh, they’ll all be hibernating this time of year” was his confident reply, which made me realise how little most Australians actually know about the outback. I’d asked lots of them on the cruise, Australians from the cities, about snakes, and I’d received a wide variety of responses, ranging from “nothing to worry about” to “you’ll probably die.” Not one of them mentioned that they’d be ruddy hibernating.
Distance completed: 815km
Distance to go: 2995km
Days to go: 24.5
Average distance required: 122.2km/day
Today's ride: 79 km (49 miles)
Total: 41,696 km (25,893 miles)
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