With my new plan to cycle only as far as Melbourne there was much less urgency about me in the morning and I didn’t even bother starting to cycle until it was almost light. Of course there was a really big headwind as I battled on towards the sunrise, and my knee was also hurting pretty bad. It was tough. All I wanted to do was to get to the next town of Southern Cross. The distance to that town was advertised by markers every ten kilometres with the initials SC. As I passed the SC-40 sign I came up with a game to keep me occupied - trying to think of as many things with those initials that I could. I started out with nice things like South Carolina, Southern Comfort, and Strip Clubs, but with my mood souring with the headwind it wasn’t long before I’d descended to one which started with Stupid.

A brief respite from this pointless game arrived when I saw another touring cyclist heading towards me in the opposite direction, sailing along gleefully with the wind. Any animosity I might have felt to the other rider for their good fortune soon evaporated, however, as I saw that it was a not-unattractive female and that she came bearing smiles and good cheer. She’d cycled all the way from Queensland, starting in January and having spent some time off working in Adelaide along the way. We stood at the side of the road and talked for some time, exchanging our stories. She insisted that she’d had headwinds all the way across the Nullarbor, and it had only just changed around in the last few days. She also thrust two small green rocks into my hand as a gift. She was very nice, but also a little odd, because she kept talking about whales. I found this very strange. She said over and over again, “I didn’t see any whales, I hope you will,” which made me think that she must have spent too much time by herself out here. Whales, in the outback? I hadn’t even seen a kangaroo yet! Then came the bombshell. I asked her what she did for work in Adelaide. “Oh, I’m a stripper!” she exclaimed, as bright as a button. Wow, but, no, but, seriously. Never meet any lone female cyclists, and when I do she’s a stripper! And going the wrong sodding way!

I finally reached the town of Strip Club, or South Carolina, or whatever it was, and looked around for wifi. It wasn’t easy to find. The community resource centre had it, but charged three dollars to use it for fifteen minutes. I believe this is the kind of sh!t that has to happen when community resource centres cost a million dollars. As a result of this absurd pricing structure the community resource centre was empty, and most of the community was in the pub, where I soon joined them. Luckily for me the English bar girl was on a working holiday, and took pity on me and my empty pockets, and let me use the wifi for two hours without me buying anything. I needed to get online to make official my new plans to end my race across Australia in Melbourne instead of Gold Coast. I still wanted to go to Gold Coast for work, but, knowing that I wasn’t going to be able to get there by bicycle by the 9th of July, I needed to rearrange and organise things. People needed to be informed, and convinced that this was ultimately the best thing for the expedition. And, reluctantly, it meant that a flight needed to be booked between the two cities, a sadly necessary evil to compensate for my inability to ride the full distance in time.

I bought some food and left Stinky Cheese, somewhat reluctantly as the next town was an intimidating 200 kilometres away. I’d spent too long in that pub, the sun was already on the way down, and this road was a bit too busy for night riding, leaving me looking for somewhere to camp with barely 50 kilometres on the clock. Not that it was an easy task as some thoughtful soul had built a fence along one side of me, probably to keep rabbits off the road, and on the other was a large waterpipe. This pipe was above ground and extended for hundreds of kilometres from Perth out to the former gold rush towns that still lay a few days riding ahead of me, and it presently blocked me from getting out to a camping place on that side either. But then I came to an old water pumping station where I found several abandoned buildings, including a few homes, overgrown with weeds. It seemed like an exceptionally good set for a horror movie. There was even an old kids’ playground, overcome with rust, swings creaking in the wind. Super spooky stuff, but with darkness closing in there was no doubt that I was going to have to camp here. I congratulated the movie script writers for setting up such an exciting horror scene out in the Australian outback.

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It felt like there were eyes watching me from behind the dusty cracked windows of the big water pump building as I wheeled over to an information board to check the name of this little ghost community. I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was called Ghooli. Oh, come on! Scriptwriters! I mean, come on, seriously, Ghooli? Seriously? You can do better than that!

I followed the dust road around behind the building and peeled off into some bushes. Almost as soon as I did this a pick-up truck suddenly came around the corner and drove on, as if it had been following me and then had just missed me ducking away out of sight. This was a genuinely creepy moment. Were they after me? I was a bit scared. With the truck stopped a little way away ahead I sneaked out of the far side of the bushes and went on a bit further to camp, hiding as well as I possibly could, and even going so far as to tiptoe back and kick away my tyre tracks, just in case that pick-up driver really was coming for me. Laying in the darkness of my tent, alone in this scary situation, I consoled myself with the thought that if this really was a horror movie as the main character I’d be the last to die. Except… I looked around and realised that at this present moment there were no other characters. Oh dear! Where’s a stripper when you need one?!

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