August 11, 2015
The walking path of doom: Come on, come on!
It was so nice to have a bed for the night although the unexpected hospitality of Keren and Phil did mean that I missed out on a bit of sleep. With access to wifi I ended up spending half of the night staying up and trying to plot a safe route through the upcoming urban areas of Wollongong and Sydney. Whilst it did seem that a combination of bicycle paths, back roads, and ferries could be linked up to provide safe passage, the actual process of researching and note-taking took hours. It was a laborious task and one that almost had me longing for the days of cycling through cities in Asia, which admittedly involved far greater risk, but with less paperwork.
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We had one more day of riding before Wollongong and we had relatively quiet roads to enjoy before reaching the seaside once again at Gerringong. At the beach we met an old couple who must have been pushing 90 (each) (180 cumulatively). They smiled at the sight of our bikes and said “We used to do that!” and so we stopped and spoke with them and it turned out that they had cycled in Europe and the UK on a tandem bike back in the 1950s. The old man spotted Mr Plopples clinging to my front pannier and pointed and his wife told us that they had been all over the country looking for and hoping to see platypuses and never seen one. I was glad, therefore, that they got to meet Mr Plopples, and also felt very lucky and honoured that Dea and I had got to see wild platypuses ourselves. We had been very fortunate.
After Gerringong came a considerable challenge. Simone had told us that, while there was no road alternative to the highway for the next section, we could follow a walking trail along the coastline. She herself had done this while touring the east coast and she had highly recommended to us to do the same. Naturally this sounded like good advice to us, although we were immediately wondering about what lay ahead of us, as simply to get to the start of the walking trail we had to push our bikes across the sandy beach. It was impossible to do alone and we had to take it in turns to help one another push through the thick sand. By the time we were at the start of the trail we were exhausted and the warning sign at the gate suggested that we were about to take our lives in our hands on this walking path of doom.
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The walking path of doom was a somewhat difficult place to ride a fully-loaded touring bicycle. The surface was lumpy grass and it rose and fell steeply up and over the cliffsides. Luckily, however, the scenery was incredibly beautiful and more than made up for the trouble. Bouncing along on that path with the whole Pacific beside me I felt like there was nothing I would rather be doing. That was, at least, until we came to a bench. Then I felt like I’d rather be sitting down.
We made rather slow progress on the walking path of doom. A couple of times we had to help each other up steep, rocky sections which had us wondering what kind of an impressive superwoman Simone must be to have done this on her own. We also kept stopping, ostensibly to admire the view and take dramatic photos of one another, although I was secretly just happy to try and catch my breath and wipe the sweat from my brow. But as we crested another hill and spotted Kiama, the town we were trying to reach, things took a turn toward the dramatic. Behind us I spotted a group of four hikers. They were some way back, a couple of hillocks distant, but they were marching at a determined pace. “We can’t let them catch us Dea,” I said, “It’ll be embarrassing.”
We tried to go a bit faster, but the going remained rough. We dipped down again, braking hard on the bumpy surface. It took us all the way down to sea-level and we had to navigate a rocky beach where I was alarmed to see Dea stopping to look for fossils. “There’s no time for that!’ I exclaimed, looking behind me nervously as the four hikers appeared at the top of the hill behind us. “Let’s go!”
We struggled up the next climb. They seemed to be getting steeper and steeper with each one. Halfway up I glanced back through some trees and noticed the hikers were almost at the beach. “Come on, come on” I said, panicked, although I was talking to myself now because Dea was already racing ahead of me. “Don’t worry about me” I shouted, sarcastically,“Save yourself!”
I finally reached the peak of the climb, now with the four hikers hot on our tail, and found Dea admiring some aboriginal sculpture. “There’s no time for that!” I screamed, and we hurtled down the next descent. By some miracle this appeared to be the last one. The end of the path was in sight. But ahead was another section of rocky beach. It was more like a boulder field. The four hikers were breathing down our necks, marching rhythmically, incessantly gaining ground on us. “Come on! Dea, quicker, let’s go! Let’s go!!!” And across the rocks we bumped and scrambled and did all we could to get to the other side. One last grassy hill to navigate, and still the four hikers continued their robotic march. But finally we were safe and back on a road and able to escape. But, oh no, the road was the steepest in the world, it was at least 40% and it was impossibly slow to cycle up and now, devastatingly, the four hikers were sure to catch us and overtake us and kill us with embarrassment. I winced. I wanted to cry. I glanced back. “Oh don’t worry, it’s okay. They went the other way.”
Today's ride: 41 km (25 miles)
Total: 46,008 km (28,571 miles)
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