Australia

The Great Central Road 

In arid, one degree humidity, the late spring sun cast an exhausting forty nine degrees Celsius upon the corrugated sandpit that is the Great Central Road. Not a cloud in the sky. A car hadn’t passed in hours. I hadn’t been through a town or collected water in two days, some two hundred kilometres. Places to find shade were rare in a landscape of waist high scrub and dry earth from tyre tracks to the horizon. My only refreshment, the twenty litres of bore water carried from the last watering hole, was getting low. I took a swig to rinse the taste of rotting camel corpse that hung in the air. Returning the bottle to its cage, another nosebleed began, but spirits were high, this was my new normal. 

Resetting Expectations 

Three weeks before, on my first day of desert cycling and only sixty kilometres after leaving asphalt, I’d had enough. I stopped pushing my bike through ruts; stood in the sand and cursed every meter of the road as I braced myself for the approaching torrent of dust; a road train. I am the plankton of the road food chain and the road train is the whale. But this whale stopped. “Are you having fun?” shouted a lady hanging out of the passenger window. “What?!”, I replied. “Are you enjoying it?” she shouted again, and I began a rant about pushing my bike through four inches of sand, the weight, the heat and the corrugation. The driver leant through the cab, joining the lady, and calmly said, “This is a good bit, mate!” starting a perspective-shifting conversation. 

The driver recalled his story of a five-month walk across the desert tracks of Australia, from Shark Bay to Byron Bay, pulling a trolley, dressed as a Storm Trooper. He told me about unmarked water holes and road grading works where I could find water supplies, his tips for bad sections of road and his humble highs and lows of a long walk in solitude. And then, with the thunderous roar of a hundred tonnes pounding across corrugation, the road train and its passengers disappeared.  

You Won’t be Here Again, so Enjoy It 

I stood. Smiled. I was a winging pom. I easily overlooked the positives when I felt hardship, but even in that moment I had a bike, not a trolley. Although I pushed my own limits, those limits were subjective. My perceptions were leading to my feelings of hardship, not the road. In the middle of the desert, I had a word with myself, “Adjust your idea of normality. The asphalt that seems to cover the world was not there a hundred years ago, it is not normal, it is a luxury. From now on sand is normal. You will walk with your bike and push it through the hot, draining sand. You can try to cycle and you will fall. When the hard surface returns it will be a cycling luxury, and when it goes and you will walk again. Only you have put yourself here and there is only one way you are getting out. You won’t be here again, so enjoy it.”  

For three weeks I cycled and walked the road between sparse indigenous communities, my pilgrimage to the red centre. It was the equivalent of Lands End to John O’Groats but in the desert, on unsealed roads, in heat, passing through only four towns to buy supplies. And it was wonderful. I woke to the sounds of kangaroos thumping away from my tent, I followed camel tracks before the animals meandered across the road in front of me, I photographed Thorny Devils and Blue Tongued Lizards basking on the hot roadside. I watched sunsets cast the world in deep red and I slept beside a campfire in only a sleeping bag, beneath the incredible stars, to the soundtrack of howling Dingoes.  

The Future Looks Exciting from the Saddle 

The nosebleeds dried, the smell of rotten camel faded, and I continued to sip saline water, pushing my bike for the last few days of the desert as Kata Tjuta began to loom on the horizon. My love/hate relationship with the Great Central Road ended at the Uluru National Park, as I kissed the welcome asphalt and bid a fond farewell to the dust. Half my equipment was destroyed on the corrugated road but the pilgrimage to the spiritual heart of Australia will remain a highlight of this journey. After a brief stay in Yulara in the company of new friends, fresh ideas were hatched and routes forward plotted. My eyes and mind have been opened and the future looks exciting from the saddle as I begin the long ride down the Stuart Highway to Adelaide.