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more OZ and NZ

1K views 7 replies 4 participants last post by  skulls 
#1 ·
I posted a few pictures last week of my trip to Australia and New Zealand (http://forums.roadbikereview.com/showthread.php?t=69462). It's three years since I was there and I'm starting to look through my photos again. Here are a few more to be going on with:

The Stuart Highway runs north-south through the centre of Australia. There´s not a lot along the whole 2834km length of the road except a couple of towns and a few roadhouses.
 
#2 ·
'The Track', as the SH is known, is surfaced, but many of the smaller roads are dirt tracks. Some, if not most, are ridden with ripple bumbs that after several hours or days are nothing more than a leg, bike and soul destroying hell. They usually lead either to nowhere in particular, or to some of the most spectacular places on the planet. Here, the Breakaways Reserve in South Australia. This place is most famous as the film set for various films, most notably some of the Mad Max films, and 'Priscilla, Queen of the Desert'.
 
#3 ·
While the quieter roads are somewhat deserted, on the SH there is a fair amount of traffic, in comparison. Since I was there, the railway has been opened from Alice Springs up to Darwin, so now the whole route can be done by train, but the 'traditional' transport along the SH are the roadtrains. Luckily they can be heard coming for up to ten minutes before they pass, so there's plenty of time to get off the road.
 
#5 ·
Good lord, it is a Mad Max Truck! That thing is a biker's nightmare come true! Good to know they are noisey. I love the scenery. I live on the edge of the Great Basin Desert. Not quite as extreme as the Interior of Australia but I still love the desert.
 
#6 ·
the roadtrains are even longer further north, towards Darwin. I didn't head up that way though - I came across from Townsville on the east coast and turned south at Tennant Creek. I too really like travelling through desert areas - there's something very relaxing about them, and when they're as big as australia, the sense of being totally alone and dependant on yourself and nobody else is, for me, a really great feeling!
 
#7 ·
the longest straight I had was 50km (followed by a slight curve and another 30km straight), but luckily I never had strong headwinds on more than a couple of days. when you get one out there though, brutal is an understatement! water can be a problem - I had a max capacity of 16 litres - but with at least 100km between most places, it's easy to get caught out. although I used to count the kms, I used to plan more around riding time - in days rather than hours, and where I would be able to get more water.
Once I met a police patrol that stopped for lunch at the same rest area as me. They inquired about my water and provisions in a friendly way, but I could tell they were checking me out to see if I was likely to get caught out hundreds of miles from anywhere and then need a search party. they've obviously seen more than a few people (cyclists included) get themselves into trouble after setting off and not knowing what they were up against. They thought the japanese were the worst cases - they head off into the outback with nothing more than a 100 dollar bike and a bottle of water. once they found a guy lying under one of the above-ground water pipes that serve the area close to Port Augusta, drinking the drips leaking from the pipe because he had run out of water...
 
#8 ·
love your pictures.....

Aus. is so beautiful, varied, and such a great place for cycling. I'm sure you had a great time....

Speaking of nutso cyclists who get lost out there, while I was living there in 1999 there was a volunteer firefighter from Alaska who was travelling around Australia on a dept. store MTB. He had gone about two-thirds the way around the country (no small accomplishment) to the area north of Perth in WA (the back of beyond as they say over there), when he took his bike down a dirt road that led basically to the middle of the desert. Some 20 or 50 miles down the track he dumped the bike, but kept walking. They hired Aboriginal trackers to find him, but the tracks just kept going. After several weeks of searching for him, they gave up. His parents, however, called the US State Dept. and asked that they go look for him, if only to recover his body. By this time he'd been gone for at least a month.

Press reports during the whole ordeal described him as a very able guy, who could survive on his own better than most. Sure enough, about a week after these cigar chomping guys from the US showed up to look for him (prompting very real concerns among the Aussies that they themselves would need rescue), the guy is spotted by a news helicopter hundreds of miles from where he was last seen. When they go to rescue him, all he has is a daypack with a few items in it, one of which was a CLEAN T-Shirt. He said that if he ever made it out (which apparently wasn't something he was very intent on doing) that he figured he would need a clean shirt in order to get picked up hitching along the road. The story made headlines for weeks.......
 
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