Friday, 30th July, 2004
July 28 – 30 – Relaxing at Tennant Creek
At Three Ways you can choose to go one of three ways (of course) – we turned left to Alice, Sarah and Renee turned right to Darwin and Gary caught the bus back to Mt Isa. He will join us again in Darwin in a month, and we hope to catch up with S&R then too. But first we all had some r&r in Tennant Creek. Sarah and Renee were staying in a NRMA funded cabin while waiting on the local mechanic to repair their van, and we all had a great veggie dinner together – with fresh herbs and lemons. We pooled our food resources and Gary bought a couple of bottles of good wine. Yum!!!
We said goodbye to Gary, but we are so comfortable here we decided to stay another day… and another… I think the bad reports we heard about Tennant Creek might not be so bad after all. We really like it here. Hopefully the bad reports about Elliott end up the same way.
Ross is visiting the cultural centre, but I stayed behind to upload today’s journal and then race into town to the butcher, supermarket and post office. Then back to our cabin to bake Anzac biscuits and a roast, as we have a guest for dinner – a fellow cyclist who knocked on our door last night, bearing greetings from Augustin. Oops – it’s 3.30, time to get moving!!!
July 26 to 27 – At Three Ways turn left for Alice
What a day! Last night I listened to a message from Trudi, an old friend and work colleague. The family would be in Darwin that day but we weren’t due for another month – very disappointing. Riding along the next day we were passed by a red ute which quickly did a u turn and parked in front of us. You guessed it - out jumped Trudi, Ian and the kids. We were both on the same road, at the same time, 7,000 km from their home in Port Fairy, Victoria. Six degrees of separation stuff.
We got down to some serious lunching – fresh fruit, olives, cheese, hummus, dolmades, babaganosh, sundried tomatoes, fire roasted capsicum, crackers, cold drinks. Trudi is the queen of outdoor lunch menus and nothing had changed. Conversation went at machine gun speed for a couple of hours but then it was time to say goodbyes. Just then the wind changed to a flat out tail wind – it can’t get much better than that! But it did.
That evening we pulled into a camp area, started up a conversation with Herbie and Liz, and within few minutes Ann was cooking a stand out meal with the benefit of electric lights. Gary says the couscous just gets better every time.
Next day was just full on distance work, 140 km had us arriving at Three Ways in darkness. We had planned to do the section in two days, but as always the promise of beer and a bed drove us on. Riding at night was beautiful – the moon was up and we even had shadows. There was not much traffic apart from a few road trains, as locals try to stay off the roads after dark to avoid hitting kangaroos. We could see the lights of the few oncoming vehicles about 5km away so we had plenty of time to get off the road. Three Ways is very well lit, and we could see it from about 15km away, which made the last few kilometres much easier. Invoking the emergency baked beans also helped.
July 23 to 25 – Crossing the border with a thousand support vehicles
After 15 km we crossed the border into the Northern Territory and turned over our 5000th kilometre - but way too early in the morning to do any celebrating. The unlimited speed signs said it was time to really start pedalling, but we first had to turn our watches back half an hour - Territory time is different.
Land was flat, winds were variable, and rest areas were welcome. As we ride we are always waving or being waved to, the unwritten law of remote long distance travel. Pulling into the next rest area means meeting up with many people we’ve seen before, cups of tea, and even greater generosity – one day Ann scored a free lunch time shower in a motorhome – thanks Terry and Kay. That night we had a candle lit dinner under the stars with Rod, Claire, Sarah and Renee. We’ve always thought of our trip as unsupported as we have been self sufficient – but in reality we have 1,000 support vehicles travelling with us. Cycling around Oz is hard yakka!
Next day we pulled into Barkly Homestead. This is the only service station and pub for 500 kilometres so the prices are unbelievable - $26 for a box of Weetbix, a tub of yoghurt, 600ml milk and a loaf of frozen bread. Glad we’re on a push bike and don’t have to buy petrol! We caught up again with Sarah and Renee who were having car trouble and agreed to meet at Tennant Creek. Then time for a huge steak.
July 20 to 22 - Where’s Camooweal ?
It’s always great to get back on the road again. Our next section would take us through some quite remote country – so now it is time to break out our camping skills…gulp. The road we were travelling was only one car wide and hadn’t been upgraded since WWII, so lots of hopping off to let the road trains through and to take advantage of the seat rest. The road literally went up hill and down dale as it followed the channel country crests, like being on a roller coaster, but one running at our speed.
Back at Isa we invested in some Tandy toys – a pair of UHF receivers. They allow us to talk to vehicles with a three kilometre range in line of sight. The matchbox sized eavesdroppers had forty channels – channel 40 used by truckies, channel 18 by the caravan nomads. We switched to 39 with the intention of giving each other a call every hour – but we weren’t quite fast enough to stay in view of Gary. We’ll get there! The next two nights required advanced boy scout skills, which we passed with flying colours. There’s nothing like a great meal and warm fire before hopping into our sleeping bags wearing ever bit of clothing we had (which wasn’t much!)
We finally rolled into Camooweal for a well earned beer at the local and news that another cyclist was just up the road. Augustin had initially made contact when we rode into Isa. We all ate, swapped info, then raced back to our room to watch Lance Armstrong win his sixth Tour de France. Amazing.
Monday, 19th July, 2004
July 18 to 19 – gearing up for the interior
We are staying at Marg and Greg’s place in Mt Isa with Gary, getting ready to ride west to Tennant Creek. Their dogs and camels are keeping us company during the day while Greg’s mum Joan is feeding us up. We’re shopping for nine days of provisions (but hope to do it in fewer days) and will need water drops. Gary is surprised at the length of my shopping list, which includes eight boxes of muesli bars for the three of us. Perhaps we should ask Uncle Tobys to sponsor us. We’re also buying some warmer clothes as it is FREEZING, thanks to the snow down south. This is very unusual weather, Joan’s housemate Penny said she only took her jumper out of the cupboard once last year. Just our luck.
We’ll post some of our provisions to stations along the road, and the computer will get sent on to Tennant Creek, so no updates for a week or two. We may also be hard to catch on the phone. Adios for now!
July 17 – riding to Mt Isa
Kerrie and Des suggested we stay a few extra days in Cloncurry and ride to Mt Isa today so they could accompany us. A great suggestion – we always like riding with company. It was Kerrie’s biggest ride, and she did really well to do the full 120km despite the punishing freezing winds. Well done Kerrie!
Kerrie’s mum Kath was our support vehicle for the day, carrying our trailer and panniers as well as fruit and a thermos. I could get used to this! Sadly Kath is not available for the next 14,000km. This was the first time we have ridden unloaded since leaving Sydney, so this was our first opportunity to get out of the saddle and ride the hills standing (this can’t be done loaded - too much stress on the bike frame). We are definitely much better at it than before we left – Ross has much greater strength and control in his right arm and we have more power in our legs too, so we can actually make it to the top of the hill before having to sit in the saddle. Pity we’ll be loaded for the rest of the trip!
Just out of Isa, our friend Gary from Sydney flagged us down with a pannier full of ice, drinks and chocolate. Luckily Gary is available for the next leg of the trip, and will ride with us to Tennant Creek. But no ice in the panniers (unless the weather gets even colder) as he will be on a bicycle this time. Gary’s bike is nearly as long as ours – it is a recumbent – so we will get even more stares than usual.
July 14 to 16 – Curry Muster
John Flynn founded the Royal Flying Doctor Service here in Cloncurry. Flynn overcame huge odds to bring a ‘mantle of safety’ to the interior, saying “We are not of them who turn back. The secret of life is to overcome failure”. It really struck a cord with us.
Cloncurry is also the home of the annual Stockman’s challenge. At last Ross got to take me to my first ever rodeo! We watched the draft, where a cow has to be cut out of the mob, sent around a course and then driven between two poles. Apparently the trick is to get your horse to do all the work. We also watched steer wrestling, bucking broncos and bull riding. Now that must hurt even more than 4,000km on a bicycle seat.
A trip to Cloncurry would be incomplete without a visit to the Ernest Henry Mine, where Des works, so he arranged for us to go on a tour. It is a huge open cut mine extracting hundreds of thousands of tonnes of copper and gold every year. The bottom of the pit is 270m from the surface, and they expect to dig down to 560m before going underground for the last seam. Huge house-sized dump trucks toil up the steeply sloping roads for fifteen minutes to reach ground level with ore and waste material.
Mine safety regulations require visitors to wear long trousers, closed shoes and long sleeved shirts – so Des decked us out in Ernest Henry uniforms. I wore my uniform with Kerrie’s yoga pants, so I looked really great. Oops, I seem to have accidentally deleted the photo of us at the mine. 
Friday, 16th July, 2004
July 12 and 13 – walloping winds
We were well and truly wind whipped on the road to Cloncurry. From the shape of the vegetation it looks like the norm for this stretch is tailwinds – but it just didn’t work out that way. In fact, it was every way but tail – massive cross winds, headwinds and road work that literally took the wind out of our sails and the morale out of our legs. Lots of stops and fruitcake fuel required.
A new feature of this road section was the cattle grid – some with bars spaced as wide as my feet are long. Cycling across these is for braver cyclists than us, walking is scary enough. Good excuse to stop and rest the bottom anyway.
We rested our bottoms so much that the 137km trip between towns took two days. Camping was a challenge, and the wind whipped the tent all night to the exclusion of sleep (the slope under me and Ross’s punctured thermarest didn’t help). It’s been a while since we last camped, and we wondered briefly if perhaps we had got too soft in all the great accommodation we’ve had in the last few weeks. The wondering was only brief because the answer was a unanimous yes. A beautiful sunrise through the tent flap in the morning tried hard to cheer us up, but as the wind was still howling we felt like doing the same. It was with great reluctance that we declined a lift from a passing roadtrain.
I never thought I’d be happy to see a hill, but as we got closer to Cloncurry we entered some steep sections. It was wonderful because at last we had a little shelter from the wind. We cheered up considerably, and even picked up our average speed. As we entered Cloncurry we passed a road sign guaranteeing a warm welcome: Cloncurry is the home of Australia’s hottest day – 53.1 degrees in 1886 (or something like that). Well, we didn't get 53.1 degrees but we did get a warm welcome at Kerrie and Des's place. It's three days later and we're still there... but you'll have to wait for the next diary post to find out why.
Monday, 12th July, 2004
July 10 and 11 – Julia Creek, our longest day so far
Julia Creek is 150km from Richmond. We carried plenty of food and water to cover us for two days on the road – but we secretly hoped to do it in one day.
The area is flat(tish), in a great artesian basin. We told each other that we might make it in one day if we had great road conditions and a tailwind, but it would be very ambitious.
But we had a headwind, and very bad road surfaces (some unsealed) due to extensive road upgrading along large sections of the route. In the end we did make it one day, because Ross wanted a beer and I wanted a bed.
We got the bed, but were too tired to go for a beer. We had ridden for seven hours and arrived as the last light faded.
Of course we had to have today off to recover, and catch up on washing, shopping, cooking and updating our journal – as you can see!
We decided to treat ourselves to good accommodation again, and checked in to a self contained villa – the ‘no vacancy’ sign turned into a night’s complimentary accommodation. And then the local store owner gave us our groceries on the house.
It seems people just get more generous the further from cities we go.
And we got to make our own roast for dinner, complete with veggies of course.
July 8 and 9 – Richmond
It was very, very cold when we left Hughendon but beautifully warm by mid morning. Thanks to a tailwind and good road surfaces, we made the 112km to Richmond by mid afternoon. First stop visitors centre (to find out where the supermarket was), then the supermarket to buy up big (my appetite is back). Then off to the caravan park to get a cabin or a van to cook up in… except it was all booked out. Tragedy. We had to stay in the pub and have a steak instead.
No riding the next day – we had to check out historic Richmond and visit Kronosaurus Korner. Richmond is a lovely town, wonderful wide streets, but not many of them. Signposts and photos mark the sites of historic buildings. Marge, a nurse at the local hospital we met walking the main street, said the council has done a great job and Richmond is much nicer than it was ten years ago (Marge is training for the masters walking championships in Alice Springs in October).
Kronosaurus Korner is a very engaging info centre and museum. This is great praise from me, as I haven’t been able to enter a museum for 20 years without cringing thanks to massive overdoses in my childhood. Ross had to practically drag me in. It looks well funded, and the museum entry fees would make it sustainable. The exhibits are great, and there is such a supply of fossils on hand there is also much work in progress.
Richmond used to be in the middle of the sea in the days when Australia was not a separate continent, and many marine reptiles (technically not dinosaurs) and things with unpronounceable names got fossilised on the ocean floor. 
The star exhibit is not the Kronosaurus, but an icthyosaurus found on nearby Marathon cattle station a few years ago. A cattleman found its nose sticking out of the side of the creek when he went wondering to break the boredom of a cattle muster. It is a remarkable find because the skeleton is complete and undisturbed, just a bit squashed.
The entry tickets to the museum even come with a fossil fossicking licence for sites near town. And there’s a wonderful café that doubles as the town bakery (don’t miss the apple turnovers). At last, a museum that got me excited as well as educated – perhaps there is some hope that I might get cultured one day after all.
This was the start of a very good day. Three strangers approached us and gave us donations for the stroke foundation. The caravan park had a vacancy for the night, and we were treated to a complimentary cabin (it is the only cabin they have).
The caravan park is on – wait for it – the shores of Richmond’s lake. Not something you expect in Queensland’s downs country. The lake has a beach and apparently people bring boats and jet skis, although the lake is not very big. Children play under the fountains and shoot each other with water cannons. The lake was recently built in memory of a former mayor who was famous for his grand schemes involving water.
We got to do our big cook up after all, to stock up for the next two days on the road to Julia Creek.
Wednesday, 7th July, 2004
July 7 – holding hands with dinosaurs
We had a day off in Hughendon today to prepare for our 112km ride to Richmond tomorrow. Naturally we went dinosauring. Ross got friendly with the local Muttaburrasaurus in the park, but the dinosaur was heading for the pub and not interested in showing us around. So we headed off to the museum. The outside of the museum was the best part, as the walls were decked with marvellous dinosaur sculptures made by local artists from scrap bits and pieces: hooks, a shovel, giant bolts.
There were some great fossils inside too, but they were from Morocco and Namibia – very international place, Hughendon. We also got to pick up a very, very heavy vertebra and look at a reconstructed Muttaburrasaurus skeleton found at Hughendon. It’s only the second one to have been found, and was found in 1987. The first was found in Muttaburra just to the south (hence its name). Apparently the dinosaurs died when the area was an inland sea and Muttaburra and Hughendon were coastal resorts, a few million years ago.
More dinosauring at Richmond tomorrow. It’s State of Origin tonight, Queensland v NSW, so we are keeping a low profile. 
July 6 – riding the red country
We rolled heavily out of Torrens Creek fully fuelled with Les’s bacon and eggs. Riding the long straight road west we knew we were heading for the Centre because the earth at the roadside is so red it is almost crimson. In some stretches it is white, orange, brown, but always fine and ancient.
No stops until Prairie, 50km away. Lucky we weren’t starving as Prairie won the worst sandwich award, twice, and this isn’t restricted to the trip. But the rest of the stop more than made up for it – we met Graham and Sandy, caravanners from Victor Harbour in South Australia, and got a standing ovation from the CWA meeting that finished as we rode off into the pelting headwind.
Drivers are friendly, and we kept waving to road trains, caravans and train drivers who passed us, all the way to Hughendon. At Hughendon we coincidentally booked into the same caravan park as Graham and Sandy (we were all pubbed out) and had a great dinner with our new friends.
July 5 – 100 days: across the Great Dividing Range
Riding isn’t easy when you’re running on empty, but it was a real pleasure to not feel sick today. Luckily we had a bit of a tailwind and good road conditions to help us along, and Ross planned another short easy day for us. It was our hundredth day on the road, so it was appropriate that we hit a milestone: we crossed the Great Dividing Range.
Well, the range isn’t that high but the vegetation is great – grevillea like trees with black bark and moonlight coloured flowers, eucalypts in full bloom, grevilleas with brushes like molten gold. Even the roadkill was spectacular: a giant snake (a python?) – thicker than my calf, longer than Argo, creamy white with a black head.
Over the range we passed a sign telling us we were entering the Lake Eyre Basin. I thought basins were flat. Oh well. We reached Torrens Creek in the early afternoon, our resting place for the night. Like all the creeks we’ve passed, there is no water in Torrens Creek, but there is a great watering hole. The pub’s walls and ceilings have been signed by a decade of drinkers, locals and visitors from all over the world.
This is the start of dinosaur country and Denise at the pub cooks a 1.4kg dinosaur steak. Ross settled for the regular steak, which was bigger than the plate. I was still on the recovery diet, but he did need some help, and I needed the fuel. We unanimously awarded Denise the best steak of the trip award.
July 3 and 4 – We’re fine, really, no need to stop…
Although I tried my best not to look sick vehicles kept pulling over and asking us if we were ok every time we stopped for a rest break. Even a road train and a regular train (on railway tracks next to the road) stopped to check on us. That means lots of lost acceleration – very expensive. Oops.
The first tree in sight today was at Homestead, which consists of a shop, a tin town hall, two houses and a public loo (toilet bowl complete with frog of course). The tree came in handy because I got to collapse behind it for a while, while Ross had lunch at the shop. The shop was incredibly well stocked – three different newspapers (we were on the front page of the Northern Miner), beer, fuel. I was still too sick to eat.
Somehow we made it to Pentland, booked into an ensuite cabin at the amazingly well kept van park, and didn’t emerge for two days.
Friday, 2nd July, 2004
July 2 – Copper trains
We said our goodbyes to Brian and rode out of town. The traffic volume dropped straight away, but not the size of the trucks. This is road train country. Nothing to fear, but very impressive every time one went past. They have either three or four trailers (called, wait for it, ‘threes’ or ‘fours’), up to 100 wheels, and haul up to 100 tonnes.
Fast riding meant an early mark today. We pulled in to Balfes Creek pub just after midday but felt like we hadn’t pedalled enough. That’s probably because most of the morning was spent waving to other motorists. They’re very friendly out this way.
We spent the first beer chatting to John the publican and road train drivers Peter, Fordy, and Alan. They all haul copper ore from the mine up the road to a rail head 60 k’s in the opposite direction. Five round trips a day. 600 k’s.These guys are probably passing us two or three times a day so it’s easy to see why we get such a wide birth.
Tonight’s meal was a truckie sized steak and veg so we both staggered back to our donga.
I think we’ll ease into it tomorrow.
1 July – Charters false start
A bad night sleep left Ann with a tummy bug so we decided to postpone our ride westward. No point in taking off in these areas of lower (human) population density if you don’t feel good. Brian’s gone to do some mayoral duties so I’m minding the fort.
Sitting on the back step right now is like therapy. Brahams graze across the paddocks, the local rail line trails off into the distance, wild flowers are blooming, and the cattle property scent is unmistakable.
I’ve had time this morning to check over our daily log. Interesting.
We’ve just clocked over our 96th day on the road and covered 3,600 kilometres. Of these days, 59 have been ride days and 37 have been working/rest/tourist days. Doing the ‘math’, we do about 62 kms a day, which takes us about three riding hours (and about the same time resting!).
In terms of equipment, we’ve bought new panniers, racks, tyres,lights and chains. Now for the sales pitch. The panniers are by Ortlieb and the racks are by Tubus, both fantastic to use and both are the best in the business. No arguments there.
I'm also very impressed with the Schwalbe Marathon Plus tyres. These aren’t cheap but they still have half their tread after 2000 kilometres (and no punctures). We’ll buy some more.
Overall Argo gets a five star rating (us, biased?), but now that we are going west we will be loading him up with water. It will be different.