October 13th, 2009 at 10:53 pm
At 5:15am my alarm goes off, and for today there is no snooze button whacking to be had. I gear up, do a quick search of the room to make sure I’ve left nothing behind, and hook down the empty main street to the 24 hour truckstop for breakfast. I am overjoyed to find that they have Weet-Bix, and while munching down on what is likely to be the most wholesome thing I eat all day, I do the maths on my $4.50 breakfast and work out that even taking the milk into account, that’s about $65 a kilo for Weet-Bix. But considering what’s to come over the next couple of weeks, I decide that I don’t really care that much, and I chug down the remains of my coffee and suit up.
I stop about 4km down the road after realising I’ve forgotten to put in my earplugs, and remedy the situation.
30km down the road and I pull over again to do a rain dance on the side of the road while trying to put on my wet weather gear. There are decidedly grumpy-looking clouds hanging low on the horizon, and I’d rather look like a burnt marshmallow man than be cold and wet all day. I’ve now covered 30km in 30 mintues of travel. At this rate, I should hit Ceduna at about 3am. I get moving again, only to stop 200m down the road when I remember that I put my sunglasses on the back seat while I was changing. I look back at the empty seat, then back at the section of road I’ve just covered, and decide that they’re gone. I’m now hoping for some volume of rain so that I don’t turn up at a roadhouse at the edge of the desert explaining my appearance with this white whale story about the downpour of rain that is coming. While I’m fleshing out the finer details of my Captain Ahab analogy, it rains on and off a little, but no more than a drizzle.
I should probably point out now the error of my earlier descriptions. I keep referring to getting out into the desert. The desert is a lie. I don’t know whether it was some half-forgotten memory from 20 years ago, or the big yellow patches on the maps I’d been looking at, but I was expecing to find sections, if not long stretches of some kind of endless desert-looking plains. I didn’t find them. Sure, there are vast amounts of low-lying scrub, but nothing in the dustbowl category I was naively waiting to see over the next crest for two thousand kilometres.
I stop in at Balladonia and pay $1.88 a litre for fuel, and discover that the “inbuilt wet weather covers” on my luggage have stopped behaving like mainsails hanging off the side of my bike, because they have torn wide open. Seeing as how the low-hanging grey clouds are still lingering, I decide to leave what remains of them still attached to the luggage, for what little cover they might provide.
After a bit longer I get to 90 Mile straight, which at 146km of dead straight road, is the longest piece of straight in a country full of long, straight roads. About two thirds of the way along, I come across another great Australian institution, the long drop toilet. And while the drop may not have been as long as one might generally have hoped, it was a great improvement over the other options available.
A short while later I cross the border into South Australia, and all of a sudden people are waving, signalling me to pass, and generally being extremely friendly from their cars. Who are these people, where do they come from, and can we get more of them?
It’s only 2pm, but I still have a long way to go by nightfall, so I only stop once for some happy snaps on the cliffs.
It’s blowing a gale along the Nullarbor plain, where (as you might guess from the name) there are no trees to speak of. While I’m fuelling up at the roadhouse I get talking to a guy riding a Suzuki cruiser in the other direction. He tells me that I can look forward to wind, squalls and rain, but that he can’t really complain, he’d rather be here than at work. Amen to that. I pull out onto the road and pass the same road train from WA Freightlines for the 7th time today.
At my next scheduled stop, I pull in to find the pumps labelled “Bio-unleaded”, which I have never heard of before, and is suspiciously low-priced to boot. As I’m weighing up my options, an older lady comes out of the shop to tell me that they have no electricity, so the pumps don’t work. She asks if I have enough fuel to get to the next stop. I guess we’ll find out.
As I get back on the road again, the sun goes down, after which my fuel light begins to blink more and more furiously, and as it the gauge reaches the bottom, the rain begins to fall, properly this time, and I begin to pray for deliverance and safe passage to… wherever it is that I’m going. At least now the last eleven hours dressed in my wets have not been in vain.
I pull into the Caltex at Penong and after the guy behind the counter looks up from his Who magazine, I get to fill my desperately empty tank. As I wander into the shop, he apologises and tells me that he forgot that the pumps shut off at 8pm. I ask him what time it is now… 8:20… It dawns on me that I lost 2.5 hours crossing the border, which could explain why the sun went down at the ridiculous time of 5:15pm according to my clock. Realising that I’m now late, I call the motel I’m staying in to ask that they don’t lock my sorry ass out in the cold.
Another hour riding later, and I come over a crest to see street lights! Civilisation! I cross the quarantine line at Ceduna, South Australia, and check in to the motel. After dumping my gear in my room, I waddle back towards the roadhouse to get some dinner. I notice that there are a couple of other bikes here, including one that’s the same model as a girl I know back home has.
As I’m approaching the doors, I notice a familiar grey head at the counter, and it turns out that I’ve caught up with three friends of mine from Perth who left a day before I did. I get invited back for a chat, spill some of my dinner on one of their beds, and after looking at the routes they’ve planned out, which have significantly more curly bits than mine, we make arrangements for me to tag along with them for the next couple of days. That said and done, it’s about time for a shower and another few hours of unconsciousness.
My wildlife count for the day included 4 lizards in various stages of crossing the Eyre Highway, and one Emu giving me the eyeball on 90 mile straight.
The Eyre highway is not a particularly exciting place to drive along, but you can play games like count the sheep. My total was zero, but you may do better.
October 12th, 2009 at 9:17 pm
Curse you snooze button.
So, this is the end of day one. I would be telling you about this on the internet already, but it seems that my mobile phone provider has no love for the town of Norseman, and my SIM card has been involved in a falling out with other phone networks, and they are refusing to speak to each other.
Thankfully though, I have made it here after all, so I can’t complain too much. After a delayed start to the morning thanks firstly to my whacking of the accursed snooze button on my alarm, followed by the sheer act of will that was ignoring the alarm then going off for a solid ten minutes, I was three hours behind schedule by the time I finally flopped out of bed. The upshot of this is that I missed having to deal with city peak hour, but otherwise it was a bad sign, as I needed to travel vast distances before sundown.
The weather began by looking quite ghastly, at least as ghastly as is possible without things falling from the sky, but the further I made my way inland from the coast, the more pleasant it became. By the time I had reached the outskirts of Toodyay, daylight was clearly visible, which I can assure you was greeted with much rejoicing. After stopping in Cunderdin where I purchased some fuel from an establishment run by a gentleman named ‘Dougie’ (who despite also being in the pizza business, had no tips to give me), I proceeded on East toward the first of two turns I had left to make for the day. Along the way two gentlemen sporting well-cultivated moustaches and uniforms of the Western Australian Police force were kind enough to evaluate the accuracy of my speedometer for me, and escorted me to the side of the road to advise me so. Such activities do not come for free of course, but it’s one of many services that they provide.
A short while later I stopped at Southern Cross for yet more petrol, and then headed again off down the Great Eastern Highway, which although a road with a single name, can involve anything from billiard-table-smooth blacktop, to compounded pea gravel with white lines painted on it. After humming the chorus to Rocket Man in my helmet for a good forty minutes or so, I managed to change tunes several times before eventually making it to Coolgardie, where after more refuelling, I made a turn.
By this point the Ghost Gums were casting long shadows across my path, which aside from the rapidly descending sun, meant that I should be extra vigilant for kangaroos or other wildlife who have lost the will to live and have the habit of running across the road in front of moving vehicles. Thankfully the only wildlife I saw all day that was not secured in a paddock was limited to a number of birds and several pieces of roadkill of indeterminate species.
As a glorious sunset was occurring to my right while I was covering the last of the road leading into Norseman, I slowed down after seeing another motorcycle on the side of the road, followed by my noticing three cars parked on the other side of the road, followed by my noticing a small green hatchback further off the other side of the road and partially into a tree. After being assured that everything was alright and that an ambulance was on the way, I kept on moving, passing the emergency services headed the other direction a couple of minutes later.
I managed to pull into Norseman just as the last of the light was fading, and after trying two petrol pumps that had no interest in supplying me fuel, found a third which was more accommodating and scooted off down the road to dump my belongings and person at the motel.
While I don’t remember taking any shortcuts, today’s tally was 685.8km, which is a good deal shorter than the 736km that Google Maps tells me it should take me to cover the same roads, and no, I didn’t cover any sections in reverse.
To top off the day was the wonderful suprise that while my room’s shower not only dispenses water downwards, but directly sideways and even up and backwards from the shower head, it dispenses truly hot water, and bountiful quantities thereof. This is one of those things in life for which I have learned to be deeply grateful.
Tomorrow is set to be the longest and most strenuous of riding days, along with being the least interesting in regards to the lay of the roads. My directions for tomorrow read: “Go 1.4km North-West along Coolgardie-Esperance Highway, Turn right at Eyre highway. Travel 1200km. Stop at Highway 1 Motel, Ceduna.” I may have to put in some effort if I wish to get myself lost.
October 8th, 2009 at 10:04 pm
I really shouldn’t be burning up my higher level brain function by writing a journal entry right now. I have way too much other stuff to do in the next couple of days, but sometimes I just need the catharsis of braindumping the non-critical stuff floating in my head. I handed in a 10 page report this morning at 2am, and I have two others left to finish before the end of this weekend, at which point I am going to sling my bags over my trusty motorcycle and ride well over two thousand miles due East across the desert so that I can catch up with some friends and watch other motorcycles ride in circles. Then I’ll ride the same trail in reverse, and go back to work. It seems like an odd thing to be looking forward to, but I truly am, even if the trip has been descibed to me by others as the most boring journey on earth. The whole dance ought to be over in just shy of two weeks.
Sometimes I wonder why I put burdens on myself in the size that I do. Surely I could be better served by not trying to cram so much work, study and other rubbish into the somewhat limited hours of the day. At the very least it would be more relaxing. Sometimes I feel like I’d rather do more nothing, other times I feel like I should really be doing more something. I guess you could say I fluctuate. It does make me appeciate both sides of the situation though, and I am deeply, deeply looking forward to Summer, when I have no assignments and thus the time to ride my bike, waste afternoons with friends, and to drown in the couch watching several years worth of TV serials.
But for now I ought to abandon self-indulgence and get my mind back into gear for the academic production line.
August 16th, 2009 at 2:16 pm
Seeing as how my room is a shambles, there are dishes to do, laundry to put away and study to do (yeah, I’m back at Uni again as well as working, glutton for punishment I guess), I decided that now was clearly the most opportune time to write a blog.
Life is rocking along on the regular. My work is still in the middle of re-org murkiness, but I’ve been assured that I’ll come out the other side with something at least vaguely resembling employment, so I can safely go on eating complete meals instead of resorting to pinching pennies and eating noodles out of a hat (which reminds me that I should get my sombrero out of the car).
I’ve managed to resist the urge to buy any more books or films lately, seeing as I now have three fat Psychology textbooks to plough my way through by November, not to mention the unit materials and other readings, but as the Dread Pirate Roberts would say, ‘Life is pain, anyone who says differently is selling something’. Which again reminds me of something, this time that I managed to do myself some ligament damage in my right hand after what looked like an uneventful stack on a pair of rollerskates. On the bright side, nothing was broken. I’m quite over breaking bones, the “Look how tuff I am, I hurt mah-self” novelty wore off long, long ago.
To be honest, I think that a lot of the reading and writing that I’ve been doing for Uni has had a bit of an effect on my recreational pondering and writing libido, which is a bit of a shame, but I’m quite confident that it hasn’t gone anywhere, it’s just hard to hear over the top of all of the other noise at the moment.
And having now worked up sufficient resolve, I should actually plod off and do some of the things that are mounting up around me.
August 13th, 2009 at 7:04 am
I’m not hungry yet, but I will be soon. The clever thing to do would be to get a sandwich or something else light & nutritious, but being clever all the time can get tedious, and certainly doesn’t taste as good as coffee & carrot cake. Coffee, I might add, that I shouldn’t be drinking this late at night, but these two go together so well. I have to be up early tomorrow morning for a long day, but since coffee will ruin my sleep anyhow, I may as well make some musings on my assignment. Readings are so much easier, but putting pen to paper or key to board (that is a truly terrible… no… actually it’s not that bad an illustration) will really make a much bigger contribution to reducing my anxiety come deadline. It’s going to be a long night.
July 2nd, 2009 at 10:17 pm
I would tell you more about my life of late, but to be frank, it’s probably quite mundane and un-exciting from the outside. I don’t think I’ve really done anything recently which would cause someone standing by to be stunned, awed, or even distracted from their iPod.
But seeing as how I need to delude myself into the reassurance that I will actually get better at writing, or at least stay mildly capable by simply updating my blog, regardless of how pointless the text… I will tell you about it anyhow.
I’ve slowly been making headway into the monstrous pile of books in my ‘To read’ pile. In the past couple of weeks I’ve managed to knock off Breakfast at Tiffanys (Truman Capote), The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald), Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 (Hunter S. Thompson) and The Secret Sharer (Joseph Conrad). I’ve recently started in on The Brain That Changes Itself (Norman Doidge), which is all science-y and talks about neuroplasticity, which is very, very cool. Fascinating stuff.
Everyone at work currently has their Re-org Boots on, since the learning area of the University I’m working at is changing their name and focus, and simultaneously there’s a University-wide IT review going on, which we expect is going to involve all manner of changes. Maybe a different office, definitely a different boss, and what’s more… I’ll probably have to wear a new shirt with something different written on it. Inconveniently, my contract renewal will come up pretty much right in the middle of all of this madness, adding an new air of mystery and uncertainty to my employment situation which I would probably have been more content to do without. But as always, optimism in the face of experience, hopefully things will shape up alright in the end.
I really must make this site look less ghetto as well, where’s my to-do list…
June 11th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Sometimes it’s the strangest times you end up writing. At the moment I’m standing in the middle of what is a ridiculously busy coffee shop, scratching away on a semi-busted old smartphone. There’s not much else to do really aside from wait for my caffeine fix. I haven’t written much in some time, but that’s not to say that nothing much has been happening, quite the opposite in fact. And while I’m generally quite uninhibited about discussing what goes flashing through my mind I guess that there are still some things that remain personal for one reason or another.
When I don’t write I get rusty, and I end up in one of those ‘what I did today’ ruts which generally aren’t particularly appealing from a reader standpoint, so for that I apologise.
When I go through these phases of deciding that what I’m going through or what’s on my mind may not be fit for public consumption, I start to wonder what the real function of my blog is in the first place. I guess that it’s just an easier preserved digital version of a notebook kept in the top jacket pocket, not that I have either a notebook or a jacket pocket at this point in time, but it makes a point to me…
…that getting pee-ed on by a seagull is not what I had in mind when I decided to leave the house and get some air…
But that aside, while it wouldn’t be quite as effective at communicating with my friends, a pocketbook made of dead trees would be just as useful a travel companion as a much more clunky computer to accomplish the same task.
April 16th, 2009 at 7:46 pm
“Blog” has been written at the top of my To-Do list for I don’t know how long now. Mostly due to its alphabetical superiority over the other things in my life that I’ve needed to get done, and despite some half-hearted attempts to conceal it from view by bumping it down a notch, everything short of “Attend own funeral” seems to come after the letter ‘B’ (and really, that’s not something I want to try and get done in a hurry). The inevitable conclusion of course is that I sit down and actually get it done. One of the reasons that I haven’t already is that I get the feeling that when I write, I should have something terribly insightful, witty or clever to say, but this has nagged at me long enough and so today you’ll be getting some input, drivel or not.
Life continues to power on with what appears to be a throttle stuck wide open. While I occasionally manage to find moments of peace and respite, I never seem to have as much downtime as I’d like, particularly to get through the epic mound of books that I have to read, slowly taking over the rest of the house from the bookshelves, desks and bedside tables of my bedroom. Still, it’s all in good fun, and maybe I’ll get lucky when winter begins to settle in and everything social and vocational will begin to slow down a measure, but I’m not banking on it.
February 16th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
A few weeks ago I made the decision to join in on what is called a FarRide, which (to sum it up) generally involves getting on a motorcycle, riding to somewhere remote, having a feed with other folks with the same goals and then riding home again. The goal in question being to travel at least a thousand kilometres (or six hundred and twenty miles if you like) by bike in the 24 hours surrounding the meeting window (which was in this case lunch). Some folks travel the whole distance to the meet and then stay the night, others (like myself) travel roughly half on the way there and half on the way back.
My initial plan was to make a leisurely pace in a southerly direction taking some of my favourite detours along the way, however after taking a quick squiz at some maps it seemed that I might have underestimated the distance from me to Bremer Bay (the appointed location for this rides meet). After discovering that it would be close to a 550km (340mi) journey in almost a straight line, I decided to nix the idea of detours on the way there and just aim to be there in time to get fed.
I’d done a bit of a warmup in the two weekends prior, riding 240km (150mi) out to Northam in the 37 degree (99F) heat on the first Sunday followed by the 360km (224mi) round trip to have lunch with my parents in Australind the week after. And although the furthest I’d travelled in any one day before was about 917km (570mi), I was feeling pretty good about the trip ahead, aside from the start time.
I’d agreed to meet a riding mate, Steve, in Armadale for a refuel and a start point, aiming to leave there at 0515 in the morning, which meant a 4am wake up for me. Having got home from work the night before, I checked my tyre pressures, adjusted my chain and fueled the bike up before sitting down in front of a movie with dinner to zone out before an early night. After only beating the snooze button once, I geared up, shoveled down six Weet-Bix and headed out the door.
Seeing as how the weather had been hot and gloriously sunny in the week coming up to the ride, I didn’t bother to ‘rug up’ as you might say, which proved to make the first couple of hours ride quite unpleasant. While the outside temperature didn’t sink into the single digits, the wind chill from riding the bike was significant and the sun wasn’t due to show itself for some time.
Fighting off the effects of involuntary cryonic stasis, I met Steve on time and we discussed the way to head out. I had planned on utilising my regular method of heading off with a general bearing towards the target, following road signs, getting lost once or twice but eventually arriving intact at my destination, however seeing as how Steve had already plotted the route into his GPS mapping device, it would’ve been impolite to kybosh all his hard work. This was the route ahead…
View Larger Map
Google Map
It wasn’t long out of civilisation before things got rough. With my body attempting to go into hiberation and my prayers for sunlight going unanswered, we were set upon by wild suicidal bunnies. The first made a direct line for the front wheel of Steve’s bike from the side of the road, only missing it by chance. A few minutes later, a second rabbit made a similar attempt on my bike in the dark before dawn, prompting me to consider if there had not been some manner of bunny suicide pact arranged.
We stopped briefly in Williams around 6:45am so that Steve could visit the gents and I got a few minutes to try and thaw out in the (finally) rising sun. We met a couple of other guys headed for the same destination and said a brief hello before agreeing to chat more at lunch. Keen to keep up the good time we were making, we kept rolling on to Wagin where we fuelled up opposite the local Giant Ram.
Back in the saddle we shot through Katanning and Gnowangerup before stopping again for fuel at Jerramungup (I swear I don’t make these names up). A few more riders pulled in and since we were ahead of schedule we stopped to have a chat in the sun over a coffee and a pie (or pastie if that’s what takes your fancy).
Not long after that we managed to pull into Bremer Bay over two hours before the meet window, the first to arrive, being so early and all. It wasn’t long before we had company and we sat back for a relaxing lunch and a yarn with other nutters who like nothing better than to ride endless miles to grab a feed. I got to meet a few new folks, a few aquaintences from the net and a couple of old friends that I hadn’t seen in far too long. I also managed to get sunburnt standing around outside the Bremer Bay Resort Hotel basking in the warmth of the unforgiving day star, but such is life. Miraculously the Hotel also made by far the best coffee I have ever ordered at a bar, so I had at least two.
Having travelled just over 560km (348mi) to this point I wasn’t concerned about not making the days target, so at 2pm we started heading back along the same route. And so it went. Bremer Bay – Gairdner – Jerramungup – Ongerup – Kebaringup – Gnowangerup – Broomehill – Murdong – Katanning – Marracoonda – Woodanilling – Boyerine – Wagin – Arthur River – Tarwonga – Williams – Narrakine – Crossman – Bannister – Mt Cooke – Ashendon and finally back to Armadale, from where I shot back across to the Freeway and North towards home.
I eventually pulled into the garage some time after 8pm, 1148km (713mi) and thirteen and a half hours after setting off. My thighs were feeling a bit stressed out, along with my forearms, but generally the body had survived quite well.
It was a good day.
Let’s do it again.
January 21st, 2009 at 11:43 am
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T.S. Eliot – Little Gidding
I do love a good bit of poetry, like little families of words that manage to crystallise into a moment the myriad thoughts on a topic that go scurrying madly about my brain.
A very significant part of why I have such intense cravings to see and to learn about other people, foreign lands and cultures, long past times and the minds of others is that I long to learn more about myself. I’m aware of many different parts of myself, thoughts and morals, dreams and ideas, but my sense of self still remains very uncertain without the context of my existence. I need to know how I fit into this picture, and so it is the context that I go searching for. To read, listen, learn, see, feel and to step through all of these experiences to find what it is that is common to all of us, to some of us, and to find what is truly unique.
I can’t begin to count the number of times that through my youth I held a thought I believed to truly my own, only to find it put sublimely into words centuries ago by someone who’d lived across the world. While not as naive these days I still do love those common moments, at the same time humbling and comforting, knowing that my thoughts are not alone (and hopefully not simply madness). They challenge me and lead me onwards to the next great question of self, of knowledge, and of what I am to this world.
