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 February 2004 issue of Chronicle Journal Newspaper Outdoor Section. Length: 800 words |
Around Australia on a Lawn Chair This was an exciting morning for me. See, usually, my day starts with the sunrise, where I wake up sweating in my tent on the side of a red dirt road, kiss the Hubby good morning, then, within five minutes of opening my eyes, proceed to pack up all of my belongings and strap them onto the back of a tandem recumbent tricycle. Breakfast will be had ten kilometres up the road. It will take the form of an orange. Perhaps a mango, if it’s my birthday or some other special occasion. Fifteen months, day in and day out, Kevin and I did this. That's 16,342km, eight hours a day, at an average speed of 8km/h. Maybe now you can see why I'm so excited by a couch. Or a kitchen, for that matter. My husband and I left Brisbane over a year ago, with the intention of conquering the Australian Outback by bike. Actually, by tandem recumbent tricycle, which is less bike than it is lawn furniture on wheels. This was not something that we normally do. Heck, this isn't something ANYBODY normally does. Before the expedition, we were unfit, hadn’t ridden a bike in years and were generally leaning toward a leisurely life in the Internet industry. The idea of riding a bike to work each day would have been a huge step forward, let alone attempting to ride the strangest cycling contraption we could find around an entire continent. I should clarify at this point the uniqueness (read: foolishness) of what we set out to do. Each year, about fifty cyclists complete the loop around Australia. This is less than the number (of people, not cyclists) that attempt to summit Mt. Everest and slightly more than the number of astronauts who enter outer space each year. Thus, to cycle around Australia falls somewhere between climbing Mt. Everest and breaking the boundaries of Earth. Australians themselves recognize the difficulties of such an expedition. During the first few months of our journey, many politely suggested that we make alternate travel arrangements: “You’re not going into the Outback on that thing, are ya? You’re a dead man.” predicted one Aussie. “Better you than me, mate!” chimed another. Others may have felt a twinge of fear at hearing this well-meant ‘advice’, and possibly even considered taking it to heart. Not us, though. We seem to have been born minus the gene that tells you what you should and should not do. A lack of common sense, some would call it. When we’re in a hero mood, we like to think of it as sheer bravery in the face of adversity. In reality, there’s a trick to it: Do the thing you think you cannot do. And don’t stop. Simply put, if your goal is to cycle around Australia, then just don’t stop pedalling. There isn’t much more to it than that. Oh wait, there’s also the ability to keep from going mentally bezerk in silly situations. That’s handy. If you’ve got those two covered, you’re practically there. Not to say that there weren’t some “How the Frickin’ Frack did I get here, and where’s the rescue ‘copter?” moments. Such as the time that we spent an hour face-down in a quarter inch of mud in the Kimberley waiting for a lightening storm to pass because we realized that we were the tallest objects within 350 kilometres…. Or that time when we ran out of food on the Nullarbor (Null means lack of. Arbor means trees. I’ll let you form your own picture) and had to resort to rationing twelve cherry tomatoes for three days. Yeah, there were days we had our doubts. But when these moments arose, we just fell back on the original plan of pedalling and tried to stay on this side of bezerk. It was a sure guide to success. And succeed we did, through the gut-wrenching thunderstorms, the sweaty sleepless nights, the hunger and physical exertion that made us lose a third of our body weight and the flies.. always the flies. Let’s dedicate a paragraph to the flies… shall we? Australian flies aren’t really flies at all. They’re very friendly native honey bees. Apparently they make their honey out of human sweat, because they spent their time sucking the goo out of the corners of our orifices. To make the situation even less bearable, they enjoy being petted. The only way to remove them is to actually pick them up, buy them a plane ticket and send them to Queensland. Even then, you’ll only have a week’s grace before they find their way back to your nose. Never did bezerk seem quite as attainable as when the flies were visiting. Luckily, it wasn’t always necessary to juggle our sanity so finely. There were moments of pure tranquillity and peace. We’ll never forget the nights spent riding in the Outback – we’ve never had the world so much to ourselves before, and I doubt that there are that many places left where this is possible. It was these experiences, which arrived exactly when you needed to be reminded of why you were doing what you were doing, that kept us going to the finish line, 453 very long days later. After all, it was adventure we’d set out to find, and it was adventure that we got in the bucketloads. What was going through our minds when we arrived back in Brisbane and reached the end of our expedition? Relief, exhaustion, disbelief at having finished without losing limbs, and confusion about what life’s like in the normal world. As Kevin said on our final day, “I’ve been doing this for so long, I’m not sure if I can do anything else.” So, once again, we’re taking a page out of our adventuring guidebook, and slowly integrating ourselves back into normal society, like a scuba diver trying to avoid getting the bends". Step One: Get out of bed. Step Two: Proceed to couch. Other steps should naturally flow from those two… or so we hope. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a bowl of cereal to finish. |
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