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Report of a self-supported and self-planned bicycle tour on the famous Birdsville Track, Australia. Monsoon rains added an unexpected degree of difficulty...

Summer, Sun, Sand and Mud - cycling the Birdsville Track, Australia

Waltraud
2004-03-05 13:53:55

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we rest for three or four hours under a tree (there is plenty of them now) and ride another two or three hours in the late afternoon. Thus we can almost every day travel around 140 km. Thereby we gradually see the transition of the desert to grassland to bushland and forest. We are fascinated by the different colors of green and discover "new" plants every day.

Farmland, villages, and the first towns

On our way East we have to cross a few small mountain ranges. Soon we see the forest and bushland being interrupted by large pastures and also fields. More and more villages we pass have dense traffic and even traffic lights, and we have to get used to the increasing traffic also on the road between the villages. It is no longer a car a day, now it's more like a car an hour. But we see the positive sides as well: we can get cold drinks in every village, and we have to carry far less water supply, allowing us to ride easier. These transitions of course are slowly and gradually for us cyclists. In Charleville we enter a big shopping center – the first one since we left Adelaide.

The further we travel East, the more we have to adapt our daily schedule to the actual sunrise and sunset – we have to start earlier. Temperatures during the day again reach the 40s, and with it comes the tropical humidity. We feel uncomfortable and sweaty. Luckily we find enough trees to rest during noon, and also the millions of flies, that gave us a hard time in the desert, have disappeared.

Bottle trees, pythons, and echidnas

In Roma we turn North again. We want to visit the Carnarvon National Park. It is going to be the steepest stretch of our whole tour, but also one of the most scenic. We ride through dense Eucalyptus forests, interspersed with pasture farms. Everywhere we find bottle trees, a tree species with a bottle shaped trunk, which serves as water storage tissue. These trees are left standing even on fields ...