Post # 2 - What we're up to!

We’re now on day six of our trip and, having just reviewed the first Blog, I realised that I never actually explained to people what we’re up to. We’ve been very fatigued and stressed trying to organise the Blog. In particular, trying to figure out how to put photos from a different phone into the text but I think I cracked it now.
So, let me just explain why we’re here. 

Probably most of you remember that we did a trip across the Nullarbor two years ago and when we finished that we both swore never again, but here we are, again. I sheet the blame home to Joyce who inexplicably suggested that we cycled around Australia. I refused, citing crocodiles, cyclones, snakes, mosquitos etc but clearly did not protest loudly enough and here we are again raising money for Rotary End Polio Now campaign by riding 3000 km from Adelaide via Melbourne to Sydney where the worst we’ll encounter are floods, bushfires snakes and mosquitos. So, that worked well. It will take us two months and we will visit about 30 Rotary clubs along the way where we (Joyce, actually, as her alter ego, the Rottweiler) will menace them into parting with wads of cash. In addition to that we want to raise awareness of polio amongst the general population by press, radio and TV interviews.

 
The situation right now is that, following Covid, some of the polio programs have been interrupted and there have been outbreaks of polio in previously disease free countries. Only a couple of months ago 10 people were infected in Indonesia after long disease free period, last year there was polio virus found the sewage in London, and someone was actually affected by polio in New York. The last vestiges of wild polio in Pakistan and Afghanistan are extremely difficult to clear up and need significant investment from donor countries ie the western world. Unfortunately, in the western world there are so very few cases of polio that there is little awareness and in Australia the last polio victim was in 1972. So, it’s hardly surprising that the general population are unwilling to open their wallets and support an end polio program. Our strategy for this trip is to wring money out of Rotary clubs (because they have been leading the crusade for 45 years and they’re already committed to the cause) and to try to get Rotarians to donate individually a very small amount of money - six dollars, under the slogan of ‘hitting polio for six’. This is trivial amount of money, the cost of a cup of coffee, but we want the 30000 Australian Rotarians to contact everybody they know and get them also to kick in six dollars. If we can pull this off and they all contact 10 people to give this trivial sum of money then we have a very significant donation. And, Bill Gates donates $2 for every $1 Rotary collects. There you have it, our strategy, that’s what we are up to. Our trip is once again self funded so we’ve paid airfares, hotel and meal bills when we’re not actually at Rotary clubs and we are unsupported, so there’s just Joyce and I alone out here.

Now, let me continue the narrative from Tintinara where, you remember, we stayed in the motel with the cement bags for pillows. Another little detail which should’ve alerted (alarmed?) us was the presence of complimentary earplugs on the pillow. Possibly related to the train line running about 70 m away.
We left Tintinara to cycle about 85 km to Bordertown along another dead straight, dead flat, dead boring but deafeningly noisy and dangerously busy. An unpleasant ride. Halfway along a monument informed us that the area we were cycling through was the ‘90 mile desert’ although it didn’t really look like a desert. There were some trees, no sand and some cropping of lucerne. That was because, sometime back in the 1950s an agronomist discovered that if you just add water, zinc, copper and phosphorus fertility goes gang busters.

The Australians amongst you might be interested to know that Bob Hawke was born in Bordertown and I think that’s its only claim to fame. It lies on the border between South Australia and Victoria and is otherwise an unremarkable little country town (at least Tintinara had a Land Rover on a pole). We had an hour or two to kill before we ate in the evening and went for a walk around the town. Quite a number of derelict shops and no restaurants open on Sunday unless you’re interested in eating in a petrol station. Hardly surprising Bob moved to Canberra.

Our motel room was in the biggest pub in town, which had a bottle shop and pokies and an array of giant screens for the footy. And a restaurant. And that’s where we ate in the evening.

We made the mistake of checking the weather forecast for the next day and discovered that we were going to have to ride 80 km in rain. The rain was forecast to start about mid morning and get gradually heavier and heavier during the day so we decided that we would have as early a start as possible. We are now on daylight saving and so it’s light from just after six, which is when we set our alarm. I can’t say that we were very chirpy next morning because none of the local cafes opened till after we planned to leave and we had nothing for breakfast other than a couple of yoghurts and a banana from the local Foodland. We set off all prepared for heavy rain and we cycled along another flat boring route which wasn’t quite as boring as previous days because there were a handful of bends and a couple of undulations. Making excellent time we arrived at midday and got only slightly wet. The next task was finding Ellis, our Rotary host for the night, whose explicit instructions made this straightforward. 

Ellis is a retired farmer with a huge, well kept garden and a huge shed just as you’d expect from a retired farmer. One welcomed us and treated us to a conducted tour of the neighbourhood in his car showing us where his farm had been and  pointing to ‘exceptionally good’ paddocks which appeared quite poor to us. Probably why we weren’t farmers.

To donate go to: https://raise.rotary.org/joyce+phil/challenge