Blog #13

 

The Murrumbidgee River

Today’s ride was only about 40 km across the flat country between Coolamon and Junee along the main road called the Canola Way because canola is the major crop in this fertile area. We didn’t really need more coffee after the Cheese Factory in Coolamon but, with no time pressure for such a brief ride, hey, why not, we paused at the Marrar cafe. Marrar was a settlement comprising not much more than a crossroads and a cafe where we sat in warm sun on the patio to drink our coffee and revel in the relaxing day. Soon a man approached and asked if either of us was a medical doctor, which set alarm bells going in case I was to be asked to perform CPR or extricate someone from a car wreck. But, how did he know I was a doctor? Turns out Greg had spent the previous couple of days in the company of our host to be in Junee, Bill, attending a funeral of one of their classmates from 60 years before. Greg obviously heard the story of the tandem ride and put two and two together.

We still get slightly fazed by recognition in a place we know no one.
We continued along the road flanked by mostly arable land dotted with grain silos and grain mounds covered in tarpaulins. These huge mounds were apparently likely to be wheat rather than canola.

Very amateur photo of grain storage on the Canola Way

 Arriving in Junee we found our way to Bill's house and he spent some hours talking to us about his life experiences in a very varied working life covering primary industry, wholesale, retail and funeral services.Most surprising for a man living so far inland, he taken part in the Sydney to Hobart yacht race. His original farms were out near Griffith, on the rice growing region and he explained to us how they groom and manage the rice paddies nowadays. They spend a fortune on laser levelling what is already very flat land so that when they flood irrigate exactly the same depth of water covers the entire paddock. The water is then drained off into a holding pond and then pumped into the next paddy for flood irrigation. The water can be used many times over and is never more than the optimal depth. It is used so economically that it’s been possible to pump it to areas which previously arid areas which were uneconomical for crops and land values in these areas had skyrocketed.

He recounted a bit of the local history of Junee, including that it had become important as a major rail depot on the inland route to Queensland. It still boasts some unique rail infrastructure, including an engine turntable in the Roundhouse the last remaining steam train depot in Australia.  Another notable event in the town’s history was that the infamous bushranger, Ben Hall, had held up a local pub in 1863. This was Australia’s Wild West.
Coolamon and Junee formed the base of a triangle were in this very fertile area with a third town, Temora, to the north, at its apex. Temora is renowned for its airshows featuring WW11 military aircraft, including the only two airworthy Spitfires in Australia. Regular monthly flying shows draw big crowds and there is a ‘special edition’ show every two years. The aircraft museum and shows are the pet project of the son of one of Australia’s wealthiest men, Sir Frank Lowy, who owns the Westfield shopping centres.
Temora is now an agricultural centre but was originally established as a gold rush centre where a huge gold nugget was found in the 1880s - the 9 kg Mother Shipton nugget. The gold was very quickly exhausted and agriculture proved sustainable.

The following morning Bill had to leave 9 o’clock to conduct a cremation in Wagga as part of his work in semi retirement as a funeral director but, before he left, he pressed lots of nibbles on us. These were mainly sweets and were much appreciated - we were touched by his thoughtfulness. However, one of the snacks he pressed on us was some form of Indian savoury featuring turmeric. We both tried this and immediately regretted it. It was truly poisonous, scoring twelve out of ten on the gag scale. Only Joyce’s home cured olives years ago had ever come close to this score. 

As soon as we opened the garage to retrieve the tandem I noticed a flat tyre, the second on this trip. Both occurred the morning after a Rotarian had enquired if we had had any punctures. Jinxed! Both probably due to Bindis, or three cornered jacks, those vicious multi spiked seeds found in lawns in mainland Australia.

The route today was not very challenging, heading south across the Hume Highway towards Adelong and the Snowy Mountains beyond. 
The first thirty or forty kilometres took us across rolling hills of mainly arable country on good quality deserted roads in windless, sunny conditions. Just as an aside, we have had almost perfect cycling conditions ever since leaving Kyneton. Only the frosty early mornings have been slightly uncomfortable, whilst the middle of the day has been acceptably warm, however the weather forecasts from coastal NSW had been alarming until recently. We were underwing a ‘blocking high’ and the coastal areas were under a monsoon.

We followed the Wantabadgery Road to, well, Wantabadgery, a place in name only on the map and reached a junction with a sign post helpfully devoid of any place names. Had the Home Guard erased them to thwart invaders? Our trusty (!) GPS indicated a turn onto River Road, which shadowed the Murrumbidgee for about 10 km and it was along this road that we ran into a farmer grazing his cattle on the verges. They were contained by roadside fences and he was concerned that our bicycle would spook them and send the crashing through the fence, so he asked us to cycle hard up against his quad bike as he drove through the mob. It seemed to work and they ignored us. The grizzled old farmer, with false teeth designed for a much bigger man, told us that the council allowed him to graze his cattle on the verges of the road on payment of a small annual fee and there seemed little inconvenience to traffic…because there really wasn’t any.

An entirely unhelpful signpost in the bush

River Road then crossed over the Murrumbidgee on a rudimentary bridge and here we had our lunch sat on the low bridge parapet.
Then a strange thing happened. The road was deserted. Not a single car for perhaps 45 minutes and, whilst we were sat on the bridge, a kangaroo approached us from the opposite side of the river. I stood up and it spooked, turned round in a hurry and skidded back to the other side  where it stopped, then felt better of it and hopped across again, passing within 2 m of us. We thought this was quite extraordinary behaviour. What was drawing it so urgently to cross the river?

Bridge across the Murrumbidgee
The kangaroo is lurking somewhere 

From the bridge we turned to join the old Hume Highway for quite some distance towards our destination, the Gold Reef Motel. It was an old, tired hotel, which no longer served alcohol, but had a cafe and four motel units around the side. These had just been modernised and served our purpose well. The little village was almost deserted with very few functioning businesses, so we ended up having our evening meal at the services club. Neither of us enjoyed it. It was a Chinese meal which we ate only because we needed the calories. The little settlement itself, considered to be the gateway to the Snowies, impressed us no more than the Chinese meal.

The following morning we had a short ride of 27 km up to Batlow, but we understood that it would be quite challenging because there were a couple of very steep hills as we gained about 400 m altitude. In the event the cycling was sublime, without a breath of wind, through absolutely silent countryside and fabulous views. There was very little traffic and it was an excellent road, reaching Batlow through a final few kilometres of apple orchards with roadside signs proclaiming Batlow the centre of apple production in Australia.
 

At 775 m altitude in the Snowys, Batlow gets a few frosts and we were not disappointed. The Batlow hotel was our accommodation for the night, because it’s proprietor, Linda, is the president of the Batlow Rotary club. She thoughtfully prepared the room well for us and it was toasty warm. We found ourselves to be the only guests, which was lucky because there was no ensuite, so we had to sprint down the cold corridor to the bathroom in our underwear. 

Linda told us that the previous weekend had been frantically busy with about 3000 people in the little town for the annual cider festival and only 45 minutes before the festival opened two of her hotel workers walked out. Not sure what triggered it but it had been very challenging for her.
The town looked a bit down at heel with a number of empty shops and we were told that it had been very badly affected by recent bushfires when 30 homes were incinerated.

The Big Apple (at Batlow)

On the upside, the town has been granted funds to rebuild and these have been used to build and refurbish a new hall for meetings, such as Rotary. Part of the refurbishment has been a lot of audio visual equipment, which was only recently unpacked from its boxes and nobody had ever used it before. Linda was in charge of organising this Rotary meeting and had invited both the Tumut and the Tumbarumba Rotary clubs to attend our presentation and had also taken on the task of supplying the meal, which was excellent. In fact, the whole evening was excellent. The members of all the clubs socialised together and were very upbeat. We met a lot of interesting people including, for instance, man from Tumbarumba whose occupation was a carriage driver. In other words he drives horse drawn carriages for a living, attending agricultural shows and competitions. It was like entering a time warp.

On the table we sat on there were 3 IT specialists, one of whom ( to my profound relief), took charge of all these previously unused audiovisual gizmos and quickly got my presentation working.

There seemed to be a number of cyclists amongst the attending Rotarians, and one of them was both the president of the Tumbarumba club and the driving force on the Rail Trail committee in Tumbarumba, so we a few things in common. Her rail trail is one of only two in the whole of New South Wales.
 

We thoroughly enjoyed our evening there and, not only that, we got significant donations from all three clubs.

Friday, May 24 was a very cold night with frost. We had been warned that we would be alone in the hotel because Linda had left at six in the morning to drive a few hundred kilometres to Echuca to pick up a new caravan. We had to be very mindful of security as we shut the pub door behind us.

Today’s ride would take us to Jugiong, which is on the Hume Highway about 115 km north. 
The first 20 km of this trip gave us some cause for concern because it was all steeply downhill and it was absolutely frigid so we were wearing almost every stitch of clothing that we possessed. In my case, I was wearing Joyce’s legwarmers, which she had found didn’t stay up and we thought that maybe they would stay up on my bigger legs. They didn’t. They kept sliding down below my knees - intensely irritating and pretty draughty, too.
One of the attendees the previous evening was a journalist based in Tumut who had interviewed me and asked us to stop in Tumut for coffee mid-morning so she could get a photograph of us on our bike. This we planned to do but, actually, as we rolled into the town, we saw her in her car on the side of the road waiting for us. She took the photos, then we had our coffees and shed some clothes now the descent was over. 
In the last few kilometres before Tumut we had been overtaken by a succession of log trucks heading to the town’s sawmills but, to our relief, as soon as we left the cafe, we lost these trucks. Following Google maps, set for bicycles, we immediately ran into trouble when we were directed over bridge which was closed to traffic…and probably had been for some considerable time. We had had a similar experience a few weeks before when directed over a bridge that had been closed for years. On this occasion it was very easy to take a half kilometre diversion onto another bridge and we continued across flat sheep country Jugiong.

When we were discussing the route with locals, they all spoke of passing through Brundle, which we assumed was a significant settlement. In reality, it was about three houses and the phone box, but we paused there for something to eat and check the GPS directions.
Eventually, about 30 km before our destination, the GPS told us to turn left and we stopped again to look carefully at the map. A farmer’s wife came out of a property 100 m away and asked us if we needed any help, which we didn’t really but were interested to hear about the road ahead. She told us that the route we were going to take would be about 30% gravel, very good gravel, she stressed. Actually that turned out to be a significant underestimate as about 20 km of the final 30 km was a gravel road running alongside the Murrumbidgee. It was an excellent gravel road, which barely slowed our progress through this most beautiful beef, cattle and sheep country. A dozen cattle grids confined stock, which otherwise wandered freely on the road without fences to constrain them.

Finally, we reached an extremely steep hill and on this hill were nine cattle roaming loose on the road but constrained either side by fences. As we ground up the hill at walking pace, they ambled away in front of us, criss crossing the road as they did so and making it impossible for us to pass. Eventually, we dismounted, thinking this would be less threatening, and tried to walk around them, but they were having none of it. We basically chased them for about 2 km until we got to an area where they were able to retreat off the road. In truth, we were grateful for the opportunity to dismount because the hill would have been a serious knee trembler and we were getting tired after more than 100km.

Our destination, Jugiong, was quite familiar, being a popular stopping place just off the Hume Highway with an excellent coffee shop. We were booked into the motel here and this proved to be better than expected (attempts to contact the motel over previous weeks left us uncertain that it was even a viable business). The room was basic, but perfect for our purposes (hot shower #1 priority), and the downstairs bar was a little tired looking and peopled by dishevelled elderly men drinking beer, one of whom had seen us arrive by bike an hour before. He was very friendly, interested in our cycling, and offered advice on menu choices (we were dangerously hungry at this point and liable to bite passers by). His suggestion of pork ribs proved an absolute winner and we ordered at the bar then, on his advice, went upstairs to eat.  To our amazement, all the tables were decked out in crisp white tablecloths, and the meal was superb. 

We went to bed feeling very content- perhaps aided by the bottle of red.

Phil

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