After riding my mountain bike from Adelaide to Darwin in 2005, I was keen for another such adventure, but one that returned to the kind of back roads I travelled when riding from Sydney to Melbourne in 2004. I hatched the idea of riding from the southernmost tip to the northernmost tip of mainland Australia, and rather than riding along the main (coastal) highway, try and ride a straight-line route that would necessarily take me on back roads and through a variety of terrains and climates.

Wilsons Promontory to Cape York by bike - Cobar to Bourke

Day: 011
Date: Monday, 7 August 2006
Summary: Riding from Cobar to Bourke.
Start: Cobar
Finish: Bourke
Daily Kilometres: 161
Total Kilometres: 1301
Weather: Cold early but mild and sunny for the rest of the day with a light, mostly cross wind.
Accommodation: Motel in Bourke, NSW.
Nutrition:
  Breakfast:  Donuts
  Lunch:  Two bread rolls and peanut butter
  Dinner:  Chicken schnitzel.
Encounters: Saw a couple of families of feral goats.
Highlights: Yet another enjoyable day cycling through lightly timbered outback grazing land in beautiful weather on a road with little or no traffic.
Lowlights: A near miss involving an emu and a road train.  I had startled two emus who began running in the scrub on the other side of the road parallel with me and slightly ahead of me.  They were prevented from running off into the bush by a fence.  This continued for about a kilometre when a road train appeared travelling in the opposite direction at high speed.  Just before the road train reached me, one of the emus took a sharp left turn to try and cross the road between me and the road train.  The road train driver barely had time to sound his horn before he slammed into the emu about 20 metres ahead of me.  Just prior to the impact I turned sharply left off the road, expecting to get hit by bits of emu travelling at 120kph.  Fortunately, I didn’t, but there wasn’t much of that emu left!

Journal:
I left the motel at about 7:30am and stopped in at a bakery on the way out of town to pick up some donuts for breakfast and some rolls for lunch.  It wasn’t as cold as the two previous mornings although I still needed to wear extra clothing for the first 20km.  Thereafter it was T-shirt weather again and the riding was very pleasant.  I saw a number of emus (see “Lowlights” above) and feral goats.  The road was slightly undulating with some very long straight stretches.  The vegetation was low scrubby timber with little undergrowth covering the red soil.  There were occasional puddles and traces of new green grass in many places.

Later in the day, the vegetation became sparser, the road flatter and in the far distance I could see some mountain ranges.  I reached Bourke around 4:00pm and checked into a budget motel on the edge of town.  After a shower I went for a walk around the town centre which almost seemed to be almost under siege.  Most shopfronts were boarded up or had heavy security shutters.  There must be a serious petty crime problem here.
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