I chose to take the longer in-land route to Townsville, via the Atherton Tablelands, rather than follow the coastal highway I had ridden up to Cairns on…
Stopped at the turnoff to Palmerston to decide which would be the best route to get me to Townsville...
It was double the distance to Townsville compared with riding down the coast, but I was feeling good and after all the long rides I had become used to in Australia, a 660 km jaunt was no big deal…!!
I turned off the Bruce Highway just north of Gordonvale, (wondering if there was a Sheila Highway somewhere in Australia, as I did so…) and prepared to ride the Gillies Highway to Atherton… Dave Young, who had ridden with me on the later stages of the Nullabor and down to Kingston, south of Adelaide, had told me to put the Gillies Highway on my lists of “roads to ride up north”…
There certainly was a surprise awaiting us further down the road...!!
This twisting stretch of tarmac, climbed up over the Great Dividing Range of mountains that runs parallel to the coast…
There are apparently 375 corners in the 29 km length of the pass, but I was too busy enjoying the jinking run we made up into the mountains, and down the other side, to count and confirm them…!!
The Big Fella went “whooping” through the corners, working up a head of steam as we turned smoothly into hairpin bends and switchbacks, and then gave me one of the smoothest downhill rides I can remember…!!
We had got “dialed in” early on, and hardly put a wheel wrong all the way over the pass and onto the tablelands beyond… Light traffic meant I could ride without worrying about slower traffic holding me up and testing my (im)patience…!!
This is a brilliant section of mountain road, and one that attracts bikers from up and down the coast, to test their mettle on…
A number of small white crosses on the roadside, indicate that for some, it was their last ride… A sobering thought when you pass them…!!
It was a lot cooler up on the tablelands, which average about 800 metres above sea level… The hot and sweaty conditions of Cairns were a thing of the past for the time being….
I stopped briefly near Evelyn to drink some water and consider my options for the next stage of the ride… I had been told that the road beyond Conjuboy was a shocker, and narrowed down to just a single lane… This section was extremely dangerous, as road trains used it to ride north to Atherton, and Cooktown beyond that…
It was also a coal mining area, and coal trucks thundered back and forth, staying on the narrow road, while cars and other vehicles were forced to veer onto the dirt on either side to avoid damage to themselves and their vehicles…!!
When two lanes become one, things get a little interesting...!!
It's narrow alright...!!
I chose to take my chances…
“Nothing from nothing, leaves nothing”, and all that…!!
If I had known that I would be on this stretch in the middle of a massive thunderstorm, I might have taken another few minutes to weigh up my options…!!
About 270 km further on, just before the Conjuboy Roadhouse, we turned onto what is known as the “Gregory Developmental Road”…
This was the part I had been warned about by both Allan and Tim back in Cairns…
It started out normal enough, a wide surface, rougher than usual tarmac which gave good grip to my tyres, and well cambered through the corners…
I was beginning to believe that the road had been resurfaced and widened since last my friends had traveled on it, and was just beginning to relax, when a sign advised that the road ahead narrowed, and that smaller vehicles should make way for larger vehicles…!!
The first narrow strip was five kilometres long, and I did not meet any other cars or trucks coming from the opposite direction… All I had to worry about was getting used to riding at high speed on a road that would not forgive any errors of judgement…!!
Within a few months, this road will no longer exist in it’s present form… A brand new surface, wide enough for two vehicles, is being laid as I write this… The stretches of single lane tarmac are getting fewer and fewer which will have road users breathing a sigh of relief, no doubt…
And then things fell apart altogether...!! For the next half hour I was sandblasted by passing trucks...!!
There were probably about ten sections of narrow bits, varying in length from as little as two kilometres to as much a ten kilometres, interspersed with the wider and newer sections… Huge mounds of gravel were piled up alongside the road for the engineers working to complete the highway…
There was one long section where there was no tar at all, and the passing road trains threw up dirt and gravel, which had me wincing in fear of having to replace my windscreen again…!! Stones ricocheted off the windscreen and pinged off my helmet as these behemoths thundered past us…!!
This triple trailer road-train was carrying 76 tonnes of ore...!! That makes this juggernaut weigh in at over 100 tonnes in total, and it takes almost a kilometre to come to a dead stop...!! You do NOT want to be in the way when this happens...!!
This is the spot, stand on the dot... The only place in Greenvale where you can get a cellphone signal...!!
I stopped at Greenvale Roadhouse, and bought water and a sandwich while I tried sending a text message to the Caribbean…
As usual in Outback Australia, there was no signal to speak of…!! An old man in a pick-up truck saw me shaking my head in disgust and stopped alongside me to tell me to ride up to the nearby caravan park, where I would be able to get a signal, if I “stood on the white dot”…!!
“White dot…??” I inquired…
“Just ride up there and you’ll see for yourself…!!” he said laughing, and then rode off in a cloud of dust…
I chatted to a truck driver who had pulled up in an ore carrying road-train, just as I was about to go see about that mythical cell signal…
The driver shook his head when I told him how I had been dodging trucks like his and their ilk for the last hour or so…
“Yeah, Mate… I wouldn’t want to be on a bike when one of these trucks come towards ya…!! Once we get up to speed, it takes us a long time to stop, and with the sandy run-offs, we can’t swerve off the road… Not in these things…!!” he said, jerking a thumb over his shoulder in the general direction of his truck…
We said our goodbyes after a few minutes, and I made my way up the road towards the caravan park…
Sure enough, when I got to the little reception office at the caravan park, there, painted on the tar close by, was a large white dot, and a sign nearby saying “This is the Spot… Stand on the Dot”…
About time too...!! My nerves are shot...!!
And it worked too…!! If you took just one step off the dot, the signal disappeared…!! Weird…!!
I had not bothered to take off my jacket while I was texting and within minutes, sweat was pouring off me… It was very hot. and the humidity was right up near the top of the scale too…
We had come down off the higher elevations and the light breeze that had been blowing had tapered off, the further south we rode…
“We’re going to get some big rain later…!!” I heard someone say from inside a nearby caravan…
I looked up at the sky, and far to the south saw a buildup of cumulonimbus clouds which confirmed what the unseen weatherman had predicted… I hopped back on the bike and took off towards the clouds, hoping that I could stay clear of the heavy rain they were obviously carrying…
After another few narrow sections, the road opened up and I put the hammer down…
Then the clouds began pilling up, and before long, the rain came down in buckets...!!
But it was all in vain…
The rain did not start off as a drizzle, but fell suddenly, in huge drops, which very quickly became a deluge of almost biblical proportions…!! One minute the road ahead was dry as a bone, albeit under an ever darkening sky; the next, it was like riding under a waterfall…!!
I did not even have time to pull over and put on my rain gear…!! I had seen a sign advising that the Bluewater Springs service station and roadhouse was only ten kilometres ahead, and decided to ride through the rain and take shelter there…
I was soaked through in any case, so rain gear would not have made any difference anyway…!!
A solid curtain of rain fell, as I pulled up under the roof of the service station, refueled, and then put on my rain gear, planning to hang about for a short while in the hope that the storm would blow over soon…
The owner of the service station watched me from inside for a while, and then invited me to go and sit on her back patio to wait the storm out…
“This will take some time to pass over…!!” she said, “We had the same thing yesterday…!!”
We took refuge at the Bluewater Springs roadhouse...
It's wet out there...!!
In the forty-five minutes I sat there, 75 mm of rain fell…!! The surrounding gardens were flooded, and cane toads were driven from their holes and burrows by the volume of water that poured into them…
A large black cat came dashing across the open walkway to take shelter on the patio, and after shaking off a flurry of water droplets, curled into a ball, and sat blinking at all the toad hopping about…
I asked for a cricket bat to set about the toads while I waited, which brought laughter from the few diners that were sitting out the storm and had heard me through the open windows of the dining area that abutted the patio…
“That’s it…!!” someone shouted, “Brain the buggers…!!”…
Cane toads are not Australian’s favourite amphibians, and at that moment there were literally hundreds of them hopping about…!!
During a sudden lull in the rain, I thanked the manageress, strode purposefully out to the Big Fella and got back on the road, believing that the worst was now over…!!
Needless to say, I misjudged the weather completely, and for the next hour, battled through heavy rain until we got to the outskirts of Townsville… (For more on this, see “Conversations with the Big Fella”, the following post…)
I took a chance and started out before the rain had stopped falling... Bad choice...!!
Large portions of the roadside were under water... The creeks began filling up faster than I was comfortable with...!!
Up on the Harvey Range mountains, the rain pelted down and visibility was down to a few metres at times, but by the time we descended down through the long valley that led to Townsville, the clouds had lifted and were being blown away to the north…
I was glad that I had managed to clear the few creeks that were rapidly filling up as I passed over them…
In many places, the roadsides were already flooding, and I knew that in a few hours, water would be pouring down off the mountains and drowning the surrounding countryside… I did not want to be out on the road when that happened…!!
With the rain behind me, and the speeds I took the last 50 kilometres at, my rain suit dried out in minutes, and as the temperature rose, with it rose the humidity…!!
I got to my cousin Telita’s house in the late afternoon, hung my kit and boots out in the sun to dry and sat reflecting on the hard, but exciting ride I had ridden that day…
Despite the difficulties that you sometimes encounter on a long ride, toughing it out and getting to your destination is a very rewarding experience… The more I have managed this over the past two years, the easier it has become, to take these challenges in my stride…
They have made me a stronger and more confident rider on one hand, and a mentally tougher one on the other… And that is why I tell anybody who wants to know, that the strength you need for a journey of this nature, is “30 % physical, and 70 % mental”…
And that, in my case, makes it a whole lot easier to get up the following morning, and do it all over again…!!
©GBWT 2011
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