The View from Elsewhere

bitten

Yesterday, I was most heinously bitten by a dog on the thigh while I was riding on a mountainbike path (n.b.: not a footpath or a bushwalking track).  It was some kind of whitish terrier thing, which first mouthed my feet on the pedals then leapt up and started biting me on the outer thigh.

I yelled at the girl who was walking the dog and another off the leash, asking her to curb and discipline her dog.  I felt a bit guilty about this, as I would love nothing more than to have a little dog running alongside me while I'm biking through the bush.  But it seems there's always some namby-pamby hippy chick tripping along the mountainbike trail with a semi-civilised dingo-cross, rescued from a remote community, singing out, 'Don't worry, he won't hurt you!'  I mean, don't people know the limits of their animals' personalities, their likely behaviour, and discipline accordingly? 

This woman was apologetic enough.  Other people have argued back and told me off for inciting their dog...one even refused to put the dog back on its leash after it had bitten me.  I've only actually ever been bitten by whitefella housedogs.   I've been chased and mouthed by camp dogs, but never bitten by one...However, I wouldn't put it past them: three people/corpses have been mauled by camp dogs here over the past couple of years.

I have been moved almost by this incident to put pen to paper and write to the Advocate, complaining about the romanticisation of the canine in central Australia.  All this could be a diversion from the writing I'm meant to be doing this weekend. Or the housework, come to think of it.

I tried to photograph my leg last night, but was unable to get quite the focus, the drama, the bruising, the puncture marks (the outer thigh's a bit difficult).  It just looks like a lump of meat, adorned with a few pin pricks:

 

None of my wounds (usually from bike stacks) have photographed that well. More happily, here's Lulu, trying to shoot the breeze.   

Now that the weather has cooled (i.e. to 36 C), the cats have joined me downstairs where it's cooler, whereas they preferred to be upstairs where it's stinking hot on 40 + C days.

There's been a lot of indignant purring and yowling.  I think they really do hold me responsible for the weather.

back in the dirt

Remember this?

These dust-burnished legs are a result of the Enduro, otherwise known as the 'Day in the Dirt', a yearly event that takes place here in September which involves people, either singly or in teams, seeing how many doing laps they can do of a treacherous mountainbike track in 12 hours.  It's all totally mad (even I think it's mad), esp given the heat, the length of the track (my best time was a bit over an hour) and the time period.

I had no intention of ever participating in the Enduro ever again, but then Sebastiene told me I was on her team, so I acquiesced, flattered of course to be invited into the company of Cool People, not to mention Cool Cyclists (i.e. ones a lot faster than me).  Our team also included G (no nickname for him yet, but he has the same name as ATSIC's most notorious chair) and Jez, a non-mountainbiker, who was prevailed upon to cycle with us at the last moment, and subsequently rode faster than anyone else (exc maybe G on some laps), despite no training, no experience of mountainbiking, never having done the track before, etc.  Humiliating!

<the start of the track>

At first I thought I'd be way too stressed to ride in the Enduro (on top of everything else), but then I decided that it would give me A Focus apart from work.  However, my good intentions of training fell in a heap, as all I had time to do during the week was to swim 1 km on my way home.  I rode the track twice in preparation (and apparently I missed one section the first time round).

This year's track was a new one: longer and more technical than the old one, (winding past many fine whitegoods, which I must go back and photograph some day).  The only way to get through it, as far as I was concerned, was to plug in the IPod: it not only gave me a rhythm for my cadence (ha! what cadence?) but it helped block the heat, the other riders, and the sheer onerousness of endurance.    Occasionally another rider would be right up behind me before I heard them -- I often thought they were part of the sound effects on the track I was listening to at the time, but music was the way to go.  It was a very hot day: about 33 C round 2-3 pm.  Today's even hotter: we're heading up towards 35 C.  In fact it's going to be a 30-something week.  We each did three laps tho Jez did only two: he piked after lunch.  By 6.30 pm, we'd done eleven laps and decided to call it a day as none of us had high-beam lights (it went from 8.30 to 8.30).  My friend the vet did seven laps on her own till her team-mate finished at work and relieved her in the afternoon.  It was an odd kind of day: too hot to be social, really.  We sat under tents, ate and drank a lot, lusted after better bikes, that kind of thing.

<a serious bikers' pavillion>

cattlewater

On Saturday, I sallied forth at 5.45 am to meet my companions for the Cattlewater Classic. (Yes, this is what you think: another  boring bike post.  I tell my students that it's how you tell the story that makes it interesting, not necesarily it's about; however, that may not hold true for cycling).  Fortunately, the meeting place was less than a kilometre from my front door, tho it somehow took us fifteen minutes to get there.   The pre-dawn rise didn't actually kill me. I think my biggest problem with pre-dawn rises is insomnia: I'm not someone who's assured of sleeping like a log as soon as my head hits the pillow, so I can't fall asleep at 9 pm and rise at 5 am, fully refreshed and all that.  As it was, most of my compatriots seemed to spend the night before writing lists and packing things on the lists till the wee hours.

The Cattlewater Classic is wholly new event, a two-day mountainbike race (that's right) devised by some local cycling luminaries.  It takes its name from a narrow rocky road -- the Cattlewater Pass track -- which I had to ride along at the end of the first day, somewhere in the wilds of the Arltunga historical reserve.  I can't remember the overall kilometre-age, but it was something like 170 km on the first day and 180 km on the second, including 220 km offroad.  The route took us out along the eastern road through the old Arltunga goldfields, then up to the Plenty highway, along the Pinnacles track and Garden road and onto the northern highway, then back into town.  It's quite a beautiful and historical area, which was a minor hive of activity during the goldrush days.  It's still possible to go fossicking and find zircon, mica and other gems (tho not if you're in a bike race).

My team consisted of four women, all of whom are seen as fairly ho-hum cyclists with one exception (not moi), plus someone's father driving our support vehicle. We were named 'Bindi's Bitches', not by moi: in fact, I took to calling the team 'the entourage of Steve Irwin's daughter.'  It was later explained to me that the name came from an associate of the team, whose nickname is 'Bindi'.  The idea was that we would all do one leg of the ride each day in order to have some hope of finishing before dusk. I was invited to join because of my technical skills, these supposedly being the ability to negotiate sandy and rocky terrain on a mountainbike.  I had to ride the most difficult terrain at the end of the first day and the beginning of the second (and no, I didn't fall off).

in the early morning, as we set off down the Eastern road, there were a lot of vapour trails about, which made things quite picturesque: my theory about these was that Americans had been doing military manoeuvres in planes that morning (yes, blame everything on the Americans).  N, the first member of our team, was given a ten minute head start -- the rationale being that it wouldn't be a good idea for us to fall too far behind during the day.  As it was, none of the others caught her in this 73 km dash. 

<the rest of our team>

<N wondering if she can really have come that far aleady>

latte lover in the wilderness

The weekend was taken up with the Cattlewater pass cycling business.  This is me drinking from the silver service outside Arltunga pub in the heartland of the old gold rush area here.  It's about ten in the morning, probably about ten degrees: I'm wearing two layers of lycra and something strange is going on with my sunglasses.

I am now officially exhausted -- so much so that I think I'll go to Pilates rather than Spin tonight.  More later. Another boring bike post looming...

triffecta

On the long weekend (there are many long weekends in the Northern Territory for some reason; I think this was a belated celebration of May Day), I rode just under 500 km from Alice to Watarrka/Kings Canyon with the bike club. I have done so for the past two years: this was my triffecta.  This annual ride has some claim to fame like 'the only 500km bike ride in the world that doesn't pass through any towns' ('Jim's Place' and Erldunda mustn't qualify as towns).

I've blogged about this one in the past -- twice in fact, so I wasn't going to do it all over again.  I was just going to post a 'photo essay', but then I thought the pictures might need some explanation.  So, on the first day we rode 200km to Erldunda, the second -- 160 km to a campsite on the Lasseter Highway, then 130 km on Monday to Kings Canyon Resort.  The first day, despite being the longest, was probably also the easiest, as the winds were behind us most of the way.  I began with a hangover and three and a half hours sleep, despite my sternest warnings the day before to self not to do so (but there was a fortieth the night before).  I spent a lot of my time trying to rehydrate and conserve energy. In general, it was harder than the previous year, when I had enough energy to compete in sprints and the like. The winds became more of an issue when we turned onto the Lasseter Highway. The last day we battled with the heat, winds and hills -- er, 'gradual inclines', to get to the Canyon. It was also unseasonably hot: I don't know how hot but I suspect early to mid 30s in the middle of the day.  At night, I slept with only a sheet on top.  We endured many flies during the day, mites and drop-bug caterpillars in the night.

There were fifty cyclists and nineteen 'support crew' (sometimes this just meant partners) in all.  Some of the pictures below make this look like rather a shambling effort.  I assure you we rode in a splendid pelaton most of the way, shepherded by vehicles that stopped every couple of hours to ply us with complex carbohydrates.  There were many heroic feats conducted with adjustable spanners, Allen Keys, bike cleats and so forth, esp by Sebastiene in her 80s-poster-'girls can do aything' mode.  In some respects, it was probably all rather easier than it sounds, because of the big group support factor.  I'm more worried about the fact that I have to ride 90 km off-road for a team event in two weekends' time.  Still, driving back home yesterday, it was hard to believe we'd ridden along the same road only a couple of days' ago.

que?

more of this whitegoods in the wilderness business

hubbard's end

So I'm back after getting up at 3 am in Auckland (11.30 pm Alice time) to catch the shuttle bus to the airport yesterday in order to make the connecting flight from Sydney to Alice.  There is only one flight a day to central Australia from the eastern seaboard cities, and usually it's an early flight.  I arrived home at 12.30 pm, having spent over twelve hours in travel (six and a half of those being on planes).  One of the first things I noticed when I got off the plane was how quickly I became encrusted with flies.  The other was the fine film of orange dirt over things at home -- difficult to escape in central Australia, even when you're not there to track dirt in, as it comes through the air-conditioning vents.

Distance has an amazing way of marking an immediate line between holiday-land and one's daily grind. The seven-day Northland circuit now seems a world away. Right now I'm thinking about revising my teaching notes for next week -- mind you, only thinking, having spent my morning embroiled in the mental spaghetti of administrivia.  One of the good things about cycling is that physical exhaustion tends to curtail any mental hyperactivity such as worrying uselessly about work or writing projects. But I'm still tired and hugely hungry, unable to get out of the habit of 'carb-loading' -- that is, of eating carbs every one or two hours, now that I've started it.

I do feel a tad regretful about not being able to continue riding: I think it would be great to spend 6--8 weeks cycling round NZ.  I felt sorry not to have done the last leg from Paihia to Whangerei when I travelled through that country on the bus.  It looked quite beautiful, tho I would also have regretted not having the opportunity to play tourist at Paihia.  In retrospect, having a day of rest every week on a cycling tour seems like a good idea.  An average of 70 km a day also seems like a little too much.  One of the hostellers told me about a little old lady who'd stayed at their BBH and who aimed to cycle 50-60 km a day, which sounds like a great way to spend your retirement.  I found the first 10 km and the last 10 km were the hardest every day (not that doing less would make a difference to this).  The first 10 km because your muscles are just warming up (always a big mistake to jump on the bike first thing in the morning without having walked around for a while) and because of the mental challenge of having to ride all that way. The last 10 km because you've ridden all that way and surely it can't be that much further.  Most of the places I stayed were also on the coast, which often meant riding into headwinds on the last lap.  Some of the headwinds were so strong I swear the bike would have come to a stop going down hill if I hadn't kept on pedalling.

But did I feel the liberation of the road?  Yes, though more downhill than uphill, and only if there weren't any headwinds present.

N.B. I've uploaded my photos at Flickr, as it's much faster than Typepad.  They are arranged under batches titled Auckland and the Northland Circuit.

day of rest

Yesterday morning, I decided to keep on riding to Paihia, despite the protestations of BBH man.  He came into my room at 10.00 am (check-out time), saying, 'I'm sorry to do this, but I'm going to have to ask you to leave, Elsewhere, because as you'll appreciate, there's things I need to do today, Elsewhere,' (over-using my first name like a third-rate counsellor).

Me (firmly; thinking, is there no end to the degree of personal irritation you are capable of causing?, and if you were born forty years later than you were, people would have been trying to shove handfuls of ritalin down your gob): Yes, I meant to leave earlier but I'm running late because you told me my clothes would dry if I left them on the line over night, and they didn't, so now I'm waiting for them to come out of the dryer.

Later, when I'd finally gotten my stuff together and made my way to the front desk, he rounded on me with, 'I'm very interested to know, Elsewhere, what your decision will be, Elsewhere, about where you're going today.'

Subtext: Just exactly what kind of traveller -- or should I say 'tourist' -- you'll prove to be.

I said: 'It's getting pretty hot.  I'll see how I feel when I get to the second bridge.'

He offered me camping gear, should I decide to take the route less travelled, no doubt with the thought that I would have to cycle back to his BBH to return it and spend another night there.

Truth is, I didn't want to make things any more difficult than need be, esp with limited time.  And I hate all the fiddle-faddle with campiung stuff, which is why I didn't bring any with me.

Anyway, I'm sure he was just the thing for a certain kind of backpacker (one without plans) but I was happy to be on my way, even in the blazing sun, which I have to agree is hot enough, tho I originally laughed at the Book's suggestion that it would be.

I stopped about 20 km down the road at a Texan diner near the fabled turn off to the scenic route the BBH man wanted me to take -- and kept on pedalling.  I wanted to see what Paihia had to offer.

The road to Paihia was rather less scenic than some of the others I'd taken and also more heavily trafficked.  I took a detour to Keri Keri -- an early settlement with a quaint stone building -- which was ok, but involved some hill-climbing to get out of there.  Made it into Paihia at 5.30 pm, a little hot and tired, wondering what would be in store for me.  The BBH man had emphasised that it was not the place for backpacklers like myself -- he mentioned the 'click of the turnstyles' a number of times, but when I got there, it was, well, yuppie nirvana -- rocky outrcrops glistening in the harbour, Thai restuarants and cafes lining its foreshores -- Noosa as I imagine it to be 15 years or so ago.  In fact, everything a reasonable girl could want, for a day off, so I booked two nights at the local hostel and decided to bus it back on Monday am, knocking the last 77 km off my journey.  As God said, it was well and truly time for a rest on the seventh day, and this yuppie decided to veg out (don't labour the point -- Ed.)

This morning I bummed around at cafes and booked a couple of boat trips -- one on a boat with a name like a dodgy vibrator, the Excitor, out to the 'Hole in the Rock' and another on a Maori cultural tour.  The latter was cancelled when the Maori decided it would be too late and dark for the trip (I dunno; it still seems quite light to me at 8 pm).  The Excitor wasn't too bad; plenty of big dipper up's and down's.

Now I have to go back to my room and dissemble my bike for the bus tomorrow.  In the way of all holidays, my trip seem over far too soon.  I feel like I could go on for at least another week, tho the day of rest was undoubtedly well-earned.  I think I've ridden 420 km (an average of 70 km a day); unfortunately I was too much of a hubbard to bother changing my bike computer from my road bike to my mountain-bike so I'll never really know for sure.  But it's been a fair way.

heigh ho

Unbelievably, I'm about to head off on holidays.  I say 'unbelievably' largely because it's the beginning of semester, so I'be been thinking, 'what am I doing?'  But I have been spending most of the summer doing that nebulous activity, writing, and feel like I need a mental and physical break. 

Anyway, in her Christmas letter to me, my aunt in Auckland suggested I come and visit.  So I've taken her at her word, consulted my teaching schedule and found this gap (i.e the next two weeks) between my first and second blocks of teaching.  I've decided to use Auckland as my base and cycle up round the Bay of Islands, which should take me seven days (acc to the lonely planet guide).  I'll be bussing the boring bits on the highway at the beginning and the end, then riding about 50-75 km a day, which is something we'd do in two hours as a 'bunch' on Sunday mornings in Alice, but may take a whole lot longer solo on a mountainbike, with panniers, riding up hills.  (There are only a couple of hills in Alice on the northern highway.)

So far, a number of people have poured cold water on my little ol' holiday, saying that they don't think NZ will be a particularly good place to ride.  'Think of the hills!  The rain!  The sheep!  The long white clouds!', they say.  Huh, well, I'm thinking of the white wines, the whitebait and the excuse to have pancakes for breakfast, myself, along with all those huge cookies you can buy in NZ.  And there's the photography aspect -- the photos you can take while cycling are far better than those from a car, as you can usually take your time and stop where you want.

The other subtext here (coming mainly from men, I might add) is that I shouldn't be contemplating cycling NZ as I'm not a particularly strong rider...in fact, that I'm some kind of Hubbard.  Truth is, I'm probably quite reasonable compared to the average member of the population (tho not to the local B-grade) and I've done it before when I was a much worse rider.  Six years ago, I went on a couple of jaunts of similar daily lengths (which took me all day) when I was a much worse rider and now that I'm a lot better, I'm hoping it will all be much less painful. 

It's interesting that I immediately sense there's a gender subtext here (or maybe not -- Ed.), as I think people think there's definitely something odd about a woman taking off by herself, exposing herself to possible danger, in a way that they're less likely to with a man.  In fact, maybe even of hard-core evidence of lesbianism.  I've talked about this with my friend, the Extreme Exercising Vet, who's much more extreme than me -- eight weeks walking in WA by herself, cycling 6000 km round France almost by herself -- and we've both agreed that there is a certain freedom about going solo on the road.  Not that I wouldn't like to head off on a bike with a partner, in the way of Bridget Jones fantasising about twin-share holidays.  But there is something about being alone on a bike on the road, without a care in the world (except for those unsafe shoulders -- Ed.).  And I'm sure that men who do this feel the same way, too.

I felt this sense of freedom six years ago on my previous trip -- and then I decided to search for corroboration from the history of cycling and came up with this, via Wikipedia (that wonderful source of up-to-date info).  I'm going to be so slack as to do a direct cut-and-paste:

The impact of the bicycle on female emancipation should not be underestimated. The diamond-frame safety bicycle gave women unprecedented mobility, contributing to their larger participation in the lives of Western nations. As bicycles became safer and cheaper, more women had access to the personal freedom they embodied, and so the bicycle came to symbolise the New Woman of the late nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States. Feminists and suffragists recognised its transformative power. Susan B. Anthony said: "Let me tell you what I think of bicycling. I think it has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives women a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel...the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood." In 1895 Frances Willard, the tightly-laced president of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, wrote a book called How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle, in which she praised the bicycle she learned to ride late in life, and which she named "Gladys", for its "gladdening effect" on her health and political optimism. Willard used a cycling metaphor to urge other suffragists to action, proclaiming, "I would not waste my life in friction when it could be turned into momentum." [4]

The backlash against the New (bicycling) Woman was demonstrated when the male undergraduates of Cambridge University chose to show their opposition to the admission of women as full members of the university by hanging a woman in effigy in the main town square -- tellingly, a woman on a bicycle. This was as late as 1897.

Hmm, there's something in all of that.  I hope to be able to share some of my meditations on the above from the road.  (And I hope that if I do blog about it, some psychopath with an interest in hit-and-run accidents won't hunt me down.)

one night, the moon

This evening, we went on a moonlight ride to Simpson's Gap with some people from the bike club.  Simpson's Gap by moonlight is one of the iconic things you do in Alice -- never mind that I haven't managed to do it in my three years here.  (B, one of the people on the ride, hadn't managed to do it in twenty years of living in Alice.)

The idea is that you ride out the 18 km of winding pathway to Simpson's Gap at full moon and have a picnic in the riverbed. On your way back, the moon should be sufficiently high enough to light the track.  At least two people I know claim to have run over brown snakes. 

There was so much cloud cover, I didn't think we were going to see the moon at all. Then at about nine, the clouds suddenly dissipated, revealing a clear desert moon above the ranges.  It was rather like the moon in One Night the Moon, except you probably couldn't have followed it anywhere.  I always had some idea that the moon would light the path like a strobe and we would follow it like the three wise men with their star, but it just added a general diffuse light.  Impossible to photograph, at least on my box Brownie, as the following images show. (You might have to tilt the screen to see.)

<the lights from town in the distance>