I work in Hawaii and had a workplace accident several months ago: I tumbled 40 feet down a hillside and had to get helicopter evacuated from the field, but my injuries were shockingly mild and the only lasting damage is an unnerving fear of heights, lol.
With that in mind, I’ve decided life is short and unpredictable and that I might as well pull the trigger on something I’ve wanted to do for quite some time: a long-distance bicycle tour in another country. I’ve posted recently about doing a 90-day tour of New Zealand from February to April next year and opened a credit card that gives me enough bonus miles to fly roundtrip for free, but that’s got me thinking…
New Zealand’s 90-day electronic visa is easy and affordable but requires proof that you’re going to leave the country. For most people that’s simply a roundtrip ticket, but for others it could be a flight to another country altogether, such as Australia, which offers a similar electronic visa.
Unfortunately, a 90-day visa in that context doesn’t make as much sense for bicycle tourists because Australia is so damn huge: you’re either limiting yourself to two or three provinces at best, or you’re using extensive public transportation and probably putting on as many miles via bus as via bike. (Nothing necessarily wrong with that, but it’s just not my style.) You can apparently reset the 90-day countdown on this particular visa by departing Australia for as little as 24 hours, but that involves booking multiple flights and I imagine it’s ultimately less hassle/money to just apply for a more thorough visa upfront. I would probably file the extra paperwork for a subclass 600 tourist visa that allows stays as long as one year.
The rough plan is something like this: finish the New Zealand tour and depart Auckland in late April/early May for a major city on the east coast—probably Cairns, which should be entering its dry season by then. From there, ride south to Brisbane/Sydney/Canberra/Melbourne then west to Adelaide using some blend of coastal and inland roads. (That’s roughly 3,000 miles, so I’m probably in Adelaide in July.) Ride to Alice Springs/Uluru—nearly 1,000 miles—and take public transit back to Adelaide, probably in August. Continue to Perth via the Nullarbor Plain (1,500 miles, so September?) and ride to Darwin for 2,500 miles along the sparsely populated coast, where I end the tour by November. That’s 8,000 miles in seven months, which at least seems plausible for a seasoned tourer.
For anyone who’s remotely familiar with Australia, does this itinerary make sense for a bike tour? I understand no one should underestimate the Nullarbor Plain—I’m way more likely to hit headwinds riding west in winter—but I’m on the oceanside of the highway the entire time, and I’ll visit Cairns and Darwin during the dry season and Alice Springs/Uluru in the dead of winter, when scorching heat shouldn’t be a problem. (I would probably skip Tasmania since it’ll be June by the time I ride down to Melbourne, and the terrain isn’t so different from New Zealand, if I understand right.)
What else should I keep in mind? I ride a Surly LHT four-pannier setup with 26” x 1.75” tires, so I could hit reasonably graded dirt/gravel roads, but I expect I’d stick to pavement 90% of the time. I’m equipped to carry 8 liters of water, but will probably expand that by the time I reach the Outback. I’m not quite as budget-conscious as I used to be, but whenever I’m in a large city I’d like to focus on the free stuff—between museums, botanical gardens, and general sightseeing, it sounds like urban Australia has a decent share of low-cost attractions if you know where to look.
I’m just eager to suss out your opinions and do my homework for what I hope will be the biggest tour of my life until now. What’s weird about this whole process is that in order to even visit New Zealand, I have to have my Australian visa sorted out, and the subclass 600 takes about a month to process. So much to think about!!
by have_two_cows
1 Comment
Australia is gorgeous for bike touring in the south-eastern corner and up the coast in Queensland. But once you get beyond Port Augusta in South Australia, there really is just a whole lot of nothing for thousands of kilometres heading north or west.
It’s not ugly, but you’d need to be prepared for weeks of riding over a flat landscape that barely changes and with just a road in front of you.
You’ve mentioned the wind, but these really can get brutal and are a constant feature. It’s not quite Patagonia level of wind, but riding into a strong headwind for days on end over unchanging landscape gets old very quickly.
There are (eye-wateringly expensive) roadhouses every 200km or so, which means at least you can get by without a truckload of supplies.
I’ve done some smaller sections through the outback. While I love the heat and also like the solitude of cycling a quiet road without any sign of civilisation (other than the road), the Australian outback is really a lot less fun than you’d imagine. To me it feels like riding an exercise bike compared to riding on the road. It gets boring and tedious very quickly.
The TL;DR take away is, when looking at a map, doing a circle of Australia looks tempting. But in reality, you’d be much better off criss-crossing Victoria, Tasmania and the coastal regions (up to about 500km inland) of SA, NSW and QLD. There are some absolutely amazing bike routes there through beautiful and quiet country highways.