Through the Valley of the Kangaroos

Today's map.

I was gently roused from my tent-bound slumber by a pack of jogging Sydneysiders complaining about the price of daycare. For a terrifying minute, I thought the trip must all be a dream; that I'd simply fallen asleep near a coffee shop in Sandy Bay, but I soon came to my senses. Nobody in Sandy Bay puts their offspring in childcare. It's far more cost effective to enrol them in sailing lessons, then leave them stranded in the river Derwent for about 18 years. If the child manages to survive, they're dragged up the beach, given a haircut, a Porsche and welcomed back into civilised society as a functioning adult.

As my morning brain-fog cleared, I remembered the advice of the family I met the night before. The road northwest through Kangaroo Valley was excellent, they said, so I broke out the map and plotted a route through it, aiming to finish somewhere west of the Blue Mountains. I went through my ritual of forcing down 3 Vita Brits with warm UHT milk, drying out the tent and solving the daily jigsaw of loading the bike. Then I hightailed it out of there via Nowra, hoping not to run into a holidaying Sydneysider and be scalded by soya latte froth.

The smooth, narrow road ricocheted up a densely forested ridge, then sharply down into the long, green valley itself. The NSW police appear to have made this road one of their favourite bitumen casinos, stacking the odds against the motorist with stupidly low speed limits and lurking patrol cars. For all my indignation, I obeyed the nanny signs. I simpy couldn't afford to risk my license when I had so much country left to cover.

Puttering along the floor of the valley, past the Kangaroo township, hunger pangs started to set in. To my delight, the signpost to Fitzroy Falls had one of those knife and fork symbols on it, so I turned off and went in search of cutlery. The carpark told stories of busloads of international visitors and the visitor centre was enormous. The whole operation also had the most elaborate complex of composting toilets I'd ever seen, complete with a warning not to dispose of children in the waste tanks. I suppose it must be a right bugger to fish them out, let alone put them in the car afterwards.

It was only 11am, so I decided to go for a walk to see the Falls and further sharpen my appetite. I'd hardly gone a hundred metres before I spotted a pair of lyrebirds fossicking in the undergrowth. I knelt down by the side of the walkway to watch, which immediately drew a crowd of tourists - not to see if I'd had a mild stroke, but to feverishly capture a thousand photos of the little beasties. I'm all for using the camera as a means to capture the moment, but the horde was clicking and flashing so enthusiastically that they may have given Fitzroy Falls its first mated pair of epileptic lyrebirds. What are the rangers going to do when they see one having a seizure? Put them in the recovery position? They don't get taught that stuff at ranger school.

Anyway, the Falls were actually really impressive. With the odd, forested escarpments of the area, it's easy to imagine a hapless early explorer simply falling off the edge of one of these outcrops. There's dense bush all around you, then suddenly the ground is 400ft lower than it used to be.

After a solid walk around the edge of the cliffs - and impressing a Chinese gentlemen with my 'cooee' skills to the point where he slapped me on the back of the head in excitement - I hit up the visitor centre for an early lunch. It was a refreshing change from other heavily-touristed places. The staff were friendly and chatty, made a good coffee and what is possibly the world's best lentil burger.

After eating so well, I felt like sitting in the sun and not moving for a while, so I did. I grabbed my laptop from the bike and blogged away, gloriously relaxed, for an hour or so.

On the road again, I tacked north, then west along the railway line to Goulburn, passing through Bundanoon and Wingello. At Goulburn, I had a tricky decision to make. The route to Oberon, my initial goal for the day, was 150km with some dirt sections on my outdated map. Dirt isn't much of a problem, but it slows you down and I'd burnt a lot of time chilling out at Fitzroy Falls. With the sun already dipping at 3pm, I struck out for Taralga, 50km away, to ask if the rest of the road would be suitable for my roadbike rig.

As it turned out, I didn't need to worry. Although it was bumpy and twisty, the whole route had been sealed recently, the bloke at the Taralga petrol station (one pump) told me. With a full tank and renewed confidence, I pushed on through the increasingly elevated and cold patchwork of national parks and farmland. Stopping at Abercrombie River for a wee, it felt like the middle of nowhere.

Another hour later, stiff and grumpy, I arrived in the pretty town of Oberon. The local caravan park was neat and cheap, so I happily pitched the tent on a deserted area of grass and settled into my evening routine.

The Rev's first taste of dirt

Today's map.

Back to the trip diary for a moment, because I'm still woefully behind.

Thick fog rolled in overnight, which was a double-edged sword. On one hand, fog tends to keep you nice and warm in the tent, but the downside is waking up in a cocoon that is one part canvas and nine parts water. The slightest touch on the inside of the tent rewards you with a refreshing trickle down your arm and waiting for the sun to dry everything out sends me insane with impatience.

Fog. Tim Prideaux dislikes this.

On my way back from the shower, I got talking with an old bloke who was a semi-permanent resident in one of the caravans near my site. I mentioned the fog and he said it'd been getting worse all week.

"The fogs seem to be getting Bega and Bega." he joked, looking at me to see if I'd registered his wisecrack.

I laughed at his cheesy comment and tried to stay out of his whey after that, in case he drove me crackers.

We started the day by heading southeast to the little surfie village of Tathra, before following the coast through national parks towards Bermagui. It was a pretty area, with lots of little beaches and bluffs, populated by a few keen fishermen and some surfers.

Cuttagee Beach, near Bermagui.

Not long after re-joining the Pacific Highway and hating it, I saw the sign for a tourist drive inland, so I swung the Rev in the direction of the brown signposts. Quite suddenly, I was on single-track dirt roads, coaxing the top-heavy bike through tight corners made of slippery gravel. It was good fun to try something very different to bitumen riding, but the pace had to be kept very slow. Any time I ventured over about 50km/h, a pothole or corrugated section would do its best to throw me into the bush, where I would be eaten alive by carnivorous wallabies.

Getting dirty in the bush.

After some more highway drudgery, dodging idiots in Commodores and aggressive tarts with hibiscus stickers on their Barinas, I pulled up in Batemans Bay for food. The inlet on which the town is built is beautiful, but the town itself had a very boganic feel to it. Everyone in the supermarket seemed to be called Sharon. None of the Sharons had ever located the contraceptives in aisle 9, judging by the pram warfare unfolding over the frozen chips cabinet.

Nice waterway. Shame about the locals.

I bought a chocolate milk to go with my grapes and apple. Feeling rebellious, I deliberately ignored the opening instructions. Sitting out by the water, I swigged my milk, enjoying the view and the knowledge that I was a total badass.

Nobody tells me which side to open!

Afternoon approached and I felt the need to make progress, so I punched on up the road, through Ulladulla and on towards Nowra. On a bit of a whim, I turned right just before Nowra and headed for Jervis Bay, which my eight-year-old set of maps told me was a beautiful place to camp. It was surprisingly difficult to find somewhere to pitch the tent, because most of the campsites are on federally-controlled land. Because it was after 3:59pm, the booking office, staffed by our federal government friends, was deadlocked and deserted. I expressed my disgust by taking a wee in their garden (the toilets were also locked) and went hunting elsewhere.

Some time later, I found a caravan park in Huskisson, which was brutally expensive, but right on the beach. I went for a jog at dusk, shared my lentil dinner with a couple of bold possums and met a wonderful young family who were on holiday from Canberra. After a couple of days with nobody but the dead bugs on my helmet to talk to, it was great to sit and chat with them until bedtime.

Would you like some awkward with your sunset?

The waves hissed gently up the beach and I settled down in my yellow cocoon - still wet from the morning fog - to sleep.

What the hell are you doing, Tim? (pt 2)

This will be a long post and it'll still only go part way towards explaining why I'm doing this little ride. It's taken from my diary written about a week after the hospital visit, just after we got the pathology results from the surgeon. It gives a bit of a re-cap of the last post and goes into what happened afterwards.

2045, Tue 24 Nov 2009

Last night sucked, but nowhere near as much as today did.

A cold front smacked up against the side of the state around 3am and blew its guts out for several hours. I found myself in the kitchen for a while, having a glass of water and watching the trees getting flayed under the mercury vapour glare of the streetlights. Cous Cous kept me company in exchange for a generous handful of cat biscuits.

Back in bed and lying awake, I hear Lauren burst into a fit of giggles in the middle of her dreams. She carries on for about half a minute, dissolving into her weird characteristic whoops before quietening down and sleeping on. I stay resolutely and reluctantly awake, full of fear for tomorrow's pathology results. In daylight, I can, with the assistance of sunshine and antidepressants, foresee a smiling surgeon saying, “All clear!” before we romp off down the street for a celebratory coffee. But at 3am, all I can envisage is a doctor swearing under his breath at a page of pathology notes before asking for Lauren, Carol and me to be shown in for the delivery of bad news.

It's rare for my night time anxiety sessions to be anywhere near the subsequent truth. Reality is usually more boring and less catastrophic. For one shitty, shitty time, today, it was spot on.

Lauren was admitted to St John's private hospital at 7am last Thursday. The intended procedure was a superficial parotidectomy - the removal of a gland in her neck that had become the host to a tumour over the last few years. The parotid thingy (I know now this is the salivary gland) lives up under the jawbone near the front of the ear, so the growth that began there when she was still in high school had only recently made itself known as a small bump under her earlobe. Needle biopsies were taken as a matter of course. The first echoes of her diagnosis came in the results of those, which suggested she was in the 5% of cases where the malignancy of the tumour could not easily be determined. Removal was a necessary precaution.

At the hospital, the friendly and generous nurses gave us an idea of what to expect. Lauren's surgery would take about one and a half hours, two at the most, with an hour afterwards in recovery before being returned to her room. Tension ramped up for Carol and me, waiting in the empty hospital room, every time the nurses stopped by to tell us it would be another hour. Some six hours later, they finally wheeled in a pale and still girl, who paused for effect before offering us a finger-wave as a sign she hadn't yet lost her sense of humour.

Before she returned, the surgeon had stopped by to tell us what was happening. The tumour was larger than they thought, he said, and she'd had some problems with bleeding. It was, however, all taken out as promised; it had just been a more extensive and delicate job than he was expecting.

After two nights inside, Lauren was able to leave the hospital. Her speed of improvement had been remarkable and she even came with me to the wedding reception of close friends only hours after discharge.

At the surgeon's clinic this morning, we were welcomed by the screams of a toddler prevented from navigating the stairs by her mum. Lauren disappeared to have her sutures out and we all came in to admire the extent of her scar. Twelve stitches in total, over a distance of some ten centimetres, joined the front of her ear and an arc under her jaw to the rest of her face. Her left upper lip still drooped, paralysed from some trauma to the facial nerve. Carol clucked happily, impressed by the scale of the wound and the neatness with which it had been concealed. Simon, the surgeon, appeared at the door then and invited us into his office for a, “...little chat.”

The name of the carcinoma escapes all of us who were there, but I won't forget the atmosphere in less than a lifetime. Lauren, leaned forward in her chair, nodded in a show of attention, but her eyes were dull with disbelief and fear. By the time that the three of us had worked out that 'carcinoma' meant 'cancer', we were in a huddle about his desk, clutching each other's arms. The tumour was a rare form of cancer; slow growing, thankfully, but one Simon had never seen before. He explained there was a chance that there were some rogue cells remaining around the tumour site, so Lauren would need radiation therapy to reduce the likelihood of regrowth.

We lasted long enough to pay the bill until we started to cry. The three of us went home and sat stunned for the whole afternoon, not knowing what to do. How on earth are you supposed to plan your afternoon when you've just been told your girlfriend is a cancer patient?

What the hell are you doing, Tim? (pt 1)

Many posts ago, I suggested that I'd give you some background on why I'm off on my little expedition. I was hoping that by writing it down, I'd be able to better sort it out in my own head and explain with clarity what I can't sum up in 25 words or less.

It's something I've been avoiding because it's easier to catalogue what I've been doing than how I've been feeling. I am, despite my appearance, a man after all.

Back in October last year, my head was in a confusing place. I had told my employer that I wanted to resign after five years as a consulting engineer. My immediate boss - a remarkable human being - offered me a 12-month sabbatical instead. Maybe he knew that when things aren't right in my head, I usually choose flight before fight, then come back to equilibrium with renewed perspective. Maybe he's just a really great bloke.

Either way, I was packing up my rental unit in the northern outskirts of Hobart, with the idea of heading back to my parents' place in Queensland, which I would use as a cheap base for international travel. LT and I had tickets booked to explore Thailand together for a month, before diverging to pursue our own travel interests for a bit. She was planning to take a live-in Thai massage course, while I hankered after a trip on a small motorcycle around southeast Asia. Doing some conservation volunteering was also on the cards if time allowed.

Looking back, it was a shaky plan, because I had no idea where I would live or work after travelling. I can see now that it must have been difficult for LT to listen to my travel/work/life ideas and not have much of a clue how she fit into them. To be honest, I wasn't sure either, but the urgency of my need for change didn't allow me to fully consider her feelings. Part of the romance of travel, for me, is in rising to challenges independently; discovering who you can be in unusual places, alone. Just how to fit that love of solo travel, which I've had since high school, into a stable and loving relationship, was hard for me. The sort-of-plans I had laid were my best solution at the time.

Against this setting of me packing up, selling possessions and scaring the crap out of my girlfriend, LT went on a routine trip to the doctor. Almost as an afterthought at the end of her consultation, she showed the doc a small bump that had appeared under her left jawbone. I don't know exactly what the doctor said, but LT was told she needed some tests done to check the lump's identity.

The pathologists stuck a needle in it, took home a little piece to examine and gave us some annoying news: LT needed the lump excised, because the nature of the growth couldn't be confirmed by biopsy alone. A surgeon was found, a surgery date was set and we waited, a little nervously, to get the damn thing out and get on with life. I extended my stay at work and in my unit so that I could be around when the surgery took place.

The day arrived and we drove to St John's Hospital early in the morning to be admitted. LT's surgery would be the first of three for that day, so she, Carol and I settled in for a nervous wait.

I'll describe what happened after that in a "part 2" post, because this one already has too many words and only one token picture.

Over the Snowies

Today's map.

Barrelling east on my own, the trip took on a new feeling. I wasn't so worried about setting the right pace or stopping often enough for Trav's hamster bladder, but neither did I have anyone to share the excitement with any more.

I'd set myself the task of getting to Bega, down near the NSW south coast, where the cows smell like cows and cheese is in endless supply. On the map, it didn't look too far - maybe three hundred and something kilometres - so I planned to take a few scenic detours here and there and generally enjoy myself.

I crossed the border into Australia's most annoying nanny state and followed the Snowy Mountain Highway through hundreds of tortuous bends to Thredbo. On the way, I stopped for a glimpse of one of the engineering wonders of the world: the Snowy Hydro scheme.

A little later, I stopped in the bush to make tea and enjoy the mountain creek at Tom Groggin.

The Snowies seem to sneak up on you. After 160km of endless climbing and descending through valleys and cuttings, you suddenly feel the air temperature drop and see tall, orange alpine guide posts appear at the sides of the road. Without taking one of the chairlifts that climb the slopes near Mt Kosciuszko, you don't have an impression of being particularly high up at all. It's not until you meet the alpine architecture of Thredbo village that you are really convinced this area is a ski resort during spring.

Thredbo was populated with builders making repairs before the ski season, plus the odd, famous-looking, downhill mountain biker. Nothing much was open and the whole place felt a bit like a pair of fake breasts. The initial impression was strangely artificial and it wasn't any more appealing up close. There was lots of scaffolding supporting the four-storey chalets that make up most of the town and, without snow, it just didn't look right. After touring the streets, I ordered a sausage roll at the bakery and tried to avoid having it stolen by the local currawongs.

I've been to Thredbo in summer before, so I left for Jindabyne straight after lunch. This was a great part of the ride. The road was smooth and fast, with most corners posted at 75kph - just perfect for cracking on at a steady 100kph (and evading the national park visitor's fee).

Thinking I had plenty of time up my sleeve, I left the highway at Jindabyne and explored the banjo-country backroads around Dalgety. Dalgety is beautiful. I know this because you can see all of it from the t-intersection at its heart. Its famous bridge spans the once-mighty Snowy River, slowed to a trickle by the Snowy Hydro scheme. Engineering marvels have their cost. What's left of the river is still beautiful, though.

By the time I was done with Dalgety, the sun was sinking like a stone and I was still miles from Bega. I charged for Cooma, stopping only to help an unlucky bloke with a new BMW bike that decided to quit in the middle of nowhere. If that's what you get for buying a $20k ride with more electronics than the space shuttle, I'll stick to my old Honda, thanks very much. After a quick chat and a check that he had enough food and water, I left him to wait for BMW Roadside Assist to fix his bike and erase the incident from his memory.

I burned on down the road with the shadows stretching long in front of me. I was getting tired and stressed, so when I finally descended the range into Bega I took the first campsite I could find. I set up the tent on my own, ran through the motions of dinner and a shower, then flaked out in the tent and waited for sleep.