Australia: Beautiful, Brutal, and Not Exactly Built for Cyclists

Andrew is eight days into Australia and already has plenty to say about it. He landed in Cairns in the middle of the night after his flight from Japan, assembled his bike at the airport, and started riding south. Two thousand miles of it, all the way to Sydney.

I caught him on a quick call before he set off for his first real rest day of the trip — 45 miles down the road at Airlie Beach. This is what he told me.

Bryan: So how's Australia treating you?

Andrew: Overall good. But I wouldn't call it a great cycling country. There's not much infrastructure. I'm on what's called the Bruce Highway, which is pretty much the only road running north to south. Cars are doing 80 miles an hour in sections where there's often no proper shoulder. And they have these things called truck trains here — 36-wheel, three-trailer rigs. When one of those blows past you, you feel it.

Bryan: That sounds rough. What else are you dealing with out there?

Andrew: The magpies.

Bryan: The birds?

Andrew: Yeah. Australian magpies are a different species from back home, and they're incredibly territorial. When you're cycling past their nests, they dive-bomb you and try to bite you in the face and neck. I found an old fishing rod on the side of the road and I just use that to fend them off. The thing is, I can't look up while I'm riding on the highway, so I watch my shadow instead — I wait for the bird to appear in the shadow and then I time the swing. They'll follow you for miles. When you stop, they just sit in a tree and stare at you, waiting for you to start pedaling again.

Bryan: What about the bigger wildlife? Anything more serious than angry birds?

Andrew: A few days ago I went down a dirt road for about 50 miles that turned out to be flooded where it crossed a river. The road was completely submerged. And there were crocodiles in the river. None of them were huge, but I had to wade through waist-deep water with crocs nearby. I actually threw some biltong downstream to distract them and waded across. I felt like I was on a survival TV show.

Bryan: You threw food into the water with crocodiles in it.

Andrew: It worked. I'm here.

The Grind

The terrain has shifted dramatically since Cairns. The far northeast is tropical — lush rainforest, extreme humidity, saltwater crocs, cassowaries, exotic birds. But 400 miles south, it turns arid and outback-like. Kangaroos and emus in the fields. Snakes on the road. Koalas in the trees if you're lucky.

The bigger challenge, though, has been the wind. A constant 15-30 mile-an-hour headwind off Antarctica has been blowing in his face almost every single day. He hasn't been able to use his top gear once.

Andrew: I've had days where I'm grinding for 10 hours and I only cover 50 or 60 miles. Yesterday was the first day without serious headwind and it felt incredible — I did 75 miles and it felt fast. If I'd reversed the route and gone Sydney to Cairns, I'd have had a tailwind the whole time. A little bit of an oversight.

The roadkill situation doesn't help the mood either. Unfortunately, dead Wallabies and kangaroos are common on the highway, and with the headwind pushing into his face, he smells them coming long before he sees them.

Andrew: Every 400 meters or so, at least one dead wallaby. And the wind carries it straight at you for a kilometer before you even get there.

The Budget

Australia is expensive. Andrew isn't staying in hotels — he hasn't seen one under $100 a night — so he camps every night, either at rest stops along the highway or at caravan parks. Even with zero accommodation costs, food is running him $30 to $50 a day.

Andrew: Basically milk, candy, crackers, and meat pies. That's the diet. I drink about two liters of full-cream milk in the morning — it's cheap, high fat, high protein. Good calories. And I hunt for discounted items at grocery stores, things that are about to expire. I keep an emergency stockpile of candy and crackers in my bags at all times, just in case there's a long stretch without anything.

Water is its own operation. Bottled water can run $5 or $6 per liter, so he bought a "tap key" — a master key that unlocks roadside taps across the country — and uses that to fill up, then purifies it with phosphoric acid and chlorine. He carries at least three liters at all times, sometimes going 70 miles between fill-ups.

The one genuine food highlight: a pair of Italian travelers at a caravan park made him pasta and salad for dinner.

Andrew: A day of hard work makes everything taste better. That pasta tasted about five times better than it should have.

The People

If the roads and the budget are the low points, the people are the high point. Australians have been consistently generous — offering water at rest stops, stopping to chat, waving him down.

Andrew: When I tell people what I'm doing, they go, "Oh, you idiot!" — but in the nicest possible way.

The caravan parks are their own world. He described the crowd as roughly three equal parts: genuine Australian rednecks, Australian hippies, and a rotating cast of international backpackers — mostly Europeans on year-long working holiday visas, jumping between farm jobs and exploring the country. Wealthy Sydneysiders in brand-new Sprinter vans occasionally round out the mix.

Andrew: It's always entertaining. At one caravan park the rednecks got into a brawl at the pub. I was eating dinner with this Tasmanian couple and they were completely shocked. They kept saying, "We've never seen anything like this in Tasmania."

What's Ahead

Andrew is roughly 20% of the way to Sydney with about 1,600 miles left. He's slightly behind schedule due to the headwind, but he's not dwelling on the total distance.

Andrew: If you zoom out and think about how far is left, it becomes too much. You just focus on the day. That's the only way to do it.

He's heading to Airlie Beach today for a day rest — his first scenic accommodation in Australia. After that, it's back to the highway, grinding south toward Brisbane, and eventually a flight to New Zealand.

Australia may not be what he expected, and it's certainly not what he'd recommend to other cyclists. But Andrew being Andrew, he's not stopping.

Andrew: I'm too stubborn to not get through it. It could be a lot worse. And at night, the stars here are unreal — no light pollution, full Milky Way. That part is pretty great.