Day: 043
Date: Thursday, 13 August 2020
Start: Hells Gate Roadhouse
Finish: Junction Highway 1 & Highway 16, Northern Territory (NT)
Daily Kilometres: 115 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 4632
Weather: Mild to hot and mostly sunny
Accommodation: Tent
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Egg & bacon rolls
Lunch: Ham salad sandwiches
Dinner: Soup, 2-minute noodles
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: Entering the Northern Territory after six weeks on the road.
Lowlight: Corrugations, followed by soft sand/dust and rocks. It was, for the most part, a very hard ride today. Often our speed was less than 10kph as we sought to make progress through endless corrugations, looking for solid, slightly less uneven, ground and bumping up and down with everything shaking. I fell off twice when I couldn't disengage my cleat fast enough when the dust became too soft to make forward progress. We were teased with a few more even sections, but it rarely lasted long and once we entered the Northern Territory, the road was rarely easy.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
We slept in until 6:30am, knowing that the roadhouse did not open until 7am and we planned to get breakfast there as well as some sandwiches for lunch (and, of course, some Coke for the road). We let the tent dry a little, after an unexpected overnight dew, while we had breakfast and then packed up and left soon after 8am. Later than we had intended, but we were crossing into the Central Australian Time Zone today, so would get 30 minutes back.
The Northern Territory border was 50 kilometres away and we had been told the police would be there to check our entry permits. In those 50 kilometres, we encountered our first bad roads, and also some crews working on road maintenance. At one place, we were told to follow a grader through a section as he graded it, but as we suspected, the dirt was to soft to ride on and we ended up pushing our bikes through. We reached the border in the late morning, but apart from warning signs, no police or any other controls and we pedalled on. It was in the middle of nowhere, so I was not surprised.
The savannah woodland was quite thick in places and as we got further into the NT, some impressive dark rocky outcrops began to appear. There were occassional cattle roaming through the woods and a couple of water bores, but no other signs of civilisation apart from a rare passing vehicle or truck (and lots of wrecked ones by the road).
It had become very warm and fighting the testing road conditions (see above) was wearing us down, though we didn't stop for lunch until around 1pm. We were going through our fluids fast, and although we still had plenty left, we resolved to top up our water, either at a creek crossing (none had any water, apart from one signposted as contaminated, near an old mine), or if offered by a passing motorist. We got our chance for the latter near the top of a killer hill, up which we walked the last 100 metres, when a passing tourist offered us water and we accepted. He waited for us at the top of the hill and we drank our fill as well as topping up some water bottles, giving us enough to camp for the night without finding more water,
We had thought, with some luck, that we might reach the Calvert River today, where we do hope to find water, but it was 141 kilometres, and just too far in the hot weather and difficult road. We kept pedalling, albeit slowly, until around 5:45pm when we followed a track off the road and found a place to camp. We quickly set up, had a flannel wash, which barely impacted the thick layers of caked dust, ate dinner and went to bed, very tired, knowing we have to do it all over again tomorrow.
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