Day: 097
Date: Tuesday, 06 October 2020
Start: Port Augusta
Finish: Hawker
Daily Kilometres: 108 (click for Julie's Strava and photos)
Total Kilometres: 10130
Weather: Cold early, then cool, windy and overcast.
Accommodation: Motel
Nutrition:
Breakfast: Donuts/Yoghurt
Lunch: Pie & kransky roll/Quiche & sausage roll
Dinner: Mixed grill & vegetables/Slow-cooked lamb & vegetables, ice-creams
Aches: Nothing significant
Highlight: Beautiful scenery in the Flinders Ranges. Sweeping treeless plains reaching out to lightly timbered craggy mountains with more distant mountains layered in different shades of blue.
Lowlight: Cold cross/headwinds for most of the day threatened to spoil our appreciation of the scenery …. but failed.
Pictures: Click here
Map and Position: Click here for Google Map
Journal:
Rather than following the main highway and the coast south to Adelaide, as our original round Australia route intended, we are going to detour via the Flinders Ranges and Barossa Valley on our way to Adelaide. We can do this because of the time we saved by not going (not being allowed into) Western Australia. It also gives Victoria a few more days to squash the COVID-19 outbreak, and New South Wales a few more days to consider letting people enter from Victoria, which is a precondition for us entering Victoria.
As we couldn't pick up our mail-ordered replacement tent from the Port Augusta Post Office, adjacent to our hotel, until it opened at 9am, there was no early start this morning. After breakfasting in our room, packing, and carting all of our gear and bikes down the hotel's internal stairs, we were at the Post Office soon after it opened and picked up the tent without any problems. I felt reluctant to just dump the old tent, which had served us well, into a nearby garbage bin, but my unsentimental partner showed no such hesitation and we were soon on our way out of town.
It was hard riding into a headwind, as we passed through the industrial edge of town, crossing some tidal inlets and scrubby wasteland. Not very inspiring after two days off. When we turned left off the main highway towards Quorn, our lunch destination, the wind was no longer directly in our face, but still opposing as we began gradually climbing towards the Pichi Richi Pass across treeless scrubby plains. As we got into the foothills, the scenery became more attractive, with some dry creek beds populated with gum trees, and steep slopes on either side. The road was paralleling the tourist Pichi Richi railway, and near the top of the long climb we met the day's steam train coming the other way. We stopped to take a photo and got a whistle blast and wave from the engineer as well as many waves from the passengers.
At the top of the climb, after passing through a low grassy gap in the hills, we emerged into a higher valley and descended through sheep grazing country to the small windswept farm/tourist town of Quorn. Forty kilometres had taken us three hours, a testament to the difficult conditions. The historic town has some attractive old buildings, but it has seen better days and many businesses were shuttered making it look particularly bleak in the cold and windy conditions. We found the small town supermarket and bought some hot food for lunch, which we ate on a bench outside, along with some supplies for tomorrow in case we were too late to buy them tonight when we reached our destination, Hawker.
We left Quorn around 12:45pm, with 66km to go, and hoping to reach Hawker before 5pm, the store closing time according to Google. The first half of the journey was across another vast windswept treeless plain with mountains in the distance to either side and ahead. The wind made the riding hard work but the excellent scenery compensated. We took a break in the lee of a roadside slope with 30km to go, just as the road began to climb to another low pass. The road ahead swung slightly to the west on the gentle climb, neutralising the wind and making the ascent easier. Along the way, we passed the atmospheric and desolate stone ruins of some old homesteads dating from the mid-19th century and also got some spectacular views of mountains near and far.
There was a slight descent from the pass into another high flat valley of sheep grazing land giving us an easy run into the very small town of Hawker which we reached about 4:30pm. We stopped in at the service station/grocery and bought some drinks and snacks before checking into our motel. After showers, and confirming our room had a microwave, Julie returned to the service station (which didn't close at 5pm) and bought some microwaveable dinner that we later ate in our room.
It's cold here and we have the heater going full blast in our room. We are a bit apprehensive about tomorrow's ride, which includes 33km of uphill on unsealed road, when the forecast is for cold winds and heavy rain.
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