Day Five – Time for Some Pictures

A good night’s sleep would have done me good. I was exhausted, and when I had climbed into my bivvy I had pretty much just closed my eyes and been instantly asleep, but now my eyes snapped open and although it was pitch dark I was wide awake, and I was worried.

Thinking about where to sleep the previous night I had decided not to stay on the picnic table, because it was too cold. The concrete around the roadhouse looked uncomfortably hard. But there was a nice little spot with some low bushes around it that would block the lights of the roadhouse and give me a bit of shelter from the wind and maybe the rain. Now though I realised that it wasn’t much shelter from the wind, and the rain was torrential, drumming down on my bivvy. It sounded like the world was about to end outside! I reached a hand out from inside my sleeping bag to adjust the bivvy hood and see if I could see any lights, and brushed the outside of my sleeping bag. It was wet. My bivvy was leaking. Disaster!

I jumped up and out of the bivvy. It was raining very hard.

One important point to remember when riding your bike a long way for a long time is that your skin likes to breathe. Close fitting lycra can be superbly comfortable on the bike as well as being aerodynamic and of course looking good (I mean we all know that’s why boys trying to prove that they are men find it so confronting, don’t we). What the close fitting lycra doesn’t do so well though is let your skin breathe, so at night I tend to wear as little as possible, to facilitate that breathing. “As little as possible” tends to be slightly more if I am likely to be disturbed (like kipping right next to a roadhouse) than in the middle of nowhere, but it still isn’t a great deal. The driving rain was stinging where it hit my bare skin.

As I jumped I had formulated a plan, and by the time my feet were in the mud I was already grabbing the bivvy, and quickly sprinted back to the picnic table. The roof over the top was probably 3m wide, and the rain was coming in pretty close to horizontally. There was no dry ground. The area under the bench seat on the downwind side of the table though was at least not getting the driving rain, more like falling rain. It was the best option I had available, so it was what I went with.

A bivvy is a wonderful thing in terms of getting quickly to bed. In this case I had carried it complete with sleeping mat and sleeping bag set up inside, so I literally spent about two seconds deciding on the driest spot, threw the bivvy on the ground, and climbed back in.

Of course, by that time I was soaking wet myself. I was using a fairly new sleeping bag on this trip, and I’d moved away from my old synthetic bag to a down model and had barely had a chance to use it with the Covid Chaos that had been happening ever since. My mind flashed briefly back to the discussion I’d had with the service team from Sea to Summit in which they suggested that this one wasn’t the model they would choose if it was going to take a beating, and also touched on the problems of getting down wet. Given my limited options though, I still went ahead and got into the bag.

From that point on I actually slept amazingly well. The rain on the roof above me and on my bivvy was making a terrible racket, and the bivvy was flapping around in the wind, but I quickly got back to sleep anyway, and when I woke the rain was mostly gone.

The sky was still heavy and grey, and the wind was back with a vengeance. Having jumped, soaking wet, into my sleeping bag the night before I figured I might as well take advantage of the conditions, so I turned my bivvy and bag inside out and spread them and all my wet clothing over the rafters of the picnic table roof. I then headed over to the now open roadhouse and settled in for a good breakfast, confident that even with the odd rain squall coming through the roof would keep them sheltered. After my first course I headed back out and turned my bivvy and bag back the right way out and again hung them up. The insides were already dry, which was great news. I’m ok riding through rain (not lightning or hail, but rain) but I really hate having wet gear, partly because I worry about things like mould and rot, and partly because climbing into a dry sleeping bag is so much nicer than climbing into a wet one!

The good news was that all my gear seemed fine. The mud that I had brought into my sleeping bag the night before just brushed off once it was dry, the down was still fluffy and warm, and the bivvy seemed intact. I was worried about it being no-longer waterproof, but I was also thinking about it a bit harder now. It’s a great bivvy that I got from Macpac a few years ago now and it has been super reliable, so I had been surprised to feel water last night. With hindsight (and now having tried it again in rain just to see) I realise that it was actually the sleeping bag being too good that caused my concern.

The sleeping bag is a fairly lightweight down model from Sea to Summit. One reason I haven’t used down in the past is that it doesn’t do well when it gets wet. This bag was meant to avoid most of that problem though, by firstly having a water repellent treatment on the down itself, and secondly having a water repellent outer shell. I think what actually happened was that the condensation from my breath was just sitting on the outer shell. Because it was so wet and the humidity was so high there was a lot of condensation, and in my half sleep I assumed it was rain getting through. The fact that everything dried out so nicely adds weight to this theory. Anyway, as I said, I have used the bivvy in rain since, and it was perfect, and I love the sleeping bag!

After rotating my drying gear I went back to the roadhouse for a second course, and to ask if it was normal to have no phone signal here, since I had had some when I rolled up the night before but it was gone now. The waitress glanced outside and said it wouldn’t be back until the sun came out.

I had actually ridden past what I realised was the closest phone tower the day before, and had noticed the solar array next to it. The waitress explained that they initially built the systems with enough solar and storage to get them through one day and one night, with a diesel generator for the rare times when there was cloud cover. It turned out that the solar worked better than expected though, so they pretty quickly stopped topping up the diesel tanks. These days they had signal through a day or two of heavy cloud, but by day three it was usually gone, and today was day three. Fair enough!

Since I couldn’t check the weather online I asked if she knew the forecast, and disappointingly she said she thought it would rain. As she said that another squall hit the windows, so I ordered some more food and sat to eat and chat with the bloke at the next table.

Eventually I had eaten my fill and I realised that regardless of which clock on the wall I checked it was getting late, so I went out, packed my gear and got on my bike. It was less than 80km to Border village, and most of it was flat.

 After a couple of hours the clouds thinned out. I probably wouldn’t have noticed, but suddenly my phone started beeping and buzzing. At about the same time I saw a looming giant on the horizon.

Now some people will argue that the climb to Eucla Pass, being only about a hundred meters of climbing, doesn’t compare to more famous climbs like Col du Tourmalet or Col du Galibier, or even the WTF climb, but having ridden all of them I can tell you that it does. Ok, it isn’t as long or as steep, but everything is relative. And when your legs have been used to flat roads for several hundred kilometers, that sudden climb is astonishingly hard!

The reward though is that once you get to the top, you’re only 12km from the border. I’ve never actually stopped at the township of Eucla, because by that point it just seems like going to the border is the thing I need to do, and it was no different that day. Grateful that the climb was over, I kept pedalling.

By the time I got to the border the weather was clearing and the temperature was rising. I was curious about what Covid would mean for the border crossing – the answer was not a thing. I had applied for the right entry permit for SA and had it there on my phone, but no-one even asked to see it. I stopped for long enough to take the obligatory border crossing photo, and was waved straight through.

I pulled in at Border Village, which is a basically a large roadhouse and motel plus whatever is needed to support that, and went in for some lunch.

Now I had breakfasted very well at Mundrabilla, and my plan was a quick stop to grab take-away supplies at Border Village, and that would have happened, if only the clouds had stuck around. Unfortunately, the skies were rapidly clearing. Just as I was about to order lunch, my phone rang. It was my boss.

For several months before the start I’d been working on a large project that had some complications. I’d done a lot of calculations and taken a whole lot of notes, and finally prepared a draft report that I had sent to my boss for review. My boss was ringing to ask why the numbers in my notes didn’t match the numbers in my report, and I had no idea. I really missed the rain.

After quite a lot of discussion on various aspects of that job and a lot of him describing the notes he was looking at to me I finally realised what the problem was (I need to make my notes more clear – the number he was looking at referred to something else entirely) and did at least have the satisfaction of knowing the report was being sent to the client. My flying stop had turned into nearly two hours, but there was basically nothing between Border Village and Nullarbor Roadhouse, so logically I should cover that time very quickly. And then, I had a change in perspective.

Once I was on the road again, I started thinking about where I was, and what I was doing. I love travel and I love seeing places, and I love racing, and sometimes those passions clash. The fact is, the last time I had been in that spot I hadn’t seen much of it, because I was pushing as hard as I could. While I was in Border Village though I had looked at the race tracker, and I realised that at that point I was over 300km ahead of JJ, with Eddie not far behind him. My legs were feeling pretty good, my butt was improving, but I was having a bit of pain in one knee and in one ankle. The one thing I had hoped for at Border village that they didn’t have was anti-inflammatory gel, and I didn’t want to push too hard and make the niggles into something serious. You never really know when you’ll get back to any particular place, and I was glimpsing some spectacular views off to my right. Everything was combining to suggest that I could afford to take this afternoon easy to appreciate where I was. The views were simply spectacular, so I stopped to take a lot of photos.

Eventually I started pedalling properly, because I did want to make it to Nullarbor roadhouse. I knew it would be closed by the time I got there, but I wanted to be able to get up and have breakfast there. It was actually a fairly consistent if very gradual downhill, so even with the wind it made for a fairly relaxed afternoon and evening of riding.

Eventually I reached Nullarbor Roadhouse. The lights were out, but that was fine. I figured I would find a quiet spot out the back somewhere to kip, and have a good breakfast the following morning. It sounded like a great plan. Taking a look out the back I can’t say I was delighted – it was absolutely packed. Campervans and caravans everywhere, including several running generators despite all the lights being off. Honestly, if your fridge isn’t good enough to stay cold overnight without disturbing everyone else’s enjoyment of the peaceful location then maybe you need a new fridge, not a generator. Worse than that though was the vans with the generator running so that they could keep a light on outside. Maybe these people drove all the way across the country and never realised just how beautiful it is when you are in the middle of nowhere with nothing but the noises of nature and the light from the stars and moon. Or maybe I’m just a hypocritical and grumpy old man. Eventually I found a spot as far from the generators as I could and with only a moderate amount of artificial light, and then went to take full advantage of the electricity coming from the wall and plentiful lighting in the shower facilities. Everything seemed to be going well, and then… Disaster!

I used to speak German. How good my German was depends on who you talk to, with opinions ranging from “that’s pretty rough but I guess it is enough to get by with” all the way to “please stop attempting that, it hurts my delicate German ears”. It was generally maintained at that level through regular visits to Germany, but during the early days of Covid I realised the next trip might be a while away and noticed that the level was clearly dropping. I needed to do something about it, and much to my relief I found that there is an app for that. I signed up for “Duolingo” and resolved that I would do at least some German study every day. Just to make it a bit easier, the app tracks “streaks” to say how many days in a row you have done a lesson.  They are handy bite-sized lessons, and you can often knock one out in about 5 minutes (yes, I know that won’t be great for my German, but better than nothing!) and I was up to 334 days, but as I looked at my phone it told me my streak was broken! People often talk about the emotional extremes that you go through in an ultra-endurance race, and I have always agreed in the past, but it still amazes me to think how dismayed I was to have lost my streak at something so minor in a way that made no functional difference and no-one but me would ever know about (if I wasn’t writing it here for all of the world to read).

I also didn’t understand. It was only 11:46pm. I still had 14 minutes! But looking at my phone, it wasn’t 11:46, it was 12:31. Time Zones! I was gutted. I needed to just get over it, accept that it was trivial, and move on. I was still gutted. I hadn’t even thought about the change in time-zone, and my watch hadn’t updated. The phone was obviously getting a signal from within the normal SA timezone, so it had changed the clock to match the signal. It occurred to me that the time your phone says just reflects the time of the signal that it gets. And that I had two phones with me. Using different carriers. And possibly even different transmitting towers. I grabbed my other phone!

By the time it had turned on it was saying that it was 11:57pm. I did the quickest German lesson I’ve ever done, and I got a burst of endorphins as some pixels on a screen told me my streak was out to 335 days. What a relief!

I quickly took the opportunity to equip a “streak freeze”, so that I would be safe if the same thing was to happen again, or if I had no signal or if I just plain forgot. And then, still buzzing with the adrenaline of my narrow escape, I went to bed.

It’s amazing what can seem important at times!