This morning I left Yulara at about 9:30, Quite an uninteresting trip. Its 304k but only about 120k line of sight, right through a salt lake and through culturally sensitive areas.
Theres no mobile service here on any carrier I have for data. I have satellite voice comms but can’t blog via that.
While riding, the tree webs started taunting me again and, after Doug made me feel bad about not having a photo, I decided to stop to get one. Now, you have to remember what the roads are like here, there is no shoulder at all. It goes from semi nice tarmac to red dirt. So, to make things safe, I left the road for about 2.5 to get away from traffic (theres a car about every 2 mins or so). I stayed on the bike, took a photo of a web that I had seen from the road, and then proceeded to try to move. Immediately when I had stopped, the bike sunk into the dirt about 150mm. This was like really soft sand and when trying to get moving again, I sunk the rear wheel down to the swing arm.
Bugger.
It took me about 10 mins to remove both panier, tank bag and top box, walk then to a part of the road about 100m further on that looked more solid (but still just off the road for safety) and start digging out the bike. I had thought about this sort of thing when preparing for this trip but as I’m travelling with some others, all of the recovery stuff (eg a shovel) is in the van so I didn’t have it. I had to use sticks etc, then drag the bike out backwards (its 240kg and annoying to move). The good thing about it was that I managed to keep it upright the whole time and eventually got it back near the road again. Then I could ride up to the paniers, put everything back on and ride off thinking I shouldn’t have been so silly and hoping no dirt was in anything it shouldn’t have been. I tested brakes etc and everything looked fine.
So, its now 1:40 and I’m sitting in the room at Kings Canyon waiting for the others.
Tomorrow, we are going to walk the rim (about 4hrs of hard walking aparently)
a photo of the tree web thingies for Doug.
If I knew it was going to cause you that much grief I wouldn’t have mentioned it!
I would say that is some kind of tent caterpillar nest, at least we have caterpillar nests like that back in Canada….
Although ‘tree web thingies’ sounds cool too.