Plans are just plans, right? I took a cabin to get out of the humidity, charge the devices, do a bit of blogging, get a good night sleep, and then I’d be able to head out early as I’d have less packing to do. D’oh! I still couldn’t get going until about 8am… however – I was ready for the long ride. I wanted to make to Atherton today.
The reason I was late was to take the regulation photo of me dipping my toe into the Gulf of Capenteria (literally)… who can say they’ve done that!?
As mentioned before, I expected single-lane sections of this road… I’d ridden this on Google Streetview as part of my planning and knew what to expect, but I’d hoped the QLD government would continue their upgrades. They hadn’t. The good roads were, well, good roads. The single-lane stuff were absolutely shocking. It’s old bitumen that’s been repaired and repaired, broken edges, rocks everywhere, and horrible loose gravel off the sides. It was lucky, again, no road train cam by.
Other than that, the roads/towns were quite typical country towns. Croydon was especially nice, with a bit of history to it that they’re certainly proud of. (sorry – no photos – camera malfunction).
It was a long hot slog until around 50km west of Atherton then the scenery changed dramatically. Large gum-tree (I think) forests, and then a magnificent windy ride through the hills. I didn’t expect that at all. Making it especially pleasing to end the trip was a drop in temperature from 34 down to 22 in about 100km.
Tomorrow, it’s the Gillies Ranges as recommend by PC from OzSToc…. Can’t wait!
ps. people have noticed that it didn’t take me long to cover this distance (6500km in 2wks)… the purpose of the earlier rides was really just to get to the Daintree (or here) hence the longer rides. Now they’ll be shorter and I get to spend more time in each location.