More from Down Unda – SE Queensland’s Gold Coast and its hinterlandSigning off now for a week or ten days, as we reload and reorganize the wagons for the long trek back to Ottawa. April 6 will be a long weird day – we reach Vancouver at 7:30 AM, some 3 hours on the clock before leaving Sydney.
Over the past couple of weeks, though, I’ve done several longer day rides, 6-8 hours or so. One took me north of the Gold Coast proper [GC, to the locals], away from the ‘burbs and into cane fields and small fishing villages. I rode with a couple of cyclists I’ve come to know here. They were on trick plastic bikes, so I had to work quite a bit harder than on my solo rides. (No bad thing.)
Beyond the beauty of the quiet countryside, this ride showed me the gritty side of cycling in these parts. Danny, our leader, has a slick 2 x 11 Shimano drive train. Slick, that is, at the beginning of each ride. There’s so much sand thrown up from the roads, he said, that he has to wipe down his chain & sprockets after every ride, and clean and re-lube after every rain. Otherwise, he said, he’d replace his chain and cassette at least every year, at $400 a pop. (On my abacus, that’s a Rohloff every three years or so.) In a similar but less costly vein, I reckon I’ve spent more time cleaning my chain in the last six weeks than I would in a full season’s riding in Eastern Ontario.
Early last week I made my most enjoyable and demanding rides in my time here, south and west from the coast into the Queensland/New South Wales border ranges. Several rivers cut through the 50 or so north-south kilometres of the Gold Coast, running east into the Coral Sea. They tumble down the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range, and over the ages have cut deep valleys. The heights are not great, perhaps 700-800 metres at most (next to the Pre-Cambrian shield, these are some of the oldest rocks on earth) but the hills are steep and the valleys and ridges are lush with pastureland and rainforest.
My longest ride was about 115 kms, a round trip from Southport (towards the northern end of the GC) to Murwillumbah, a small agricultural centre in NSW, some 25 kms inland on the Tweed River. Between my starting point and my turnaround at the New Leaf Café (a highly recommended eatery on the attractive old main street), the road climbs and descends the forested caldera of a huge ancient volcano. It’s the back road to Murwillumbah, known as the Tomewin Mountain Road, and a favourite for cyclists because it’s narrow and twisty, with a 60 kmh speed limit and light motor traffic.
Here’s the Google altitude profile:
http://tinyurl.com/kuzoq3m The North-to-South section is a bit easier than the return leg. There’s a stiff short early climb, about a km in the 14-16% range, followed by about 10 kms of more-up-than-down as the road snakes along the volcanic rim through eucalyptus and then rainforest. The scent is sublime, the birdsong a symphony all its own, and the views are pretty good too – see below, #s 16, 17, & 18.
Shortly after crossing the border, the road descends the inner side of the caldera. The ancient volcano was a big ‘un, not merely an old ‘un: about 100 kms in diameter, and some 23 millions years old. My photos give only a sense of the scale of the north-eastern portion of the basin – see #19 and 20 in this post and the following. Further south and west is the eroded plug of the volcano, Mt Warning. The first part of Australia to be touched by the rising sun, it’s sacred to the country’s indigenous people, and more recently was used and named by James Cook as a key navigational aid.
(continues in the next post) (having problems posting photos -- to be resumed)
