You're too kind, Andre, but thank-you anyway. Now you'll have to live with more --
A new route – along the Tallebudgera Creek Road towards the hills
Last Tuesday morning had a high bright overcast, a good day for riding before a couple of days of expected heavy rain. At 7:30, I set out for the Tallebudgera Creek Road in the southwest section of the Gold Coast. An hour’s ride beside the ocean on bike paths and dedicated bike lanes got me through the holiday flats, condos and beach sections between Southport and Burleigh Heads, where I crossed the bridge over the Tallebudgera estuary.
From there, the route angles gently SW away from the coast, more or less parallel to the Tally Creek (as ‘tis known) as it winds through several kms of flat sandy terrain.
There are a couple of pretty watersheds and valleys in this part of the Coast, where the Currumbin and Tallebudgera Creeks run eastward from the hills, down to the ocean. On my previous rides in the area, I’ve always taken the road along the Currumbin Creek, the more southerly of the two, partly because that offers access to the northern side of the ancient caldera which forms part of the boundary between Queensland and New South Wales. From a closer look at the map, though, I realized that the Tally Creek Road also offers an intriguing route towards the eastern slopes of the Great Dividing Range. Not having been along that road, nor having cycled more than a couple of hours since last October (see post above), I decided to have a look at the Tally Creek Road.
For a Canajan emerging from a long cold winter (actually a standard-issue one from the ‘60’s and ‘70’s, but a not-so-normal one in these New Climatic Times), this ride was full of visual and noisy delights. The noisy ones came first, and were a pleasant surprise.
In the suburbs just SW of Burleigh, the settlement pattern becomes more dispersed, with detached houses on large lots and much more green space. As I passed by a sprawling acreage of football and rugby pitches, I cycled beside a 200-metre row of shade trees. (What were they? Dunno, but they were mature, with full foliage.) All-of-a-sudden there erupted a colossal racket of birds’ voices, with dozens, maybe hundreds of them in several trees overhead—magpies, perhaps, as I saw a couple of those on the ground beneath the trees. It was a racket, to be sure—you couldn’t call it “song”—maybe the birds were warning one another about the Weird Thing beneath them, and angrily telling me to clear out. But to my ears, the sheer volume of it was nothing short of magical, a reminder of how rarely I hear a mass of birds, and almost never in an Ottawa winter.
As I continued westwards on the sub-cum-peri-urban road over gently hilly terrain beside the creek, the second Unexpected Splendid Bit of Noise appeared. This time, it was announced by a couple of notional headlights in line astern in the oncoming lane: “Looks like a couple of Britbikes,” sez I to myself. “Wonder what they are?” A wave of valve gear and chains told me that they were indeed old English motorcycles, and the unmistakeable thump of a big single confirmed it. That one was a rarity—an old Velocette with its distinctive fishtail muffler, followed by two Triumph twins, the last one a very clean mid-‘70’s 750. (The Velo, BTW, was a cooking single, not the fierce 500 Thruxton, but the pilot was easing along slowly enough that a passing cyclist could admire the green pinstriping on the black tanks.)
The Tally Creek Road is reached via a couple of kms on the shoulder of the convenient Tallebudgera-Currumbin Connector Road. From there, a rider has a view of the low mountains some 20 kms further west, and the rich pastureland near the creek itself. (Photo #7 below.) The Connector Road crosses the creek, which at 8:45 AM was a brown, undernourished and generally underwhelming stream, hence left unphotographed. The Tally Creek Road proper heads west from its junction with the Connector Road, and immediately climbs upwards onto the northern side of the valley. I saw a “café” sign, but no café, until I crested a hill and plunged down t’other side—and there it was, housed in what I guessed was a modest old farmhouse, set back a few yards from the road. I made a note to visit it on my homeward leg.
The creek may have been undernourished, but the vegetation and foliage on the northern side of its valley was luxuriant, a rich spectrum of greens, and soooo welcome for a traveller accustomed to shades of blue and white (at best) for the past few months. Recent rains have lessened to fire danger dramatically--see # 7A below. The green was interrupted by occasional dramatic splashes of red, purple and yellow—see #'s 8, 9, and 10 below. I don’t know any of these, except for the yellow, which is wattle. (Gotta get myself a guide to the trees of the Coast.) I thought that the rich purple might have been bougainvillea, but both bloom and leaf are different, with more blue in the bloom than pink. As I stopped to take a photo of each, dogs raced along fences, yapping and barking. They were not nearly so enchanting as the clutch of raucous birds earlier on, but they were just doing what they were s’posed to be doing.
The Tally Road goes on for some 16 kms, dead-ending at the foot of a nature reserve enclosing Tallebudgera Mountain (682m), but I left that for another day. Today, I made my turnaround at a southward road which offers an extended and hilly loop back home—again for another day. This time, something else entirely grabbed my attention—an enormous sprawling wooden manor house, as I called it—see photos #11 and 12 below. This was unannounced—nothing in the Osmand POI’s nor in any local guides to Architectural Sights which I had noticed. It’s a magnificent piece of work which fills a lens, even from a distance of nearly 100 yards: a two-storey rightangle, with the outer edge of the angle housing a big gabled entrance facing the road. This is flanked by two wings, each by my guesstimation about 90 ft long. (You’ll see that there are seven arches in each wing; each one, I reckon, is about 12 wide.) (Note too the nice modern touch of a bank of solar panels, suitably unobtrusive.)
Who owned/owns this splendid creation? No name on any gate or mailbox that I could see. When was it built? I would guess just before or perhaps just after the WW 1 – would there have been enough individual wealth amassed in this agricultural valley to finance something like this in the 19th century? The only clue to all this chosen obscurity and anonymity I could see, was the name of the road joining the Tally Creek Road: “Syndicate Rd.” (Sub-text: keep out, and forget you ever came here.)
After a tangerine and an energy bar, I wheeled around and headed back to the café I had passed a few kms back. This was the second part of my Tally Road Architectural Side Trip: see photo #13. The Heritage Hideaway Café (as it was described on its various signs) is indeed an old farm house, now repurposed as a café offering a good range of cakes’n’coffees and light meals, with a sideline in meditation, scented candles, wild honey, homemade marmalade, artisanal jewelry and sculpture, polished stones, local landscape paintings and the like. The customers on my visit were construction workers and a couple of young surfer dudes. I had a good coffee and almond/blueberry gateau with some A-grade local ice-cream. I made a mental note to bring our grand-daughters along sometime: aside from the obvious attraction of ice cream and umpteen cakes, they love bling, even modest New-Agey bling.
I was interested to know more about the blueberries—where did they come from, I asked, New Zealand perhaps? The cheerful young woman behind the counter said they came from the store, and she didn’t know where they got them. Mmmmm, sez I—they look to be farmed, and I offered the reference point of wild blueberries being the item to choose, if at all possible. Still, no complaints, which would have been Bad Form and pointless anyway, and I inhaled the gateau. I didn’t learn much more about the farmhouse, either: Asking how old it was, I was told, “The seventies.” “That would be the 1870’s?” I said. “The 1970’s?” said the cheerful youngster, relaying a message from her colleague. “Ummm, I sorta doubt it. The 1970’s were not so very long ago, y’know,” sez the Old Fart. “I was in my 20’s then. I’d reckon the eighteen-seventies, and it’s been nicely preserved and maintained, so good on yer.”
The ride home was uneventful, though the mild headwind from my outward leg reversed course, as it does, so often, morphing from southwesterly into a northerly headwind. The uphill straight out of the café was a 12% or so, maybe a couple of hundred yards, and I was glad of my 22T granny gear—to my slight & pleasant surprise, I didn’t need my low-low, so I can save that for some of the 14’s in the neighbourhood. I did take a photo of Tally Creek as I recrossed it--see #14 below. We're about 6 or 7 kms from the estuary here, and the tide is coming in, so the creek is a little more full, but still brown and not-so-inviting (leaving aside whatever critters the colour may conceal). The piling on the left of the photo suggests that there's still a metre or so of tidewater to arrive. No public explanation of the purpose of the pipeline; perhaps it feeds the golf course beside the river here? (I didn't check the salinity of the water--see above re uninviting brown and possible critters lurking in the weeds.)
Next ride: revisiting Currumbin Creek Rd, the next valley southward.
