So, the Oxley Highway…w-o-w. I should preface this by saying
I’m tired. I don’t know if I’m
finally letting myself be tired because tomorrow is my last day (!) on the
bike, or if this is just what happens when you put more than 5,000 miles on a
motorcycle in 25 days of riding (over the course of a 37-day trip, to be fair—I
took days off!). Maybe it’s both—I am too tired to figure it out.
In retrospect, I am very glad I stayed in Tamworth last
night, as the Oxley was a challenging road and I would have pretty wiped by the
time I hit it if I’d gone head-down from Dubbo to Port MacQ. It was still a
hard road today, but holy guacamole what a road.
Highly recommend, 12/10 would do it again. I rode the “wrong” direction, going
down the hill instead of up, but it was still an excellent excellent ride. There are a couple of different sections to this
road so there is something for everyone, and over the course of 131 miles (212
km), from Bendemeer to Wauchope, there is plenty
of something. This road is often described as a must-ride in Australia and I
completely agree: this might be my favorite road in this country (or maybe I am
too tired to remember any others). Still, the road was so lovely it moved me to try the panorama again.
On my way out of Tamworth I was stung by a BEE (or
something)—sonofapoophead hit me on the side of my neck, finding a tiny chink
in my gear, between my helmet and my jacket. It hurt like the dickens and it
was a little bit before I could safely pull over and investigate, so I rode for
a while with my left hand clamped to my neck like a weirdo and I’m just glad it
hit me on that side. (I have been stung before while riding and it always sucks—it
seems like it takes forever to get to a place where you can get the stinger
out, and I am mildly allergic so the site always swells up and hurts, and good
lord, is that the tiniest violin in the world, playing just for ME?)
I stopped at a gas station of sorts (rural Australia) and I
asked the nice lady there for ice and a bathroom, and when she directed me to
the bathroom outside I am afraid I blurted, “Does it have a mirror?” And then I
was terribly embarrassed so I felt compelled to explain this was an issue of
stinger-removal, not vanity, and she took a measuring look at my helmet head
and fanny pack and very kindly brought me a little baggie of ice cubes and kept
the rest of her thoughts to herself.
In order to be able to keep moving, I pulled out my trusty
neckerchief and turned it into a makeshift ice pack. By the time I stopped for
gas an hour later the ice had melted so, to the surprise of the guy who came
out to pump my gas (first time that has happened on this trip), I arrived with
a giant goiter-like bulge in my neck. I then reached into my scarf and pulled
out a medium-sized baggie of water: where do YOU carry your baggies of water? “After
some 98 then, are you?” he said, politely. Yes, sir. Yes, I was.
The sting is currently hurting even now, just FYI.
In keeping with my penchant for signs that advertise
waterfalls and bathrooms, I stopped at the Apsley Falls. If Australia was not in the
midst of a drought of some kind, I am sure the falls would have been
impressive.
Instead, the attraction was “a bloody great hole in the
ground,” as the only other person there said to me, and it was still pretty
cool but FLIES.
I walked down 108 steps to a viewing platform and found this
HORRIFYING spider—I am pretty sure he was dead but then I started to wonder
about what could be lurking around out there that was responsible for killing
this guy? I high-tailed it back up the 108 steps which, fun fact, is almost
exactly the number of steps out of the B/D station at 7th and 53rd,
without that homeless guy who is always reading the paper. I think I would take
him over the spider.
Here I make two confessions:
- I secretly believed I would see another echidna while I was tromping around the falls area. Instead I saw termite mounds, which is basically the equivalent of soooooooooooooo close, and yet soooooooooooo far.
- There were a couple of walking path options and, I am ashamed to say, I choose one in particular because it went by something called “Lion’s Lookout.” Ashamed because it turns out the sticks or something whocares that made the platform or something whocares had been donated by the local Lions Club, and hahaha don’t be silly I know there aren’t lions roaming around Australia!
Port MacQ also has a lovely...promenade?...which apparently has a tradition of visitors/locals (?) painting the rocks along the way. It was neato but it kind of did my head in since there were just WORDS everywhere and I kept trying to read them because WORDS so eventually I peeled off and then I read the news that two pods of pilot whales beached themselves and either died or were euthanized on a remote beach in southern New Zealand and no one really knows why this sometimes happens but everything in the world somehow lasts forever and for just the blink of an eye.
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