I got up to my alarm that I set to wake me at 5:30, my intention was to get up and on the road nice and early after writing about my day. I headed down stairs after I had packed up my gear and pushed my bike down to a local cafe. I ordered a piece of carrot cake and asked for some hot water in my mug. At the table I made my coffee and began eating what I now called the most delicious carrot cake I’ve ever eaten. There’s a possibility it could be because I haven’t had a carrot cake and a very long time but it was fantastic! While I was sitting there the managers kids came and sat at the table, the youngest was sitting next to me and telling me how much he loved books about zombies. I asked him if he wanted to see the book about me, after he agreed I went and fetched it from my trailer and read him the story of the boy who walked around New Zealand.
My productive morning was off to a slow start. Slowly I wrote and as the minutes turned to hours my word count climbed higher. At about 11:30 I was ready to go, I used the tap at the cafe to fill up my drink bottles so that I had enough water to keep me hydrated during the hilly day I had ahead of me. As I left town I fell into my rhythm spinning in time with the music I was listening to. Just out of town I turned off towards Nimbin, this is where the hills started. To my left there was thousands of native hardwood trees that had been cut down and to my right there was farms.
I have a special type of breathing that I do when I’m going up steep hills, it helps saturate my blood with oxygen. I do two huge breaths in and normal breath out, I can really tell the difference to my performance when I breathe like this. When I got to the top of the first hill I was soaked in sweat. I stopped at the top for a breather as I was standing there a white Ute pulled over to check if I was okay, the kind man
offered me water and a ride to Nimbin, I thanked him but politely declined telling him I had enough water and it would be cheating if I took a ride. He wished me luck and told me there were some huge hills up ahead. I pushed off and made my way down into the bottom of the valley to begin climbing the next hill. I decided to start listening to a podcast to pass the time I just randomly selected something but I thought would be a little bit of a laugh. The podcast was by orgasmic enlightenment and its title was natural penis enlargement! What a joke, the woman whos podcast it was definitely seemed like she wanted you to buy her book about sexual enlightenment. By this point I had now reached the top of the next hill. I’ve been climbing up most of the morning so there was a big down that was about to come. I let gravity do all the work, it pulled me down, my bike got faster and faster, 30kmh then 40kmh then 55kmh as I zoomed around the last corner I sounded like a jet.
I had one final straight so I started pedalling as fast as I could. My top speed was 67 kmh, i’ll tell you what There would be a pretty big mess if I fell off at that speed, there would be 125 kg of carnage sprawled the cross the road. I flew past a mobile speed camera going through a small village and when I was halfway up the other side of the final hill the camera guys drove past me and told me that they clocked me 6kmh over the limit in the area. I’m not a motor vehicle though so there was no way of fining me. I felt so naughty, breaking the speed law on my pushbike!
About half an hour later white car pulled up in front of me with its hazards on. I could see someone filming me in the mirror when I pulled up alongside I realised it was a familiar face! It was my mate Calumn, he had driven up from his house in Bowraville. He handed me a banana and a slice of bread and said what are you doing out here! If you don’t know who I’m talking about Callum joined me from the section between Yarra and Alice Springs he came out to face his anxiety and to remind himself what it means to be resilient.
He helped me film as I made my way down the final stretch of road into Nimbin. It didn’t take long once had arrived in town for news to spread that I was here. The first friendly person that talk to me offered me two tiny homegrown bananas. I told him about the time I spent in the desert under the skys he went on to tell me about aliens that visited the town two nights before, apparently they arrived from the south and hovered over large rocks shooting light out into the air. I’m gutted I missed that that would’ve been a pretty special sight to see as I have never seen a UFO before! While this conversation was happening another two older men approached me interested in what I was doing. We got chatting and they offered to take me down to the local radio station to tell the community a bit about what I was doing. One of them also found me a couch to crash on for the night so once I was done on the radio we headed back to his friends house so I could have a shower and relax.
When I came out of the shower they were passing a bong around fill of some Premium Nimbin herb. At this point really knew I had arrived and was having a true Nimbin experience with some locals who have been here since the beginning! Calumn and I headed off leaving them to it so we could get some dinner and catch up with what he had been up to since leaving me on the edge of the desert. And we ate at this awesome little Asian place I had vegan fried rice and two red bean steamed buns. When I headed back to the house everyone was sleeping so I got my sleeping bag, climbed inside and drifted off to dreamworld.