5 June 2026 – 96 kms – Swan Hill to Mittyack
Wamba Wamba, Wadi Wadi, Latji Latji, Ngintait, Nyeri Nyeri Country
The lush, soft grass and my closed cell foam pad create a luxurious mattress that I do not want to get up from. But up we get. At 5.15am. I have no idea how far we will ride today or how strong the wind will get. I have no idea where we’ll camp tonight. So let’s get going so we have as much daylight to work with as possible.
The tent fly shows an interesting combination of dew and rain drops. The patches of big drops are leftovers from some showers yesterday evening (it’s now rained at least once on 9 of 12 days so far). Between all those patches are the tiny dew droplets covering the rest. Have I ever seen that combo before?
I think it would be interesting after sunrise to see my tent patch, tyre tracks and all my footprints on the dewy grass that would tell the story of my morning pack-up. But we’ll be 20-some kays down the road when the sun will illuminate it, but I imagine it might look a little funny.
Our intent is to get to Mildura over the next few days and stop along the way to see Hattah-Kulkyne National Park. It is another Living Murray Icon Site and should allow me to check out the mallee ecosystem, too. The only problem is… there are no good sealed backroads to get us there. And the gravel and dirt roads I’d prefer to ride will be too boggy with the three days of rain.
I asked at the bike shop yesterday if they could give me a good route. They could not. They thought I would have been better off going through Balranald. They do give me some options, but their suggestions involve “C-roads” and I tend to avoid those as much as possible.
So I’m going to use the first part of their suggested route to Chinkapook, but then I’m going to head over to the Calder Highway (an ‘A-road’ that is more likely to have something of a shoulder than a ‘C-road’). Where we end the day will largely depend on how much the wind prohibits progress.
I ride out of town through the industrial estate. Unfortunately, a bunch of people need to be at work by 6.30am in a bunch of those businesses. I’m all lit up, but it is still stressful to have that amount of traffic turning into businesses in front of me in the dark. It also stinks. Polymaster is putting out some acrid smells – I guess they’re basically burning plastic.
I get over to the Woorinen Road. It has no shoulder. It, too, has heaps of traffic going both ways. I thought there might be heavy traffic going into town, but not in my direction outbound. It is not particularly pleasant. That is a very polite understatement. It is still very dark. This might be the most stressful 45 minutes of the entire tour. Some people are patient. Some are not. I had to make a shoulder in a couple places lest someone run me off the road instead. I have no idea where those people outbound were going – there must be some ag processing stuff out there somewhere.
Just before sunrise, we turn off on the road to Chingollah. The road is a full-width seal to start but eventually gets down to a single strip of seal down the middle where you have to drop off onto the dirt on the sides when you encounter another vehicle. There’s more traffic than you’d expect on this road, too. Google sends you this way from Manangatang, rather than sending you down the main roads.
It is cold again this morning and I regret not putting on my full-finger gloves. My thermal stays on under my raincoat until after lunch. The wind drives the cold into me again.
We work our way west across all the little sand dunes. We’re in the mallee country now – a different bioregion to all the river country we’ve ridden so far. There’s not much mallee left, however. All the blue mallee has been cleared and there are grain and legume crops as far as you can see.
Up and down we go. It’s like a tame version of Iowa with fewer trees and much crappier road conditions. Into the wind. Pedal. Pedal. Pedal. Fling the snot the cold keeps sending down your nostrils onto the road below. Get over in the dirt for a vehicle to pass. Try to keep your cold fingers in the raincoat sleeves. On and on.
The wind never completely died down last night, and it’s already letting me know it’s going to be a day of a constant whoosh in my ears. It’s a free white noise machine. That you can’t turn off.
I can definitely feel the weight of the 5 litres of water I have on-board. It’s enough for today, cooking tonight, and the first part of tomorrow. I don’t know where we’ll camp tonight, but there are no water sources until Ouyen which we won’t hit until tomorrow.
I like this landscape and I love the form of the mallee trees. It reminds me of the Sandhills of Nebraska in a way, if those were cropped instead of being left for grazing, had some trees and were on a smaller scale. Even though it’s industrial out here, it doesn’t bother me as much as the intensive irrigation.
The amount of vegetation that is cleared is phenomenal. At the time of European settlement, it was estimated the mallee covered an area of 11,000,000 ha (you read that right). Within 150 years, only 15 percent of that vegetation remained. This was one of the last areas of the state to be settled due to the difficulty of clearing the veg.
But, hey, if you can grow stuff in sand without irrigation, then I have some respect. Just woulda been nice if they’d left some trees along the creek lines at least. The only trees are in the road reserve for the most part. Clearing sand hills of their deep-rooted trees that held them together resulted in severe erosion and dust storms, extensive salinity problems, etc. over the years.
We angle up to Chinkapook on medium-density undulations. In some places the sand dunes are more densely packed and the hills are steeper. In other places, they are more widely spaced and flatter. You probably wouldn’t even notice in a car, but you definitely do on a bike. The road angle makes the wind a bit easier to fight for a little bit, too.
Millions of years ago in the Miocene, the area was covered by a shallow sea. Marine sands, now known as the Parilla Sandstone, were deposited. This sandstone was later eroded into the Lowan Sands and the Woorinen Formation (which has more clay than the Lowan Sands) in the Quaternary Period and redistributed through wind and water. That’s what you see now with the dunefield being mostly parallel, east-west trending dunes that can easily be seen on satellite pics.
I stop for a break in Chinkapook, sitting on the back steps of the public hall where I’m in the sun but out of the wind. There’s no water here, but you could easily camp here – there’s plenty of spots. The disused tennis courts preclude an after-ride hit-out though – they are overgrown with weeds and vines and everything else that time might deposit.
The short daylight hours push us on before we want to go. I ride out of town and then head west toward the highway. Thankfully, now that the wind has picked up to full strength, this section of road is flatter. I average 15 kph which I think is quite good given the bike weight, the knobby tyres and a 25kph wind that gusts to 35-40kph. Still, I move soooooo slowly across my map. I’m just this teeny tiny spec out there going nowhere fast.
In these situations, where you need to distract yourself from the all-enveloping push of pressure against you, I like to yell out lyrics to songs. That’s supposed to help with vagal nerve tone, too, which is compromised with gastroparesis. So today I’m yelling out the lyrics to one of my favourite Glen Hansard songs. It’s punchy and catchy and simple. I don’t care what the other drivers think as they go past. Here it is below. Imagine yelling this out as you proceed very slowly for 25 kms.
I reach the Calder Highway. The map shows a road continuing on that I think we might be able to camp along before catching another road back north to the highway tomorrow. But that road is waaaay too sandy to consider. So Calder Highway it is after we stand here, drink some water, get a feel for the traffic volume and constitution and have a snack.
Two cars honk and their occupants wave as I’m standing there. Well, that’s nice. I don’t need encouragement honks – just for no one to run me over, thanks. I set the bar low.
The road shoulder is actually quite generous, and the road angle is much better for fighting the wind. So I crank it up to 21kph as trucks roar by and I try to judge the size of the vehicle coming from behind by the sound of their tyre profile. It is not stressful at all in this 5km section that transports us to Mittyack.
Like Chingollah and Chinkapook earlier in the day, Mittyack sits on the disused rail line and would have been a place of a couple hundred people back in the 1920s. Today, it appears to be an old store that is now someone’s home, a CFA shed and another house a bit down the road. The grain silos along the rail line are still in use (by road). There’s a guy at the second house raking a bunch of brush into piles to burn. There is also a transfer station somewhere down a turn-off to the right.
It is time to get the tent set up so it can dry and the sleeping bag can floof. I’ve done 96 kms into that wind. I’m feeling pretty done. I thought I might be able to camp by the CFA shed, but there’s a vehicle there and it just doesn’t feel right. Damn. I could camp back in the big vehicle turning area for the grain silos, but that is right near the highway – not ideal.
I start riding out of ‘town’ to the north. The road goes to dirt and starts to go over a dune. But off in the scrub is an open spot by the disused railroad tracks. I lay the bike down on the side of the road and go for a wander.
Yes, this will work. There’s a spot I can wedge the tent back here. We’ll be off this road and about a kay from the highway. Never mind that I had to step over a broken barbed wire fence to get over here. So I’ll be trespassing on railway land, technically, but I really don’t think anyone is going to care. I’m not trying to hide, but I won’t be obvious either.
I pull the panniers off the bike and then carry the bike over the barbed wire and then down to the open, gravel area. I then go back for the panniers. I get everything set out to dry.
Wow, there is every size and colour of ant imaginable! Those teeny ones could make it between the metal zips if they wanted. No open food in the tent this afternoon. I clear away a few sandy rocks, get the tent set up between bigger rocks and away from obvious ant holes, and then start on dinner.
A few people go by on the road which is about 25 metres away through the trees. No one stops or bothers me. I’m so tired and whupped by the wind that I fall asleep not long after it gets dark (5.20pm!). I wake up later, get out to pee, enjoy the stars for a little bit in the darkness (you can see the whole length of the Milky Way) and then crawl back into the bag, cuddle down and sleep hard on that hard and sandy ground.
