11 June 2026 – 109 kms – Buronga to Lake Mungo
Barkindji, Muthi Muthi, Ngiyampaa Country
The pedalling begins. In the dark as usual. There is plenty of traffic a bit before 6am. Just because it’s still pitch black doesn’t mean you don’t need to get to work for a 6am start. But everyone gives me plenty of room on the road – moreso than they even do during the day. I’m comfortable with the dark starts now.
Because of the darkness, I can’t get photos for you of the extensive signage at the beginning of the road warning of whether the roads ahead or closed or open. I can’t get you a pic of the sign that has an image of a fuel bowser and the words: Next fuel 345 kms. Ivanhoe. I can’t impress you with the warnings of remoteness.
We roll along the gently undulating seal, wrapped up in our light bubble, mostly oblivious to anything in the black beyond the bubble. There’s no moon to help illuminate our path.
We roll past the tip and pick up the whir and crackle of the electricity lines again for a little bit. After that sound accompanying us daily in the first few days of the trip, it has been absent recently.
In the distance, for a long way, I can see what looks like a huge building with bright lights on it. In the dark and distance, it is very War of the Worlds. It looks like some hulking square alien could just pick up and start lumbering towards us, shaking the earth as it clomps along with some loud mechanical crashing sound.
As I get closer, I can see that the huge building is part of the most massive electricity substation I’ve ever seen in my life. That’s where a couple of the cars that passed me have gone. High tensile power lines march off to the southeast. My goodness is that ever huge!
I look this up later. It’s a very significant piece of infrastructure. Acccording to Transgrid, it is one of the largest and most sophisticated electrical transmission hubs in the Southern Hemisphere. It is the central hub for the EnergyConnect interconnector project. It balances and directs the high voltage electricity grid flows between New South Wales, Victoria, and South Australia.
It is the backbone for the 900 km interconnector project that will support the reliability of the grid as we get rid of coal-fired power stations. It covers 15 hectares, has an 800MW capacity and was first substation globally to operate five 200MVA phase-shifting transformers in parallel (if you have any idea what that means – I do not). It took three years to build. It just reassures me that we really are moving forward with renewables and electrification, as it seems like we are dragging our feet so much of the time and not moving fast enough. Read more here: https://www.transgrid.com.au/media-publications/news-articles/world-class-substation-completed-on-australia-s-largest-transmission-project/
The sun eventually comes – first light turning the pitch black sky to midnight blue and purple and then on to deep pinks and oranges. The stars fade, the day comes onboard.
The road curves around a bit. The wind is already there, moving from the ESE to the ENE. I think I time my road movement all day today with the shift in wind, so that it is always in my face. Haha! Some tours are headwind tours (my 2013 Wyoming tour had a preponderance of headwinds, too). This is definitely one of them.
There are long gentle pulls and descents. There is always vegetation around, always some trees, always some kangaroos and always some goats. There is the frequent metallic jingling sound as the goats run away and through the gaps in the metal string fencing.
At first I’m not sure that the god-awful stink is the goats. I wonder if it might be some sort of vegetation that the goats like to eat and I’m painting them guilty by association. I wonder what plant could smell like rancid and greasy lamb fat that’s been left in an oven for 20 years.
But as time goes by, I come to understand that its the goats that stink to high heaven. Well, not the lady goats, it’s the males that stink. I don’t know if they always stink and they just stink a heck a lot more at this time of year when they are breeding. But it is foul and there are heaps of feral goats all over the place out here. You can smell them before you see them.
I’m making good time as the sun lifts higher in the sky. The chipseal is pretty good. Eventually a clump of cars pass in each direction and I feel like I’m pedalling through an algebra problem. If car X leaves Mildura at 6.30am and travels at a speed of 100kph and car Y leaves Mildura at 7am and travels at a speed of 110kph and truck Z leaves Top Hut Station at 6.45am and travels at 93 kph, at what time do they all converge on the cyclist that left at 5.45 am and is travelling at 17.5 kph?
After about 8 minutes of this glug of cars, it spaces out to about one vehicle every 30-45 minutes for the rest of the ride.
I feel like the first 40 kays is just the pre-ride, or the warm-up, and the actual ride is the dirt to come. We’re knocking off those kays as the wind rises. It is not too obnoxious, except on one particular long, gentle hill where I start to think: “oh dear, this is going to be a loooong day if it keeps up like that.”
There are no houses visible from the road and very few mailboxes or driveways that lead away from the road. It’s just me, the goats, the kangaroos, the varying density of trees and the whoosh of the wind in my ears.
I stop at the Petro Mail Road junction for a snack and a drink and then continue on. My old NRMA map has the chipseal ending here. I know they extended the seal in 2023, but I think I’ll lose it somewhere around 47 kms into the day.
The seal continues on. There are huge table drains the width of the road off to the side. They’ve done a heap of drainage work along with the road construction. I keep wondering when the seal will end and am pleased when I see it continuing on as I crest each hilltop. I enjoy each km of it – gleeful as the kays turn over easily.
In the end, we get 65 kms of seal, leaving just 45 kms of dirt. Those last 45 kms might take awhile to get sealed – it involves 2 councils, the National Parks and Wildlife Service and whomever looks after and approves construction in a World Heritage Area. At least it means that you really have to want to go there to see the place. You can’t just pop out on a whim – it probably prevents people that aren’t quite so respectful of the area’s significance from visiting.
We eventually come to the open expanses of the old lakes. The Lachlan River used to come this way before it chose a more direct route to the Murrumbidgee River after the Ice Age. Willandra Creek is the old Lachlan.
Saltbush and bluebush cover the old lakes all the way to the horizon where red dunes adorned with cypress or mallee line the edge of the earth like a mirage.
We roll along the gravel. Yes, there’s some corrugations in places. Anywhere you see white gravel, and up to 200 metres either side of a livestock grid, will have loose stuff and corrugations. The red dirt is all smooth and packed mud and loam for the most part. The ranger said 30 kms of corrugations, and my early start is partly based on that info. Corrugations slow me down more than the wind or hills. However, there’s just some corrugations here and there, instead of 30 kms straight, and it’s always the worst around the grids where vehicles speed up and slow down. It is all very manageable.
There’s all this stuff around ‘gravel riding’ these days. People do gravel races and buy specific gravel bikes, plugging their superiority over any other type of bike or riding. It’s either a fad or a religion and its adherents are very vocal in how little pavement they ride and all the wonders of gravel.
Bring them out here, make them travel some distance. Because I can tell you – if there is only one road to ride, and it goes where I want it to, and the traffic is low, I’d much rather it be sealed. I don’t really care what the surface is – I don’t see one as superior to the other. I just want to ride. And a lot of the places I want to go require riding on dirt. You miss a whole lot of interesting places in Australia if you only ride sealed roads. That is why I bought Atlas. I like the remote riding and that corresponds with gravel. But I really don’t see it as superior or a factor in my routes. At this point in my cycling career, I just go where I want to go and the surface is whatever it turns out to be. If a route features a lot more dirt, I take Atlas. If it’s mainly sealed roads, I take The Wizard.
So the previous thought occupies my mind as I proceed forth across the old lake beds. The sun pours down, the wind keeps the few flies away. I like the big skies, the far horizons and the huge expanses that can swallow you whole. But I can’t imagine doing this ride at any other time of year.
For the rest of this trip, any time you hear me say I like something, please know it has the caveat attached “in winter”.
I never have any real trouble with flies – most days I don’t see any at all. I don’t sweat much. I’m never super thirsty. I can add and peel off layers and maintain a comfortable temp while riding almost all the time. Winter is definitely the time to be out here. All the bits I ride north of Mildura are not winter-rainfall dominant. The rain is sporadic and spread throughout the year, and annual totals are low, so I just get unlucky on this trip to hit a lot of rain up this way.
Everyone that goes by waves. There are a couple big trucks, 2 caravans, several guys in utes and one council ute. On we go. The wind is more a nuisance than the road surface. The boggy bits are all bypassed by a well-travelled two track off to one side or another. There is really only one long boggy bit and one bit where I ride through the boggy bit on packed mud rather than the two-track option – simply because there’s less chance of puncture on the main track.
However, the last 15 kms go agonisingly slow. I’m tired at this point because I haven’t been eating enough, the wind is stronger and directly in my face, and as we climb out of the old lake bed, we pedal up onto red dunes and the road goes rough. It’s sandy and corrugated and there is no good line a lot of the time.
Mungo Lodge comes into view just in time. It’s in their lunch serving hours and I need some sustenance. The place has seen better days. It started as a rather basic place in 1994 to help house the visiting researchers and growing number of tourists that didn’t want to camp at the park. It got a big capital injection in 2007 as visitor demands changed and more luxury was desired. All of the fading signage seems to date from this time. It was then sold in 2025 because it needs another capital injection to update all the stuff that has deteriorated since 2007 (it is a harsh environment out here and 110 kms from the nearest supplies).
The Indian couple running the place are nice and trying hard. I ask for a chicken sandwich from the menu and ask if I can get that as takeaway. She confirms this and tells me to take a seat – it won’t be long. So I go over to a table in the largely empty dining room near some plush couches that form a U-shape in front of a nice stone fireplace. The woman then brings my sandwich out on a plate? I was going to take the sandwich with me, transfer it to rice cakes and eat it at the campground a couple kms up the road.
Never mind, I just remove the bread and eat the rest while I sit there and listen to the only other group in there. It’s two old couples discussing places to travel and concurring that East Gippsland ‘has few good facilities and is pretty wild’.
Ahhh, the sandwich revives me for the last couple kays to the NPWS campground. It’s about half-full and will get to 3/4 by dark. It is all caravans, except for one huge tent for two people.
I find a site where the table is very close to the parking space, so I don’t have to traverse thorns. The spot is pretty close to the toilet and undercover BBQ area, too.
The mobile phone signal is strong. I send a proof of life photo to Nigel and my parents. I was a bit apprehensive about today’s ride. Uncertainty and the unknown are always so much worse than even the worst things. At least bad news or bad roads can be dealt with. You can always form a plan.
We did the 110 kms in about 7 hours today. I’m very happy with that. We’re munching on snacks and drying the tent and sleeping bag by 1.30pm. It really was not a bad ride at all!
I do the grasslands walk from the campground to familiarise myself with the vegetation. The interpretive signs are engraved metal, so the information survives.
There is a 35-km “Lakebed Loop” mountain bike trail that has been closed for a long time already and not meant to reopen until December of this year. I’m not sure if I would have done that anyway, but at the moment, if you ignored the track closure signs, you’d fill your tyres with punctures within a couple metres anyway.
Then I go down to the lookout and sit there for a while, trying to thing about time and space and distance and what this would have looked like 60,000 years ago to 40,000 years ago. The lakes dried up 18,000 years ago. I try to get my head ’round the immensity of that system of lakes, overflow lakes and the volume of water to feed it all. I guess the Darling River with the Menindee Lakes is a modern-day, smaller scale equivalent, though all the water regulation means you can’t really see or feel what that system would really be like in natural conditions.
I think about how the Barkindji, Muthi Muthi and Ngiyampaa peoples can connect their history to this place back to at least 2000 generations of ancestors (white people have been here for 5). Of course, the years don’t concern them – they know they’ve been here forever since the Dreamtime.
I try to get my little head around all the immensity – the time scales, the geographic size, the geomorphology and cultural history. I am so excited to be here at such an important place in Australia’s history and understanding of itself. It was worth every km and every bit of pre-ride anxiety to get here.
