28 June 2026 – 70 kms – Roadside Camp to Broken Hill
Wiljakali Country
Are there degrees of silence? Or is it an absolute? Are there only degrees of quiet?
Regardless, I’ve enjoyed these hours with no human sounds, no smelly goats, no thump of kangaroos, no rooting around of wild pigs (I saw some dead ones by the road yesterday). The wildlife stayed away last night, or at least poked around quietly enough I never woke. No vehicles went by.
Down deep in my sleeping bag this morning, the wind has finally gone. The sound of the birds is muted. Either it has snowed out there or it’s foggy for the world to be on mute. And though it feels nippy outside the sleeping bag when I stick an arm out, and the locals I’ve talked to have commented on how unusual all the precipitation has been, I don’t think we’re settting any temperature and snowfall records here. The last time Broken Hill saw any snow was flurries one night during a severe cold outbreak in July 1929. I decide it must be fog. Again.
So I pack up the saturated tent once again and carry all the gear and the dripping bike back to the road. The fog is pretty thick with visibility about 300 metres. Safe enough to ride but I get all my blinkies flashing.
There’s not much to see in all that fog, but the road rises and falls and curves around a bit, until all of a sudden we come to the intersection with the Silver City Highway. This long highway to the remote bits of far northwest NSW was finally fully sealed just a couple years ago. However, it still gets closed frequently when it rains because it still has a bunch of causeways where creeks cross the road… and then cut it when those ephemeral creeks flow.
I’m not in any hurry this morning. I didn’t even pack up and get on the road until 7.30am. I was just loading the bike by the road when two cars came by heading towards the national park around about that time. I’ve only got 70 kms to ride today. That’s a nothing-distance at this point in a tour.
Yeah, you know you’ve been riding for a bit when 30 kms seems like a ride around the block and 70 kms feels like a rest day.
It’s good we don’t need to anywhere in a hurry because that brand new chipseal is that super-size diameter stuff and it rides super slow. I’m very happy when I hit old bits of seal that are much smaller diameter and ride so much faster.
Unlike riding in the dark, where you ride in a little bubble of light, oblivious to things at a distance, riding in the fog is like riding in a little bubble of clear air, but still oblivious to all that lies at a distance. I’m not sure if the scenery is nice here or not. All I see is cloud. Cold, cold cloud.
For awhile, as I ride through the fog, I think about all the buzz words that have floated around in my work world. One from around 2019 was ‘bespoke’. Everything was ‘bespoke’ and people paid more, or justified use of more funding, for ‘bespoke’ designs. Then there was ‘use case’ during my 2022-23 contract. I think it stemmed from the world of IT, but it got bandied about in the government world, too. Everything was a freakin’ ‘use case’. Don’t get me started on “leverage”, “best practice”, “deep dive” and “bandwith”.
And somewhere during the COVID period, it was the term ‘visibility’, as in “I can tell you all about X, but I don’t have any visibility about Y”. To me it always implied something sinister, like someone was intentionally withholding information from this person. In government, sometimes it probably did mean that, but many times it meant the speaker just couldn’t be bothered to pick up the phone and call someone to ask. Or it means the guidelines or talking points or decisions hadn’t yet been developed or released.
So today I would like to officially say, “As for the quality of the scenery, I don’t have any visibility on that.” Ha, finally a proper, if literal, use of that term!
Somewhere down the road, at about the 35 km mark, and around about the time that the road gods open the gates at 10.30am, the fog lifts just a bit and I can see the bottoms of the rounded, northeast-trending hills of the Barrier Ranges.
Also about this time, on a long straight stretch near a winding creek outlined by trees and two rolled, burnt-out vehicles, and before a hill with a crest some 500 metres down the road, and right at a livestock grid, I have three vehicles approach from behind while one vehicle approaches from ahead. I am riding an algebra problem again today.
Now, I’ve ridden for three hours and only seen three vehicles in that time. And now there are four within view at the same time, all converging on me and the cattle grid. I do not dare ride off the edge for fear of a puncture. Luckily, those sight lines are long, and I can hear the line marking truck behind me downshifting to slow down. He’s a government worker on government time, so I don’t feel bad about holding him up for 15 seconds. I give him a friendly acknowledgement wave and wonder just who opens the gates for the vehicles at 10.30am each day.
There are a couple more cars that go by, then one approaching from ahead starts to slow down and indicate. Ah! It’s my Mutawintji friends. They stop on the side of the road and I circle back to the driver’s side window. But Pat gets out of the car, rather than chatting through the window, as does his wife. So I roll up to the front of their vehicle, and then pick up the bike and set it down off the road so I don’t have to roll through any thorns.
They’ve had a fun time exploring this week. Today they are heading up to Packsaddle Roadhouse, hoping the fog lifts so Pat can get some good photos. They came over the hill and saw a cyclist and just knew it had to be me. It helps I’m wearing the same clothing I was wearing the day we did the tour. They talk to me like they’ve known me forever.
Then Pat asks if he can take a picture of me with his wife. Sure. They ask if I have an email address they can send a copy to, but I just hand him my camera instead. If I’m gonna be in your holiday pics, you can be in mine. It’s cold, so it’s time to get moving or get back in the car after that, so we wish each other well and I tell them to enjoy their lunch at the roadhouse.
The clouds lift a little more as the road weaves around the hills of the Barrier Ranges and we curve down and then across Stephens Creek.
In the last 25 kms, the wind has picked up enough to be a helpful tailwind which blows me across the final basin and its straight bits, as well as the straight shot climb into town. There I meet the vehicle warning of the linemarking, the line marker guy marking some new bits of that awful super-size chipseal and his tail vehicle that all passed me earlier. I wave.
I enter Broken Hill. I have now come in from the southeast, left to the east and come back in from the north. In all those directions I have never seen the ‘nice’ part of town. It is all just old and gritty.
I ride down to Sturt Park. Somewhere after my encounter with my Mutawintji friends, it was finally warm enough to take off my rain jacket and pants, and the fog had lifted enough for me to feel like I wouldn’t get too wet from the humdity in the air. But now that I’ve stopped and it’s 11 degrees with a fairly decent wind, I need to get changed into dry, warm stuff quickly, lest I get chilled and take hours to get warm again. Damn mozzie virus.
So there in the park, with other staunch souls braving the cold, I pull off my light thermal and riding shirt and quickly put on my off-bike shirt, my medium weight thermal and my puffer coat. I put my rain pants back on over my shorts. Ahhhh…. for whatever bulk that puffer jacket added to my pannier on this trip, I am so happy to have carried it on days like this. Instant warmth and coziness.
I hunker down behind a rubbish bin and use it as a wind break to cook some rice and lentils for a warming lunch. A woman walks by with a weiner dog and asks where I’ve come from. She hears my accent, thinks I’m from America, and welcomes me to Broken Hill. Her daughter lives in LA and the lady is going to America later this year so they can go to Vegas together. She asks more questions, explains Broken Hill’s proximity to Adelaide and asks whether I know where that is. I say, “well, yes, I’ve been there. Actually, I live in Albury, I’ve lived over here for 25 years.” She goes a little sheepish and then says, “so really, you know all about these things anyway!”.
Later, as I’m packing up all my cooking gear so I can go to the motel and get checked in and get properly warm, a squirrely-looking guy I wouldn’t trust if my life depended on it comes up and asks the standard six. He then asks why I’m riding alone. I say, “because no one else that I know thinks riding a bicycle long distances and being cold and wet all the time sounds like a nice holiday.”
He then says, with a glint in his eye that I find very off-putting, “so are you a lesbian?”
I reply, in a manner as disrespectful and direct as his question, “No. I like dicks. But I can confidently say I’m certain I would not like yours.”
He does pause for a moment and then says, “sure you’re not a lesbo? I thought you were a guy at first.”
I say, “yes, I’m sure. People think I’m a guy all the time. You aren’t expecting a middle-aged chick to be doing this sort of thing, so you aren’t expecting to see a woman. And then I’m wearing baggy, any sex clothes with my hair pulled back. I’ve got tiny boobs. I’m not cute. It’s a common mistake. I’ll forgive you.”
Maybe it’s the see-saw hormones of perimenopause, maybe it’s just being middle-aged, maybe it’s just too many years of meeting guys like him, but I absolutely have no patience for that shit anymore. And I’m not going to wear girly shit and pink clothes, just so it’s easy for society to guess my gender. I’m a practical, functional sort of gal that wears the same shorts for 20 years or until they wear out. I use gear until it’s well and truly done – so nothing ever matches and some of it is always going to look a little worn. And I absolutely hate the colours pink and purple (and yellow, too, if that matters).
The guy has no response. He just walks away. I will chalk that one up as a victory.
I roll over to the motel. They give me a room on the ground floor, even though I only paid for a cheaper room upstairs. There’s a man standing by the door that’s been chatting with the older lady owner and her son. One leg is in a big moon boot and the other leg is a prosthetic from the knee down. I can see him go over to my bike and look it over and poke at the frame bag while I’m getting the key. Yep, another person that thinks it’s an e-bike!
Then, I go over to the room, get everything spread out everywhere around the room to dry, turn the heater on to summer temperatures, take a nice, hot shower and then crawl under the sleeping bag for a nap. So here we are again. Ready to wait out shit weather once again.