7 July 2026 – 145 kms – Dareton to Annuello
Barkindji and Tati Tati Country
The mobile roadworks sign says River Road is closed and it is ‘local traffic only’. It says Detour via the highway. However, I think this needs further investigation. I really don’t want to do 20 kms over on the highway if it can be avoided. So last night, some internet research suggests it’s really only the last bit into Buronga that’s closed for reconstruction. I remember this was the case when I rode through a month ago. And I remember there was meant to be a bike path along that section, too. Are we willing to take a gamble this fine, dark morning?
So at 6am, after prying myself from the luxurious and extremely comfortable bedding, I’m back out into the cold and dark to see what River Road might bring. It winds along and undulates up and down. Again, I can’t really see the scenery, and I have no idea which little undulation Google thought was a ‘moderate hill’. It’s hard to gain perspective when you can’t really see the elevation change coming and can really just ‘feel’ it in the effort required. I never need to change gears, though. I also note that there are ‘local traffic’ vehicles going each direction every few minutes, but I am very comfortable with cars overtaking me in the dark now.
I get up to the road closure, hoping it is early enough I can sneak through or get over to the bike path somehow. A car from behind me goes through but a couple others turn back toward the highway. Okay, let’s gamble. There are no workers down this end at least.
Well, the bike path is just a bit of overgrown gravel path off to the side. Sometimes I can see it and sometimes I can’t. Eventually a river levee comes alongside, and the path must be on the levee, or on the river side of it, because I can’t see it over there at all. And in some places they obliterated it with the road reconstruction.
But that doesn’t matter. The road is all packed and rolled and ready to be sealed. So it is very good for riding. No one is around, so I just cruise along with the whole thing to myself, riding a road as good as sealed for my purposes. The road is all blocked off in Buronga, but the bollards and barrels that block it off are no barrier for a bicycle. Good stuff. No photos though because it is still pre-dawn and they’d come out blurry.
We ride up and over the big bridge over the Murray River and are again grateful we don’t meet anyone on the narrow footpath. On the Mildura end, it just becomes a normal footpath with no good places to rejoin the road. With busy morning traffic, I end up following the footpath around a corner at the busy roundabout, past 8 cars backed up along that road waiting to enter the roundabout, and then to a servo. Here, there is a local ‘No Through Road’ that I dart over to on the other side of the main road.
This little road ends at the rail line. So you know I pick up the bike, carry it over some mud, thunk it up the huge gravel and over the rails, and then carry it back up the embankment on the other side. A guy in a car outside a house watches the whole thing with a look of confusion on his face.
Then I’m on other local roads crossing the main roads until I get to 11th Avenue. It has a bike lane. Sorta. But it looks my best bet on the maps. It disappears for awhile in one city block, in another city block the rubbish truck is sitting in it and forcing me into traffic. It disappears at every roundabout. And it some places, it’s really just the parking lane with a bicycle sign painted on it.
And then, once we get out of the main part of town, it disappears forever. I was expecting this. What I wasn’t expecting was the constant stream of traffic coming from the other direction and the amount of cars behind me heading out of town, too. I’m not sure where they are all coming from or going to, but there is a lot of dispersed housing development out this way.
So before that becomes a constant squeeze and more dangerous than I’m willing to abide, I dart between cars in the only gap I see for at least a dozen vehicles and take another road up to the next ‘avenue’, hoping it has fewer vehicles.
These rural roads were really not built for this amount of traffic. It reminds me of northwest Melbourne out near Tullamarine where the roads are still basically country lanes but have city levels of traffic on them.
The next avenue is a teeny bit better, but still incredibly hectic and stressful. The road goes up and down some sandhills to make it even more fun.
As we proceed, I start to realise that if I get smooshed, a bunch of the witnesses are going to have seen it from above.
In that gorgeous, freezing, clear morning, there are at least 25 balloons overhead. I’m not sure when I first spot them because I’m concentrating so intently on ground level and all the traffic around me. But the whoosh sound of them putting more hot air into the balloon is unmistakable. I knew this area was big on balloons, and they’ve held world championships here previously. However, that’s the most I’ve probably ever seen together. I don’t know their landing site, but some of them are so low that I can see details of clothing on the people inside.
The traffic finally dies off a bit as I ride up another road to get over to the Calder Highway to go back toward Red Cliffs (the way we came into Mildura back on the 7th of June). Of course, traffic on the highway is continuous, but I do have a shoulder. That was a very hectic and unpleasant 30 minutes of riding!
Phew – we make it to Red Cliffs. It is still very cold – it was 2 degrees overnight – and the shade in the main street has me all goose-bumped. I go into the bakery to get a chicken and salad sandwich that I can deconstruct later. All of the stuff in there looks really, really good! If gluten is still your friend, go check it out.
I tuck the sandwich in my pannier and then we head off down the highway again. I had a northwesterly headwind on the couple days I rode this back in June. And today, because I’m going the other way, I have a southeasterly headwind, of course. But I just pedal on into it, because that has become par for whatever course I go on this trip, and because… what else do you do?
So I pedal on down through the mallee country again, up and down the gentle hills, in the somewhat stingy shoulder. There are a lot more trucks today, but they generally give me plenty of room where they can. There are lots of different trailer combinations and lengths, and some give me a good suck into that third trailer (no four trailers today), but after four weeks of being pulled right toward the final trailer on very big vehicles, I’m getting used to it.
I buy 3 litres of water at the roadhouse at Hattah and sit at a picnic table out the front to eat my chicken and salad roll deconstructed and reconstructed on corn thins. It is such a pain, but sticking to gluten and dairy free has really done good things for me. Trying to stay away from emulsifiers, which are in pretty much everything in the middle aisles of supermarkets, has been helpful, too. But yes, it is a major pain in the arse, particularly while on tour!
After lunch, I decide to use the route the guys at the bike shop in Swan Hill suggested. The route I used back in June, which wasn’t their suggestion, was fine and perfectly safe. But, you know, I like to ride new roads.
So off we go to the east with the national park on our left and open, cropped fields on our right. We again curve up and down and around through the mallee. There are more big trucks on this road than I like, and I have no shoulder anymore, but there are no scary moments.
Around 2 or 3pm, I get to the River Road turn-off into the national park. My intention is to camp up here near the entrance somewhere in the bush. There is a very nice open and cleared area near the park entry information board where I can sit on the hard packed dirt.
I drop the bike here and sit against it and soak up the sun. I get warm enough to be down to shorts and t-shirt. I soak up the sun for quite awhile, not yet ready to set up the tent lest the ranger comes around and says I can’t camp there.
I can see and hear the traffic on the road. It concerns me. There is a fair bit of it. Further ahead, the road splits. One road goes up to Robinvale. The other road goes down to Annuello and cuts down to the road that goes south out of Robinvale. Oh man, I really don’t want to head east on that in the morning with that much traffic and sun glare and, potentially, fog. What do I do?
I think about staying here and then getting up at 2 or 3am and doing the road when traffic is lowest. But it is meant to be very cold tonight (1 degree) and I can’t see myself prying myself out of my sleeping bag and packing up a condensated and dew-heavy tent at that hour. So I think about a 4am start. Nah. Same deal.
I slowly come to realise I need to do this next section of road tonight when the sun will be from behind or fully set. What time should we head off? While I contemplate that, I drag out all my cooking gear and fix up a big pot of rice, lentils and veg. I won’t be cooking up a dinner later, so we should get that goodness in us now.
Ugh, I really want to stay here and soak up the sun until it sets and then crawl into my nice and warm sleeping bag. But good god, I also don’t want to die in my last two days on the road on this trip.
I finally decide to just go for it at 4pm after I’ve eaten and packed everything back up. There are trucks and other cars on the road, but when there are potential squeezes, I do get patient drivers. Thank goodness. There was a sign back there saying “Caution: cyclists”, so maybe they’re used to cyclists on this road? If this is the best cycle route around, I feel so, so sorry for the riders out this way.
This is no fun, but it has to be better than doing it with sun glare. When the road splits, most cars go the other way and the Annuello cut-through road is actually wider than what we just left. It has no line markings, but it’s wide.
As the sun sets a bit after 5pm, I meet a string of vehicles of ag workers leaving a Coolibah Herbs site. It’s mostly backpackers and I get lots of big smiles, waves and honks. They must be the ones camping out the back of the Hattah Roadhouse. One big b-double with two full-sized trailers overtakes from behind.
And then as darkness descends, the road is mine alone. I pedal through those gorgeous mallee trees that line the road. Beyond the road reserve, the land has been completely cleared. There are almond plantations and lettuce-like crops on the right. There are also grain crops of some sort off to the left all the way to the horizon.
I stop to put all of my lights on and then continue on through that strip of native veg that splits the cleared land on left and right. I pedal on and on, the road gets narrower, and another b-double Coolibah Farms truck goes by. That’s the last vehicle I see on this road as I pedal into the dark.
I keep going. I exhaust civil, nautical and astronomical twilight. There are stars in the sky. And the dew has settled. Even on me – I didn’t know it could do that on a moving object. But there are teeny tiny dew droplets like a mist on my thermal top.
We get up to the t-intersection with the C-road out of Robinvale. Annuello is another of those ex-towns that would have had a couple hundred people and grain silos on the rail line back in the day. Google satellite shows there is still a community hall along the main road south of this intersection, so I’m hoping to camp next to that.
I wait at the t-intersection to let a car go by. Then I stand there and listen for vehicles. Nothing. Nothing. So I head out on the main road and pedal down toward the old ‘town centre’. It’s totally dark now, so I keep my eyes peeled for the community hall.
Then, a big b-double comes up from behind on a slight bend. Shit. Shit. Shit. I don’t have anywhere I can go. I get as far over into the grass and weeds that I can to the left of the white line. The truck comes barrelling by. Fuuuuuuuuck. Fuck. Fuck. That was way, way, way too close. He gave me the room that he could, I gave him all the room I could, but that was too much.
And then, over on the other side of the road, I see a big metal building. It’s the CFA shed. That will do! I’m done. Absolutely done.
I roll up to the building and lean my bike against. I’m trembling from the adrenalin rush. A security light flicks on. Thank you, that’s helpful. I get out my torch and go have a look around, thinking I might be able to camp out the back, out of view of the road. Nah. Well, it could be okay, but next to the CFA shed is a shade structure, and I like the idea of camping underneath that. I’ll be on pebbly gravel, but I can put the tarp under the tent to make that a bit less poky. The shade structure might help with the dew.
So I set up the tent there. I don’t think anyone from the road will notice overnight as it’s not in the line of sight if you are concentrating on the road ahead. And really, I’m not concerned if they do see me. I’m not trying to hide.
Oh, I’ve gotten chilled while setting up the tent. Brrrr… I know better than that now. I strip off that wet, dewed-upon thermal and get all my dry layers on. I get in the sleeping bag and take forever again to warm up. Before the mozzie virus, if I got cold, I could change clothes and be warm again in 20-30 minutes. Now… it’s like 2 hours.
I’ve had a lot of experience since the mozzie virus in 2017 in hot conditions and learning how to keep myself cool so I don’t get too hot and unable to cool down. I’ve learnt that I need to soak my shirt in every water source I come across if it is over 25C. But this has been the first time I’ve had to deal with my screwed up nervous system and being outside a lot in cold weather. It has been a learning curve.
I have enough phone reception to figure out what I’m doing tomorrow. The choice is really: A) ride over to Nyah tomorrow where there is free camping and then do a really short day into Swan Hill on Thursday OR B) do 110 kms into Swan Hill tomorrow and have a free day there on Thursday. I have the train booked for Friday.
I prefer to ride longer days when it’s cold as sitting around tends to be chilly … so 110 kms into Swan Hill with my friend, the headwind, it is. Today had too many stressful bits for my liking. And riding another 45 kms after you thought you were done for the day is some sort of self-punishment I probably didn’t deserve. Riding from before the sun rose until long after it set was kinda self-punishment as well.
I like a challenge, oh, I really do. I thrive on it. But I’ve tallied up enough traffic, rain, wind and logistical challenges on this trip to carry over for a couple more tours, I reckon.
