21 September 2026 – Jindera to Chiltern – 70 kms
Wiradjuri, Dhudhuroa and Bangerang Country
It is 10am before we push off. It has taken all of my willpower not to get on the bike early.
I have never understood the late starters – the riders who wait until all of the traffic and wind has picked up before they start their day. I’m usually at least a third of my way into the day by now. And, almost always, it’s those first couple hours when the sun is rising or low and the world is still a bit quiet that are my favourite hours of the day’s ride.
However, Nigel lives in a little ‘town’ 15 minutes outside of the bigger city. So it’s a commuter town. And so are the two towns even further out. There is commuter traffic starting from 5am. So I’m cooling my heels and waiting until all the impatient people get their kids to school and then get themselves to work.
By the time we leave, the wind is up and increasing. The sun is high in the sky. A cold front passed through yesterday, so we’ll get to ride into a gusty southwesterly headwind all day today. I guess I didn’t leave the headwinds behind with the last ride.
I pedal out into the gentle hills outside of town, rising and falling over those gentle crinkles in the earth, those waves of old sea floor that have been compressed and lifted hundreds of millions of years ago.
This area did not get as much rain as I did in outback NSW in June and July, but it has had above average rain throughout winter and spring. Consequently, the vegetation growth bursts forth creating a shaggy landscape of wild green grasses, green stalks of baby wheat and tall, bright yellow canola. The wind sends waves of ripples through the canola and pushes the grasses to the northeast.
If you were an explorer and travelled through this country right now, you’d be fooled into thinking you’d found a temperate and well-watered oasis perfect for all those things you used to do easily back in the old country. Of course, this area is well-watered compared to many places in Oz, but average rainfall and temperature records might cause greater pause on further examination.
I think I’m going to take a shortcut on Stony Park Road to bypass the crossroads of Burrumbuttock, but it’s been 10 years since I did much riding out this way, and I turn one road too early and shunt myself back to the main road instead.
Nevermind, it only adds some hills, three kays, a gentle dog chase and two mostly polite, swooping magpies to the day’s tally. I roll over to the community hall and swig as much water as my gastroparesis stomach can handle and then refill water bottles.
On the way out of ‘town’, I get swooped repeatedly by a series of magpies that pass me off from one to another as I proceed. Hilariously, the most vicious and persistent one is right outside the primary school. I’m riding uphill and into the wind, so they have plenty of time to harass me.
Then I just push into the wind through a very wide valley with low, cleared hills far off on each side. This is slow going and I establish that I’ve probably lost all of my fitness while in America that I had built during June and July. The wind is a nuisance, and so is my flabby body.
I eventually roll into Howlong, a small town on the Murray River that is another commuter town for Albury. There’s about 3,000 people here that live in houses in a grid format on the high side of the river. There is an ailing golf course/club, a primary school, an aged care home, a pet food factory and a bit of other manufacturing, and a strip of shops that includes a bakery, an IGA, post office, cafes and some real estate agencies. There’s also a butcher and a mortuary.
I stop at the park, but they’ve removed the tap that I used to fill water from. Never mind, I think I’ve got enough to get me to Chiltern. Good thing the road gods, or my deficient navigation, detoured us through Burrumbuttock for a refill a while ago.
The only way out of town to the south is the road over the river and across the flood plain. There are limited crossings of the Murray River – from here, you’ve got to go 30 minutes up-river to Albury or 30 minutes down-river to Corowa.
So you’ve got to ride over the river and wide floodplain with all sorts of traffic. The route has a lot of trucks. And 8 bridge crossings with no to minimal shoulder. It is stressful. I hate it and have always avoided it where possible.
But we survive and then get ourselves over to the old Howlong Road. We laboriously pedal up and down the somewhat steep, short hills into the wind that is now gusting to 35kph. I’m riding impossibly slow, but I still get up the hills, knowing that this is the way that the fitness returns.
I’m carrying heaps of food, I don’t need all of this, but it’s all the good stuff for my guts that is hard to find in smaller places. I don’t need to have eight days of food onboard, but I do, and I figure that extra weight will whip us into shape sooner rather than later. We’ve only got 5 days before we hit our first big climb over a mountain range.
The green continues, the hills continue and eventually we make it to the forested hills in the national park. These are all little hills, but I’m convinced I climb more on this first day of the trip than I probably did in half of the whole outback tour!
I drink a heap of water once I get to Chiltern, chill out in the sun and wind for awhile, and eat an early dinner of salmon on corn thins so I can get rid of the smelly, oily tin in a bin in town, rather than having to pack that away in a ziploc and dispose of somewhere down the road if I ate it tonight at a random campsite.
In the late afternoon, I pedal a bit out of town into the forest and make our home for the night. My butt and bits hurt, and my muscles are tired, but I have no knee, ankle or tendon pain. That is good. I’m still pulling up thick, stringy or blobby bits of brown mucus, but my covid cough is not too bad.
Today was just one very slow plod over terrain and roads we’ve ridden before. It was a reminder to my body of what we’re going to be doing for awhile again. And it was progress through the territory of 12 swooping magpies. All in all, it was a very typical first day on a tour!