E Sharp

Beyond Bananas – The FAQ post

March 25, 2022March 25, 2022E Sharp

Hello, Maggie.

The magpie flies overhead and calls as it lands on the power line stanchion. The angle of the sun has settled further down in the sky at mid-day. There’s shade in the yard from the nature reserve trees well into the morning now.

The passing of time is always cause for reflection. Autumn has always said to me that things will be okay, even in those really hard times in life. And here we are in autumn again.

Oh, Maggie, you swooped me when I would walk through the nature reserve behind my house. But you never swooped me in my yard, even when your young one came to hang out in the afternoons with me in September. He had no fear.

And so time is moving on. I’ll be on the road when you launch your next brood and are swooping again, dear Maggie.

Beyond Bananas – March Ride 2 – Ride your age

March 14, 2022March 14, 2022E Sharp

11-13 March 2022
228 kms (142 miles)

DAY 1 – 73 kms (45 miles)

Sometimes what you think a ride is going to be is not what it ends up being. You might have some ideas in your head of the route you’ll take or where you’ll stay or what sort of approach you’ll take (e.g. hard and fast, slow and exploratory). But then you get out there on the road and things morph.

Beyond Bananas – March Ride 1 – Days 2-4

March 10, 2022March 14, 2022E Sharp

DAY 2 – 0 kms

The support acts start around 5am. It’s just a drop or two of rain at the start – the kind that makes you think: oh, man, did a bird just crap on the tent?

There are light showers that follow – spritzes of water thrown against the tent like someone flicking a paint brush to dry it. Steadier, light rain commences, a light drumming on the tent that sounds more like fizz popping than splats.

Beyond Bananas – March Ride 1 – Day 1

March 9, 2022E Sharp

4-7 March 2022

136 kms (85 miles)

Day 1 – 30 kms (19 miles)

Sometimes a good idea comes out of nowhere. So you pounce on it and make a plan. The logistics of the plan all come together quickly like when all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle suddenly start to fit and the image becomes apparent.

Beyond Bananas – Feb Ride 1 – Day 3

February 13, 2022E Sharp

Day 3 – 38 kms (24 miles)

First light. Far in the distance a kookaburra chortles. The grey shadows make the vegetation seem indistinct. The pale greens of the eucalypts bleed into the darker greens of the cassias. There is no dew, but you can see your breath. Just.

And the mozzies can smell your breath, too. They are already flitting about the tent.

Beyond Bananas – Feb Ride 1 – Day 2

February 12, 2022February 12, 2022E Sharp

5 February – 14 kms (9 miles)

I don’t really know where I am. Lost in a forest…. (that’s a Cure song). Or maybe not. How can you be lost if you don’t know where you’re supposed to be?

Beyond Bananas – Feb Ride 1 – Day 1

February 11, 2022February 11, 2022E Sharp

4-6 February

Day 1 – 35 kms (22 miles)

The cicadas are playing their abdominal tymbals. It’s a high shrill waxing and waning of an insect orchestra with first, second and third trees instead of chairs. I imagine an unknown conductor coordinating the crescendo over in the iron bark tree just as she instructs the cicadas in the box tree to quiet down until the next rising chorus. They play for hours, a rise and fall from tree to tree, over and over until darkness falls.

The start of the cicadas always heralded the end of summer in my hometown. When the cicadas started up, you knew you would lose all your summer freedom and be relegated to the classroom soon. Therefore, I always hated cicadas as a kid because they heralded the end of the long summer nights and carefree days.

Beyond Bananas – Introduction

January 8, 2022January 9, 2022E Sharp

I could see that he was curious. He was looking over at me with one eyebrow raised and the opposite eye all squinty. It was as if he had picked up an odd insect to study that he’d never seen before in his garden. Hmmm… is it poisonous? Is it eating my plants?

I was filling my water bottles from the tap outside of the public toilet block. He was standing nearby. As I moved back toward my bike… there he came, standard six questions in tow.

The Waiting – Strenuous Activity – Day 6

December 28, 2021E Sharp

Day 6 – 86 kms (54 miles)

“It’s time to go home, when you start to smell the donuts.”

It is my favourite quote from two of my favourite friends’ adventure stories. It was Day 13 of a 14-day backpacking trip. Dan was trudging along, pretty hungry and not all that excited about the food rations left in his pack that late in the trip. As he hiked further along, he thought he started to smell donuts. He didn’t eat them on a normal basis so he wondered why all of a sudden he’d be smelling and craving donuts.

He hiked further. He then came to the realization that it was his long hair next to his face that smelled like donuts. He stopped and put a strand of hair to his nose. Yeah, his hair smelled like donut fryer oil. He called out to his friend. “Smell my hair. Does it smell like donuts to you?”

His friend sniffed. He replied, “Yeah, you smell a bit like an apple fritter.”

Back around Day 7, Dan had washed his hair with a travel-size bottle of shampoo left over from a motel visit. He looked through the rubbish he was carrying in his pack. Yep, the shampoo had an apple fragrance. So the remnants of the apple shampoo combined with all of his built-up hair oil had made his hair smell like an apple fritter.

To this day, Evan jokingly still refers to Dan as ‘my little apple fritter’.

Since then, those guys always say that it’s time to hit town, clean up and resupply or go home when your hair starts to smell like donuts.

The Waiting – Strenuous Activity – Days 3-5

December 27, 2021E Sharp

Sometimes there are voices in the night. They sound like human voices sometimes. But they are not. They are forest voices. The murmurs are rocks shifting in the creek. The groans are distant trees rubbing branches. Or sometimes the click and squeak is an echo-locating bat flying nearby. Sometimes the sound plays out as the gentle clack of a twig submitting to gravity as it falls to earth on top of another stick that fell some time before.

You can lie in your tent and listen to the conversation. Nocturnal dialogue is often quieter but carries further. Diurnal dither is more constant and punctuated by bird call and the buzz of flies, bees and other insects.