And
ride she did! Pauline Webber enjoyed one of Australia’s best bike rides and
discovered the pleasures of communal bike riding.
(Book
now for this year’s great ride.) Images below by Pauline Webber
Victoria may indeed be the Garden State,
but it is also the bicycle state, with cycleways, railtrails and the dynamic
Bicycle Network Victoria looking after the interests of pedal-pushers.
For the past 28 years, this organisation
has hosted the annual RACV Great Victorian Bike Ride and I saddled up to join
the 2011 tour from Swan Hill, in the state’s northwest, to Castlemaine, 590km
southeast.
With 3500 cyclists and 500 volunteers, it’s
a huge feat of organisation. Every morning, the enormous circus of tents,
catering pavilion, bar, nightclub, luggage trucks, maintenance shop and coffee
carts is packed up and re-erected at the next campsite. Most riders take their
own tents, but there’s also a Sleep Easy package of tent set up for you each
night and a hotel package handled by cycle tour company Alltrails. Combining
camping with motels works well, though accommodation en route is booked out
well in advance.
We are eased in with a gentle 50km circuit
round Swan Hill past vineyards and orchards heavy with summer fruit. The next
few days are easy 80 to100km routes through the pancake-flat Murray River
valley, the sky a huge blue bowl over fields of wheat and canola.
This is very much a family event - toddlers
in trailers are towed along behind mum and dad while kids barely old enough to
reach the pedals go tandem or ride solo. Older folk maintain a steady pace
while super-fit high school students whiz by them in colour-coded pelatons.
I get chatting with Len, 81 years old and
on his seventh ride. “I lost my wife 11 years ago,” he tells me. “I couldn’t
let her down so I learnt to cook, clean the house and I took up cycling. I’ve
made lots of friends and kept myself fit. I think I do ok.”
Astonishingly, Len is only one of several
octogenarians who are Great Ride.
Many riders do the tour again and again,
saying it’s a great way to get to know the state. “You see places you’d never
go to in other circumstances,” one tells me. Some towns on the route really get
into the spirit of the thing and it’s always a buzz to hang out in those that
put on a carnival for us. I’ll definitely go back to Barham, Maryborough and
other communities that made us so welcome.
Plus “it’s an environmentally sustainable
way to travel” says one of the volunteer road marshals, who is on her 11th
ride. “These kind of holidays leave a pretty small carbon footprint.”
Among the 1000 school, there are some
Aboriginal lads from remote communities. For many, it’s their first taste of
the world beyond home. “It builds their social skills and confidence,” says
Graham Buckley, who brings students from the Anangu Pitjantjatjara
Yankunytjatjara lands each
year. “For a few, it can be a life-changing experience.”
I burn up the aphalt for a while
Conversation in transit is one of the
pleasures of communal bike touring. I burn up the asphalt for a while with
WARBIES Gabriel and Jo. The acronym stands for “we are right behind you”, a
great thing to know when you get a puncture, take a spill or find your brakes have
gone.
Jo, a slight, fair-haired young woman is
doing her first WARBIE tour. “I like being a bit of a role model,” she says.
“There aren’t many female WARBIES and I reckon it’s good for other girls,
especially the school girls, to see a woman take a position of responsibility.”
Like Jo, Gabriel has done the ride many
times and feels he gives something back by volunteering. Almost all the
volunteers I meet have done the ride many times.
I make a few discoveries as the days pass,
not least that a fierce headwind can be harder on the thighs than a hill. I
find hot tea is the best pick-me-up after a day on the road, that lying snug
and dry in a tent listening to rain patter down outside is one of life’s
pleasures, that computers and mobile phones are non-essentials and that there’s
no better way to make friends than over a beer and chicken curry in a giant
communal dining tent.
The secret to a happy ride, I’m told, is to
go at your own pace. On Day 4, I do pedal-chat with Lyn and Val, whose
shocking-pink “Grannies on Bikes” T-shirts are hard to miss. Both retired, they
formed the club because they’re determined to stay fit into old age. We’ve been
riding along together for a while and I’m thinking we’ll probably keep company
for the rest of the day when Val says, “Well, we better be getting along. See
you in camp.” And with that, they both shoot off into the distance.
Now I’m back home, I do regular rides so
I’ll be match-fit for the 2012 ride. Watch out you Grannies!
RACV Great Victorian Bike Ride 2012,
November 24 – December 2
Lakes Entrance to Phillip Island
Registrations open April 2012
Bicycle Network Victoria www.bv.com.au
images by Pauline Webber
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