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Showing posts from April, 2012

the Botany Bay cycleway

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       Sydney would have to be one of the most bicycle- unfriendly  cities in the world - hostile, aggressive drivers; too many mothers in cumbersome four-wheel-drives doing the school run; and an infrastructure designed for the car not the bicycle.     The Lord Mayor, Clover Moore is valiantly trying to build a bike network, but is meeting huge resistance from the State Government and the bully-boy Murdoch Press-owned Daily Telegraph, appropriately dubbed the  Daily Terror.     So, it appears almost inconceivable that I can cycle forty-five kilometres from the geographic heart of Sydney on the Parramatta River, all the way to Cronulla Beach, the southern-most surf in the city, and for the majority of this ride do it on bike paths. Ill-designed, rough and poorly sign-posted bike paths... but anything is better than the killer roads.     The first ten kilometres is a joy, cycling along the Parramatta River and through the Olympi...

kangaroo valley - riding through tellytubby land

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    When I was much younger and living in inner-city Sydney, my girlfriend and I would occasionally catch the red-rattler  train from Central to rural Moss Vale with our bicycles on board.     We'd slowly meander the backroads of the Southern Highlands admiring exotica like cows and foxes and birds. The green of the fields was reminiscent of tellytubby land. LaaLaa and I would trundle down from the Highlands into Kangaroo Valley, nervously braking at every hairpin bend, before spending the night in a caravan park beside the Kangaroo River. Next morning we'd cycle, or walk, very slowly up to Camberwarra Mountain and down the other side into Bomaderry for another red-rattler back to Sydney. It was a budget weekend away from Newtown.     Twenty five years later, the backroads are still relatively quiet as I cycle away from Moss Vale, enjoying thirty kilometres of dairy farms, intense greenery and even more intense roadkill. Foxes, wombats, snakes, kangaro...