bikes

Bright is a lovely town nestling in the valley of the Victorian Alps, a perfect base for cycling some of Australia's admittedly few mountains. On Friday afternoon, the only sunny day of the week, I pedal down the tree-lined Great Alpine Road towards Mount Buffalo. I've wanted to climb this mountain for yonks! The serious climbing starts thirteen kilometres into the ride where the gradient reaches 6% and remains steady for the next twenty kilometres. Sure, there are patches of 8%, but nothing really scary. With all the recent rain, the one constant of this climb is the sound of gushing water. It's as if the mountain is slowly melting from the top down, a granite ice-cream cone in the sun. Just as I'm getting into a rhythm, a Council ute stops beside me and the driver says the road is closed ten kilometres ahead - a landslide with boulders bigger than a truck. I can't bear the thought of turning around, so decide to take my chances. It'd need to be a big boulder t...

The first time I rode my mountain bike up Megalong Street hill, I dry-retched. I needed a new bike, stronger legs and better-performing lungs. I bought a road bike and, for the past eighteen months, have been working on the legs and lungs. How can I say this, without sounding like an arrogant prig... but, I like riding up hills now. I actively seek them out. I'm willing to drive for a few hours to ride up the Category One climb from Kangaroo Valley to Moss Vale. Lovely hill that one - perfect road surface, tree cover so the sun is never a worry, and a relatively predictable gradient (average 7% over eight kilometres). Living in the Blue Mountains, I don't usually have to go so far for hills. Five hundred metres to be precise... Here's a saddle-eye view, no sorry, horrible image that one... here's a handlebar-eye view of my daily ride. It's starts each morning with a right turn onto quiet Cliff Drive. I pedal towards the Great Western Highway, which is not great and ...

Thai food has many essential ingredients - lemongrass, ginger, basil, rice. But, after two visits to this wonderful country over the past six months, and having eaten more than my fair share of sumptuous meals, I'm confident I've found the most added ingredient... sugar syrup. Iced tea, iced coffee, fruit shakes, in fact all of their drinks from juice to cocktails are loaded with the zappy liquid. All Thais love 'khonum', or sweets. Walk into a general store and the front table is filled to overflowing with brightly coloured treats, usually based on rice, coconuts, bananas and rocket fuel, sorry, sugar syrup. In my more cynical moments, I imagine that's why they are so often described as a sweet-natured people. They're full of the stuff! Don't get me wrong. If I was banished to a deserted island (perhaps for crimes against poetry?) with my choice of chef, I'd be hard-pressed choosing between an Italian, a French person and a Thai. But, I'm glad th...

I'm tempted to describe the fourth day of my Southern Thailand bike tour as the day of the debris . We start at Ban Krut, following the Gulf road and for the first time the road surface becomes potted and unpredictable. But that's okay, because there's little traffic, just the occasional ute-driving farmer and smiling schoolchildren on ancient scooters. We pass a fishing village, boats moored in the safe water of the river, racks with fish drying in the sun, old ladies at stalls selling fried banana, street dogs wandering aimlessly. A scooter repair shop owner has thrown all the disused tyres onto his thatched roof to hold it in place against the strong easterly. A pile of concrete water pipes are rolled into a ditch. Beside the river, piles of coconut husks are stacked twenty metres high. A man rides past on his scooter, a monkey on the handlebars, another on the pillion seat. They're used for climbing coconut trees to get the fruit. Much easier and cheaper than doing ...

Southern Thailand is the perfect location for road cycling tours. Good roads, considerate drivers, platefuls of delicious food to keep up energy levels and, usually a pleasant resort at the end of the day. Which is why, after completing the Bangkok to Phuket ride in July last year, I'm back again. This time with my bike buddy, Paul and our wives, Cathie and Belinda who have kindly allowed us to cycle while they visit temples, palaces, beaches and coffee shops with the support vehicle. Starting point is Phetchaburi, a province renown for shrimp and salt farms south of Bangkok. The salt workers, swathed head to toe in loose garments to protect against the fierce sun reflecting off the salt, carry buckets of the crystals slung across their shoulders. Tiny boats are moored in estuaries, ready to go out to the Gulf at night. Fisherman mend nets in the shade during the day. At Hat Cho Am, we eat in a beachside restaurant - shrimp with garlic, chicken with garlic, chicken with ginger an...

I ride nervously into Coonabarabran. Las t night, I read that the town derives its name from the an Aboriginal word, gunbaraaybaa, which in local tribe Kamilaroi dialect means... ahem... shit. This morning, mercifully, the air is fragrant with the treacle-sweet aroma of honeysuckle. Children dressed in green tartan uniforms walk to school, shouldering superhero backpacks. A comfortably overweight woman strides purposefully along the footpath, being lead by a shaggy-haired minature dog. It looks like she's following a furry vacuum cleaner. The vacuum barks at me and hoovers along the zebra crossing. Main Street is also the Newell Highway, so I keep well to the left as B-double trucks rumble slowly downhill. Outside the newsagent, two old blokes, dressed in neat shorts and long socks, discuss the affairs of the day. Both are sitting on mobility scooters. We all have an attachment to a set of wheels, I suppose? At the roundabout, I turn left and catch my first glimpse of the Warrumbu...