It’s taken a little longer than expected to get to Cairns.  It was the heat again, plus a dose of headwind.  Plus a little over-optimism.

I reckoned it was three long-ish days from Townsville.  For reasons now lost in the mists of time, I didn’t really ever check this in any detail.  Which was a mistake.  Even without the temperatures, which are warm enough for the locals to whinge about, I should have noticed that it was really a four-day ride for me.  And with the heat, the last leg of my Australian riding ended up taking five.

I’ve probably moaned enough about the weather in Australia (and, indeed, everywhere else).  So I’m going out of my way to accentuate the positives.  For example, on Monday evening, while I was cooling off after a tough day to Ingham, it sounded like it was raining outside.  As it turned out, it was just the aircon making peculiar noises.  But it made me stick my head outside, where I saw huge flocks of birds flying about in the dusk.

It took me a while to work out that they were very quiet for a massive flock of birds.  And another few seconds to work out that they were actually bats.  Thousands of bats.  Migrating?  Heading out to hunt?  I don’t know.  But they certainly provided a spectacular, if slightly spooky, end to the day.

Between Ingham and Cairns, the landscape finally became more interesting, as the mountains pushed in towards the ocean.  Still a lot of sugar cane, but with a much prettier backdrop.  Thankfully, the road remained fairly flat, meandering around to find the lowest ‘passes’ through the hills; nothing over about 100 vertical metres, which was just as well as I sweated through the middle of the day.

At Tully, I had a swift detour of the main road to visit the ‘Golden Gumboot’; probably the last ‘Big Thing’ of the trip.  Yep, that’s basically a giant welly with a newt on it, celebrating the fact that Tully is ‘A Pretty Wet Place’.  At least that’s what it said on the sign next to the boot.  I’d have gone for ‘A Very, Very Hot Place’, as I poured more liquid in, and guzzled an ice cream before wandering on northwards.

Yesterday (Day 200 of the trip), I finally rolled into Cairns, the end of my Australian cycling.  Not before passing Queensland’s highest mountain, Mount Bartle Frere, and dodging a few more ‘eccentric’ drivers as I approached the city.

I’m being very generously hosted here by, erm, (one moment while I get this straight…) the sister and brother-in-law of a friend of a friend.  Think that’s right…  I’ve not even met the friend of a friend yet.  But they all seem very nice (though they also seemed to think that I’d want to go mountain-biking today after 2711 kilometres – very nearly 1700 miles – on the bike in Oz).  And I’m conveniently close to the airport for the next leg.

So what is next?  Well, the next country is Indonesia, and the obvious way to get there is to fly to Bali.  The perversity of airfares mean that it’s cheaper for me to get there via Perth (with a stop in Melbourne of all places; have a look at a map to see how crazy that is) than it would be in a straight line via Darwin.  I’ve no idea why that should be the case, but it is.  This will also hopefully give me the chance to catch up with an old school friend in Perth who I’ve not seen for an astonishingly long time.

The Beast and I are travelling to Western Australia on Sunday, and (although it’s not booked yet) on to Bali around Wednesday next week.  Which will gain me an awful lot of flying, and probably a week off the bike to recover before tackling Indonesia.  I really do need the break.

I met some Austrians a while ago, who’d been in Indonesia before hitting Australia.  They said the humidity is not as bad up there.  I do hope they’re right…