Southbound by Bicycle - Part II Ulladulla looks threatening as I come over the hill. There are large, block-like shopping complexes at the bottom of a big hill, a choppy, rocky looking harbour and a rainy sky. I remember an anecdote someone told me a few weeks ago that they’d heard it’s the ‘punch-on capital of Australia’. I get an egg and salad sandwich for tonight’s dinner from one shop and wheel the bike a little way further up the road to the Ulladulla Palace Chinese restaurant. Inside is a space large enough to seat over 100, with about 20 seats filled, mostly by pensioners. They’re here for the $8 lunch special too. There is a family sitting nearby me, of what looks like a young father and mother, their child in a pram, and his sisters and mother. The father picks up the cutlery of his sister, fixing her with a snickering expression and licks every inch of them with meticulous, malicious attention to detail without dropping his sisters gaze for a second. His wife hands her a clean set from across the table. Today as I ride I have been thinking about the word opportunity. If someone were to ask me what opportunity means to me I would say that it is the sum total of all the bike parts sitting unused for years in the back of family friends’ sheds somewhere. Tonight I have arrived to the kind of nice camp spot I had imagined myself arriving to last night. I rode down to Bawley Point, a small town totally unknown to me, then followed a road that went coastward, that led onto an unpaved road, which led onto a dirt track through a forest. In the forest near the coast, I found a beautiful grassy patch for my tent and to do some much-needed adjustments to the bike. There’s a howling wind but I’m mostly protected. Earlier, when I went to look out over the cliffs, the wind was so strong that when I took a piss on a bush downwind I still got a bit of spray back as the wind was bouncing right off of the bush. There is a big sea hawk hovering over the forest that I am trying to get a good look at. I think it is playing hide and seek with me. When I woke up at Bawley Point I went to make a few minor adjustments and inadvertently loosened the break lever making a small problem a big one. I figured I could do a small fix at the Bawley Point shops and then get myself to Batemans Bay, 30 km further, to do it properly. I was sitting outside the shops at 7am when a lean man of about 50 dressed in all black with a big beard and a cap rode by on his bicycle and I figured he might know where I could get the tool I needed and save me waiting 2 hours for the shops to open. The lean man told me that there was a guy called Einstein who lived nearby who would be able to help me out. He said he would show me the way. We walked through a gate nearby and through a long backyard, past about 20 kayaks, a pile of building supplies, a boat, a swing set, about 30 bicycles, and up to two caravans that sat side by side with a covered living area between. Einstein came out, just waking up, and was immediately curious as to what kind of circumstance I could have arrived at his doorstep that morning. He was a big man, with a scruffy demeanour and a deep voice full of calm and kindness. His eyes, slightly turned down toward the temples and full of thoughtfulness and intelligence, his moustache and his frizzy hair were appropriate to the namesake. I spent the day getting to know this gentle man with an exceptional talent for mechanics, fixing the bike for half a day and then on a tour down to the many spectacular beaches of the Bawley coast. We exchanged stories. “They asked a question in a class I was in once,” Einstein related, “About what you would bring on a deserted island if you were washed up with only one thing. I said I would bring nothing. Because everything I would need would wash up on the shore anyway.” This was the perfect anecdote to express the kind of day I was having. We then ran into an old school teacher of mine and his wife. After a lovely dinner with them that evening I retreated early to the luxury of a real bed in a caravan that wasn’t being used. It was like being in the Marriott. I thought about my new friend Einstein and wondered what he’d done with his evening. Probably cooked something quick cheap and easy alone and fiddled with this and that. And he was probably happy to do so. But I did get a feeling like it was a shame he hadn’t had a place at that table with us. Mostly downhill to Batemans Bay this morning and with my bike in better shape than ever I made it by 8 am. It’s a beautiful bay and I’ve just eaten breakfast – leftover felafels on sourdough flatbreads cooked by the riverside on the public barbecue (these things are sensational). I think the only way to understand the beauty of the South Coast is in a certain etcetera – it’s the gum-tree topped cliff top encircling white sandy beach with sapphire watered sea washing in gently, one after the other, separated for the most part by forest, etcetera of it. It’s that etcetera which needs to be seen to fully understand how gorgeous it is.
Posted on: Sat, 22 Nov 2014 00:17:28 +0000
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