A hot-under-the-collar start to the East Gippsland Rail Trail.
Bairnsdale to Bruthen: 34km
As a so called communications professional for a major transport project a rather important part of my job had been telling people that we would be turning their train trip into bus replacement hell and to please check the website for details.
Which is why it came as a complete surprise to me to hear that coaches were replacing trains today, due in part to the same project I had been working on before leaving for this trip. Oops.
I’d lazily gone over to check the VLine website the night before from my comfy hotel room bed, in between finishing the free biscuits and watching a Harry Potter re-run, the really depressing one where they are nearly grown up and camping and and all the colour has been drained from the world.
Choking on the crumbs I realised I’d need to run the gauntlet of begging the bus driver to pretty please put my bicycle in the bottom of the bus.
My mood really was no better for being woken from a deep, deep, cushion-y slumber at 5am by the deafening, creaking groaning, clanging sounds of machinery. The hotel room I’d forked out for was right up against the preferred parking space for a mini-excavator mounted grandly on the top of a B-double truck.
The plant (as in machinery on wheels, not a lovely green thing with leaves) had arrived the previous afternoon and blocked out the entire window space of my room (I know, first world problems) but I would have killed for it to stay a little longer.
As it was, I felt cranky and out of sorts. I also felt increasingly stressed out about the bus journey and the prospect of not being able to travel the way I’d planned, though got around this bad mood for a bit with the pocketing of an impressive number of margarine and vegemite sachets from the breakfast buffet. Score!
Arriving at the Sale train station way too early, I went nervously up to the counter and purchased a ticket for Bairnsdale. “Oh, just one thing,” I added. “I need to take a bicycle on the coach.” (VLine people love it when you say coach and not bus).
“Ahhh, right,” the man said good-naturedly. “Well you know that’s at the discretion of the driver”.
“Yes but your WEBSITE,” I said in my best cranky city person voice. “Your WEBSITE says that bikes can be taken if there’s room in the luggage area.”
The man was completely unruffled. “Hmm, that’s not exactly right. How it actually works is that there are different kinds of coaches. Some are suitable for stowing the bikes underneath and some aren’t. It just depends which kind you get.”
“But – if I can’t travel can I get my money back?” I asked.
“Yes, yes, yes, well, that’s the least of your worries,” chuckled the man.
I wasn’t in the mood for this level of uncertainty today. The BUS DRIVER FROM HELL loomed in my imagination: a cyclist-hating, power-hungry lunatic who was now fully within his rights to tell me with an evil glint in his eye that his particular model of bus wasn’t equipped to take a bicycle.
What actually happened was much less dramatic.
The nicest bus driver in the entire world hopped out of a near empty bus and asked me politely if I’d like to stow my pannier bags along
He was a classic country driver, enjoying a bit of time on the microphone for the comfort and entertainment of his five passengers.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re now coming in to Bairnsdale,” he intoned smoothly. “We’re just running three minutes behind schedule due to those road works past Stratford, but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a lovely day for a journey.
“The one thing I can guarantee is that you’ll arrive at your destination at exactly the same time as I do.”
One hour into my ride along the East Gippsland Rail Trail I started wondering if the bus driver had taken a wrong turn and instead driven us to Singapore (“ladies and gentleman, I can assure you that we’ll all cross the equator at the same time”).
The air was dripping with humidity and had suddenly become thick enough to eat with a soup spoon.
I was coming to terms with the fact that it was a just a Bad Day. Even with a navigation app, finding my way on to the rail trail and out of Bairnsdale had been a humiliating struggle. Stopping for an emergency Fanta had resulted in spillage all over myself, and the spot I picked to change my shirt had turned out to be home to a swarm of mosquitos.
It was great to be on a rail trail again, but the surface was still heavy going after recent rains and past the wonderfully named town of Mossiface transformed into an almost unrideable goat track.
Kookaburras laughed, the first of many in East Gippsland.
A river crossing at Nicholson provided one genuine highlight, with pastoral views along the snaking waterway and countryside, and the chance to ride over the top of a converted trestle bridge, built as part of the old railway line in 1915.
My arrival in Bruthen brought with it an important cycle touring revelation: kilometres mean bugger all.
Even though I’d only ridden around 35 kilometres, it might have well have been 100. I was exhausted and there was nothing to be gained by pushing on. Anyway, who was I going to impress – the kookaburras?
I was also keen to spend the night in Bruthen which was meant to be a very nice small town with a quirky, low-key caravan park. And so it proved to be.
After stuffing my face with Cornish pastie from the Bruthen bakery I rolled over a bridge to the caravan park and sorted out a spot on the river. I even scored myself a camp chair, found in a pile of bric-a-brac in the rustic little camp kitchen cum shelter. Like everything in the hut it was covered in two years’ worth of pandemic dust and cobwebs which I diligently cleaned off with my cloth.
Sitting in my camp chair, next to the river, in the tropical humidity, I realised that there was one more thing I desperately needed right now: a beer. I hadn’t needed or wanted a drink since leaving Melbourne, but there’s a time and a place, and this was it.
Jumping back on the bike I chugged up the hill to the main street and parked outside what looked to be a large, well stocked supermarket with a decent liquor section. I say looked because my magic had worked again! The 7-day-a-week business was closed today and tomorrow for its annual stocktake.
Sighing but not surprised, I instead found myself inside the BP truckstop servo to see if I could at least find something for dinner. Scouring the shelves for something useful I eventually carried some noodles and a small tin of tuna triumphantly up to the counter.
The attendant held up the tin with a look of consternation on his face. He scrutinised it carefully, holding the faded tin up to the light at different angles. To be fair the tin did look like a prop from a post-apocalyptic movie, where survivors pick through the rubble of long-gone convenience stores.
“I’ll just give this one to you for free,” he says. “Can’t really see any expiry date is.”
“Thanks. It’s a shame the supermarket isn’t open, I was really hoping to get a beer.”
“Oh!” he replied. “Why don’t you go to the pub?”.
“Nah, that’s closed as well,” I said, thinking he meant the local Brewery.
Well if only I’d tilted my eyes up even a little bit I would have noticed the real pub, which in fact dominated the landscape from a fabulous position at the top of a rise, overlooking the Tambo river.
Stashing the mystery tuna on top of the bike rack, (where it could act as a sure-fire deterrent for thieves) I headed on in to the pub, where I was soon standing out the back deck, beer in hand, admiring the epic, sweeping views of the surrounding landscape.
I also had the chance to speak with Jeff, a Bruthen local who had moved to the area from the city about ten years ago.
“Can you think of anywhere else better to be?” he asked, and at that moment he had a point.
I asked Jeff about the 2020 bushfires and what effect these had had on the town. Pointing to the sides of the river valley he was able to show me how the main fire front had moved in, headed for the town, only to change directions and curl around a ridge. A number of homes were lost but many others were able to that their lucky stars at what happened that day.
Jeff remembered vividly the roar of the fire, and the feeling of complete isolation as power, water and telecommunications went down.
Through Jeff I also got to meet Vicki, an organiser for the Bruthen Blues Festival, an event which had seen two years of cancellation due to the pandemic. It was great to be around their energy, passion, and dry humour and great to be sitting in a proper country pub listening to banter from the handful of other locals.
As much as I’d enjoyed my travels so far, they had been mostly solitary. Being around people was the perfect tonic for my earlier irritability and showed how quickly a ‘bad day’ could turn on its head.
Best of all, the social times continued back at the camp site where several of the guests gathered at a long table in the shelter to eat dinner and swap laughs and travel stories. It was convivial company, with much the conversation revolving around my future plans.
“No offence,” one woman laughed. “We just want to avoid being anywhere at the same time as you are.”
I’d had to admit that the extremely frustrating closure of the town supermarket may have actually been my fault given recent fortune with the Archibald prize and various other venues along the way.
It started to drizzle lightly and talk turned to the upcoming weather. A massive rain event was closing in and we debated about when the worst of it would hit. I’d been confident of making it to Nowa Nowa but was now starting to worry that I’d be paddling, not riding along the second leg of the rail trail.
I glanced into the large fireplace and considered if it would offer any comfort if I were to be stranded alone in the shelter. The grate was stuffed with a soggy assortment of cardboard box pieces and crumpled brochures titled ‘HAVE A FIRE SAFE SUMMER’.
A little ironic – not given the weather, or even because of what I’d heard today, but because I’d in fact written that very same brochure myself, in a previous job.
If it wasn’t keeping us safe, at least it could maybe keep us warm.
