Bikepacking in a Sort of Circle

Posted on June 19, 2025 by freestateofjen

Halfway along Heidke Road, Woodgate: 1st day, just setting out

This year I decided I was going to start back on adventure. I kind of lost my mojo for it a while back after being diagnosed with degenerative disc disease and the last hike I tried to do felt like my back had snapped in seventeen places. I told myself that if I started bikepacking then the bike was carrying the weight not me, so everything would be solved. Easy. Well…

Just about to head out onto Woodgate Road. There was dead cow just next to this sign with crime scene tape on it. WTF!

I mapped a bikepacking trip from my home in Woodgate, Qld to Ballina in NSW, which would take me 17 days to complete, but after struggling to ride the 58km between the start point and the first campsite I began to question my ability to plan such a long ride. I hadn’t taken into account the difficulty of riding up hills. I’m sure it’ll be fine, I tried to convince myself as I kept riding. Afterall, I’d spent a lot of time mapping everything and organising stops and accomodation all the way down the coast to Byron Bay.

Things started to go sideways early. For a start, I went the wrong way at the end of a road and had to ride all the way back, then when I got back to where I veered off I didn’t know which one of the other two roads I was meant to go down. Luckily I picked the right road, but wasn’t sure until I’d gotten almost all the way to end of it. All of this because of my ridiculous aversion to technology. A small example of this is how I haven’t written a blog post in a few years because I didn’t want to have to face turning this new computer on. I bought it and it’s sat there doing nothing for several years, which means I’ve also done nothing in the way of writing. Another example of my aversion is this:

Paper maps I made from Google Earth images as a form of navigation for an 800Km solo bikepacking trip. It would be great if I could let go of the idea I have of myself of being a neo-luddite.

On the way from Woodgate I stopped in at the Isis River BP and got a cup of tea. I thought I only had a little way to go to get to the road that ran along the railway corridor off Buxton Road, but I totally underestimated how far down the Buxton Road the level crossing was and it felt like I would never get there. I got across the crossing ok, but I was a bit worried about riding through the water because the concrete surface is underwater and all slimy, but it was ok.

Isis River crossing underneath rail bridge. I only found this by looking at tracks as I drive along and going back later to investigate. This track takes you from Buxton Road up into Barretts Road area.

It got bad after this. The road up and out of the crossing is almost vertical and it was so fucking hard to push the bike. It was very close to me not actually being able to push the bike forward, but I couldn’t go back either, so I just had to go one step at time, put the brakes on, take another step, repeat X 100. It was horrible. This wouldn’t be the last time I’d wish for a Steerstopper. The track after the concrete road was all kinds of fucked up, but I was going ok and didn’t think to put the seat down and when I lost balance down a big washout I fell off because I couldn’t reach the ground with my feet. It didn’t really hurt, but I got some skin off my right knee and something jabbed the absolute shit out of my other leg. The worst thing was trying to move the bike out of the fuck up. That was hard. Pushing it all the way up to the road was very hard too and I started to get the shits with the whole thing. What the fuck? I yelled at the scrub repeatedly.

One voice in my head said, just camp anywhere, it’ll be fine, but the other voice said, no, it’s shit, let’s keep going. I started to worry about water, but I found the billabong I knew was in the bush, so it was fine.

First campsite at secret billabong off Barretts Road, Isis

The next day was 47km from the camp at the billabong to Wongi Waterholes campground. I was pretty complacent about this stretch. That would be part of my downfall, but I didn’t know it at the time.

Oh my fucking god!! What a horrendous nightmare! I had a lot of trouble sleeping because it was so cold. My sleeping bag and liner that had always worked a treat in the past didn’t keep me warm at all and I had to get up after a few hours and put extra clothes on. It made no difference though and I was freezing all night long. This is a result of another aversion I had: washing and drying my good Mont down sleeping bag. My Grayl Geopress water filter also wouldn’t work properly to filter the billabong water and I was pissed off I didn’t bring the Sawyer filter as a backup, so I started out with only about 1 litre of water. It’ll be fine. I’ll be at Wongi in no time, I thought.

I rode out to the highway and along the inside of the treeline in the direction of where I thought I had to cross to get onto Broadhurst Homestead Road, but I got scared I’d go too far down the hill then not be able to push the bike up the side of the highway to get across it. I couldn’t see the highway from where I was, but I knew I was only around 80 metres away from it, so to avoid the disaster of getting stuck down the bottom of the hill and having to push the bike all the way back up I pushed it through the trees towards the highway, which was really bloody difficult because it was full of kneehigh grasstrees and fallen logs and jabby sticks. I made it in the end and wasn’t too far from where I had to cross over.

Now the easy stuff will start, I thought because I knew where I was going and the road ahead was nowhere near as difficult as the roads I’d already ridden on after leaving my house. I’m golden, I told myself, but I was pretty wrong, actually I was totally wrong.

It was pretty hard to get through the first gate onto the powerline easment, but I knew that gate was difficult and got through eventually. Things weren’t as easy on the powerline easment as I’d fantasised they would be and I had to get off the bike every 50 or 100 metres to push it up really short, steep hills, which was just as bad as the day before when I almost couldn’t push the bike up the road leading out of the river crossing, but probably worse because there were what seemed like hundreds of these hills and they kept coming and coming. I couldn’t remember it being this hard when I’d done it in the past, but told myself I must’ve glorified the last trips I’d done.

What actually happened was at some point I’d migrated onto the wrong easment. There are two that run parrallel to each other, but due to my neo-luddite tendancies, had no way to know if this is what I’d done. It’s fine because although they diverge, they converge again at where the powerlines meet the forestry, so no big deal, I reminded myself and started to relax a bit. Except they didn’t because I ended up at a gate that I hadn’t seen before, which opened onto a big paddock with a house and shed on it. I stood there staring at the house, which looked like a total murder house, and wondering what I should do. I had to go forward (I could see pine trees in the distance), but to do that I had to ride through the paddock and right past the house. Ok, I’m not in America, they’re not going to shoot me, so the worst thing that can really happen is that they’ll yell at me, I told myself, so I opened the gate and started riding only to see that access to the top of the property was cut off by a massive eroded gully that I had no way of traversing. I rode along all sides of it and couldn’t see a way across and small flutters of panic began in my chest. But somehow, in a little corner behind some trees I spotted a tiny gap, which I was able to slosh through and heave the bike up to get up onto the paddock. I rode towards the house thinking, please don’t let there be dogs, please no dogs, please, please, please. But there was nobody home and there were no dogs, but as I passed right by I could see that it was most definitely a murder house and I was so glad that nobody was home. I could imagine bodies hanging from the rafters and all kinds of maligned shit going down right here. Yep, I probably would have been shot.

After forcing my way through the longest, seediest grass of all time (I had to throw my socks out the next day) I made it out onto a forestry road. This is when I started to feel a little bit scared because I had absolutely no idea where I was in the 11 000 hectares of forestry that surrounded me. Plus, it was mid to late afternoon and I had only around 600ml of water left in my hydration belt and I was totally exhausted. I tried to use Google maps to navigate my way to Wongi campground, but after riding 750m in the direction it told me to go, it wanted me to turn left into a gate that lead back into the property I’d just come out of, so I called it a fucking idiot, put the phone back on flight mode to conserve battery and rode back to where the 750m had started. I’ll just ride straight and generally to the left, I told myself because it seemed to me that I was meant to go in that direction, but I kept saying very loudly to the trees, I don’t know what to do! which is not a common headspace for me because I am usually very decisive. After a while I saw I was approaching a t-intersection and I wished silently for someone to help me, but I knew that was unlikely, so I stopped thinking about it and almost started to cry, but I yelled outloud, “No! Stop that, you dickhead. It’s going to be fine!” Almost straight away, two white vans drove around a corner and I waved them down to help me. The two drivers got out and showed me where to go on their phones (this is when I realised it wasn’t google maps that was the fucking idiot, it was me for not knowing how to use it properly).

I tried not to think about how weird it was for the timing of the vans and me to be in same place at the same time in the middle of a massive forestry. I reckon if it wasn’t for them, I’d probably be out there still, lost like a dickhead in the middle of buttfuck nowhere. This is where believing in god would come in handy to explain how the vans and me crossed paths, but I don’t believe in that, so I just have to accept it as something that happened. It still feels wierd though.

Old wooden bridge in Wongi on the way to the campground.

I didn’t get to the campsite until almost 8pm and was totally dead by that stage. It was hard to put the tent up and get my dinner. I just wanted to go to sleep, which I couldn’t do again because I was even colder than the night before. It really felt like it was the worst day of my life!

Packed up and ready to leave Wongi Waterholes campground

The next day my destination was Maryborough, which was only 23km, but given how difficult the terrain had been so far I was worried about getting there in time to meet my mates at Canegrowers at lunchtime, but I made it by 10am, so I had plenty of time to faff around, buying another sleeping bag and trying to find chain lube, which I’d left at home. I went out for lunch with my buddies and then headed off to the motel I’d booked for the night. The bed was amazing, so was the hot shower. The bike loved it too.

Bike inside the motel room in Maryborough. I didn’t think they’d let me put it in the room, but it was the first thing the dude on reception said, “put your bike in your room.”

I was worried about the next day, which was a 73km stretch to Kia Ora, the increasing distances following that and the unmapped sections I had to get through from Brisbane to Byron. In the comfort of the motel room, while reflecting on what I believed was the worst day of my life, I got talking to the Cool Guy I’m Married to about it and I decided that even though I really wanted to keep going, the wisest thing would be for me to loop back towards home and he could pick me up in a couple of days. I really should have at least driven the section from Maryborough to Tewantin to get an understanding of the landscape and leave water drops for myself, and I definitely should have learnt how to use technology properly before I set off. I wonder how I imagined I’d get through the zig zaggy streets of the Gold Coast to the campsite in Pottsville after that? And what about Byron? How would I find my way there? I had this attitude that boldly claimed, don’t worry, it’ll be fine, but would it? I had started to doubt that approach very much after my experience of getting lost in Wongi and I DID NOT want to get lost on my way to Kia Ora because unlike Wongi, I’d never even been to Kia Ora before.

So, I made my way the next day to Susan River Homestead, which wasn’t very far, but I managed to ride 25km overall because after checking in and unloading my bike I found a secret track, which was really fun to ride on.

Secret track near Susan River Homestead.

On the last day I rode back up the highway towards Maryborough and down Churchill Mine Road. Google maps said it was 17km and a 54min ride from Susan River Homestead to Torbanlea, which is where the Cool Guy was meeting me that afternoon. Piss easy, I thought. Wrong again. I was still riding after 2.5 hours and the actual distance was just over 26km. What pushy can travel that far over that terrain in 54 minutes? Google maps was back to being the fuckhead again.

In total the ride was just over 200km, which isn’t bad, but not the 788km I’d originally imagined I would be riding. Still, who cares. At least I did something. It’s better than sitting around whinging about stuff and waiting for something to happen.

I got a lot of advice and information during this ride from people who have zero adventure experience. This is some of it:

Just put it in highest gear and keep pedalling (in relation to riding up steep hills). Oh gee, thanks, you dickhead, I never though of that.
Get an ebike. Yeah, that would’ve been real helpful when I was trying to push the bike up steep hills because they’re peddle-assited, not throttle-assisted.
It’s only a five minute drive up the road. Go away.
Just pull up and camp anywhere. Not safe or possible if you don’t have a caravan.
My friends just ate tomatoes and they rode 200km a day on their remote bikepacking trip. What a load of codswallop. How did they keep the tomatoes from being squished? Where did they buy them from in the middle of nowhere. Who likes tomoatoes that much?!

Generally, people have no understanding of what it’s like to do something like bikepacking or hiking and give out advice about how to do these things based on their experience of driving a car and/or car-based camping. Also, I don’t think many people do shit like this on their own, so they don’t really get that you have to do everything for yourself by yourself and there’s no one to help you out.

On this trip I had someone ask me why I would do this sort of thing. I couldn’t think of a good answer at the time, but now I know why. It’s because I want to see what I’m made of. Each time I do an adventurous thing I get to see more of what I’m made of, which gives me leverage to keep finding out more about myself. Yeah, shit went sideways a fair bit on this trip, but I handled it and now I get to do more adventures with more knowledge and an even greater understanding of how completely awesome I am.

**Go wild to see how awesome you really are**

How a hike turned into a concert, turned into a bike ride, turned into a clay lease, turned into hot chips..

Posted on August 14, 2022 by freestateofjen

I rode a long way, but it wasn’t meant to be like that and I blame The Hu.

I was all ready to hike the northern section of the Fraser Island Great Walk. I’ve done the entire southern section once and various parts of it a few times over the years, but could never make the timing work for the northern section, not to mention the added cost of chartering a light plane to get off the island.

Basically, organising it just seemed waaay too much effort and I could never be bothered to apply myself to working out how to get to the ferry landing, booking the ferry, working out distances, booking campsites, booking the plane and generally overcoming my ever-increasing malaise when it came to even thinking about it. These kinds of reasons are the same ones that make me never want to do the Gold Coast Hinterland Great Walk: it’s too fucking annoying to organise! BUT, I still wanted to do it, so I made the commitment that I would. Then there was The Hu.

The Hu were playing at Eatons Hill Hotel (approx 450km from where I live) the night before I was meant to leave on the hike. What a shame, I thought. I won’t be able to go on the hike. Ohhhh. So sad. It seemed much more important to see an amazing international band with the Cool Guy I’m married to than to go on a hike that will still be there for at least another year, well, until climate change takes us all down anyway. And by that time, well, I don’t imagine I’ll have too much time for hiking, what, with fending off the climate-induced zombies and what-not.

The Cool Guy dropped me and my bike on Rainbows Road in Childers on the 7th of August. I was pretty excited because it was the first chance I’d had to use the bikepacking equipment I’d bought ages ago… Ok, I know for some die-hard bikepackers that panniers are NOT allowed for bikepacking, but you know what, I don’t actually care what anyone else thinks because it’s my life and I get to make my own rules, so panniers are bikepacking gear. Good, we’ve established that.

I was a bit worried about going the wrong way through to Wongi from Rainbows Road, but I’d driven the route twice before and when I saw the super-rough causeway I knew I was on the track, Some of the hills were pretty steep and I was able to pick up really good speed on the downsides. I got up to 31km/hr at one point. That was very cool.

I heard a sound that was like running water, so I stopped the bike to listen properly. It was a bird, but I couldn’t see what kind. I’m guessing some kind of flycatcher. It would have been good to see it because I can’t ever remember hearing a birdcall like that before. In that same spot I spotted heaps of Hardenbergia violacea, which I was pretty excited about because I want to grow some from seed, but I couldn’t find any pods, just flowers. I did pick up a pretty cool rock though. Ooooh, exciting. I don’t normally collect rocks and shells because I think it’s stupid, but this one was really weird looking, and of course that appealed to me, so I got it, but I really should have just left it where it was.

There were lots of wooden bridges and I took photos of the bike at a couple. If I’m honest, I felt like I was pretty fucking cool.

At Duckinwilla I called in to see some people (E & M) I knew through a family I was once really close to (this family turned their backs on me when I was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2005) It was really hard not to let the conversation degenerate into a hate-spewing platform, but kept a pretty good lid on it. I did manage to get it across how I couldn’t understand how these old friends of my mine can possibly live with themselves after what they did, and how confusing it was that their eldest child (my old best friend) is now working as psychologist. “How can someone so thoughtless and selfish choose to work in a profession that is based on caring, helping and being compassionate? I just don’t understand that at all, ” I said. E didn’t have any answers, but I wasn’t really looking for that anyway, because I don’t think there are any answers to that question and there is no way to understand any of it. I wrote a story about it: here.

After E & M’s place I rode and rode and kept riding. It got dark, but I just kept going because I thought that I had to get there eventually. I could hear the highway very faintly off in the distance, which made me think I’d gone the wrong way, but I wasn’t too concerned because I though that I could just camp in the bush near the highway and get my bearings in the morning.

I rode up and down hills, over causeways, through muddly holes, past swamps and at one point I saw a torch beam in the trees. I yelled out HELLO, but no one yelled back, so I kept riding. And riding. And riding. Flying down hills, over boulders, rutts and on into the blackness, I screamed, “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?” I thought that doing what I was doing was a pretty good way to live a proper life; one that you wouldn’t regret; one that you could be proud of. And am I proud of my amazing life.

At around 9pm I reached a highway, but I could tell it wasn’t the highway I thought it was going to be (The Bruce Highway). It was way to narrow for that. I thought it might be the Maryborough-Biggenden Road, and when I heard a train sound its horn, I said to myself I bet I’m in Woocoo. I carried on for a while, swearing and shouting out loud about being so far from where I was meant to be and how there was nowhere to camp and blah, blah blah. By this stage I was cold, hungry, tired and thirsty. Plus, my legs and back were killing me. In fact, it was hard to move. I was in a bit of a “mood”

I had to park the bike and go scrabbling around in the dark to find somewhere to camp. Finally I found a decent spot at the top of big cliff that I had to climb up. Thank god for my Nike turf boots.”How am I meant to get the bike up there, you fuckhead?” I yelled at the night. It wasn’t really a problem, I just rode right to the spot on a dirt track that ran along the top of the cliff. Problem solved.

I was camped in the middle of a clay lease, which is why there were giant holes and cliffs everywhere, but I thought that there must be houses nearby because I could hear dogs barking and faint voices every now and then. At least I was happy with the spot. It was out of view from all traffic. That’s something that is really important – I can’t camp anywhere on my own that people would notice me. It just makes a lot of sense to stay hidden.

It was pretty hard to let go of being regimented regarding how things were “meant” to be. In my journal I wrote: This is the first unplanned trip I’ve ever done. I’m glad I don’t have rules about making it here or there specifically because I think that would have been pretty hard to cope with. So I didn’t make it to Wongi. Big deal.

I tried to sleep, but the bush was so noisy. At one point it was so cacophonous that I just assumed it must be dawn, but when I looked at my watch, it was only 11pm. There was a barking owl, which I actually mistook for a dog to start with, nightjars, a horse galloping and a push bike ride past on the track behind me. I told myself that it wouldn’t be a bike because that was at about 2am, but in the morning there were gravel bike tracks there.

At one point a car pulled in off the highway. The engine stopped and two people got out. I got a teeny bit worried because I wasn’t too excited about them turning the car off. Usually you only turn the car off if you’re going to hang around for a while. Anyway, they started giggling and after about 20 seconds, got back in the car and drove off. I think they dumped a child’s carseat in the bush near the clay lease sign. I saw it there the next day.

I got really cold during the night, which is totally stupid. Why didn’t I bring the good -5 Mont sleeping bag instead of the cheap-ass +10 Denali bag? What a dickhead. You’d think I would’ve learnt from the experience of being completley frozen when I hiked the Cooloola Wilderness Trail a few weeks back. I was even stupider then because I didn’t take a sleeping bag at all, just a useless “thermal” sleep sheet. Just quietly, I don’t think anything you buy in Australia that is called “thermal” is really thermal at all. I had all my clothes on: socks, shiny leggings under thermal leggins, crop top, t-shirt, thermal jumper, windproof jacket, bandana and a beanie and I was still freezing.

I reckon I have a condition called PTCD, which stands for post traumatic cold disorder. Its a real thing:

It took me a while to get going in the morning because my back was killing me. Luckily I only had to ride on the highway for about 100m because I found a track that ran between the road and properties. I saw a dude in his front yard, so I called out to him and said, “where am I?” He answered that I was in Woocoo. I knew it, I thought, so I continued on into Maryborough, where I thought I would decide where to ride to next. I started to think that I would head out to Tin Can Bay, but when I saw it 73km away, I decided against it.

In town I got a coffee and started thinking about going to a favourite childhood fish and chip shop on Creek Road, but by the time I got there, I’d decided that I’d wait and get the chips at Maddigans in Hervey Bay because it seemed perfectly reasonable to me at that point that I could just ride into Hervey Bay, lob up to a motel and get a room for the night. I started fantasising about what it would be like to have a hot shower and lay down in a comfy bed without horses galloping around in the distance.

The road into Hervey Bay wasn’t that fun because it was busy as cats burying shit in concrete, but for some of it I was able to ride on a track I found that ran parallel to the road. When that ran out at the Susan River bridge I had to get back out with the traffic. At least I made it into Hervey Bay before it got dark. Not long after congratulating myself about my ultimate greatness, I discovered there were no vacancies in any of the caravan parks or motels anywhere in the whole entire town. If there is a word that is the opposite of YAY, then that’s the word…Oh yeah, there is a word: FUCK!!!!

So, I got the chips at Maddigans and had to call the Cool Guy to pick me up a day early. If I had’ve camped at the Susan River Homestead, instead of being so stubborn, I could have had an extra day of riding. It just seemed impossible to let go of the idea of getting into Hervey Bay once it took hold. No, I can make it! my mind said.

I don’t even know how far the whole thing was. My fit watch reckons it was 122km, but online maps reckon it was 180km. It seems more than 122, but I don’t think it was as much as 180. Still, I feel really glad I did it. Not a bad effort for my first solo bikepacking adventure.

The thing I love most about adventuring is discovering how to deal with novel situations. Skills in this domain are emergent and you never know what you’re made of until you have to get through something new and challenging. For example, how to deal with WordPress just deleting 3/4 of the original version of this post that took me almost 8 hours to craft and refine. Don’t believe a website that tells you it’s auto saving; it never is.

Not having an itinerary is totally liberating because this is where next-level adventure happens. Imagine if we all approached our lives this way.