TRAVEL FEATURE - AUSTRALIA
LEIGH WILKINS
MILE MUNCHIN '
Bugger me ! I could barely take a breath let alone mutter a curse as I watched the other riders slip and slide up the steep , densely overgrown hill . Whose idea was this ? What the hell were we doing ?
It was a one-day ride through the Great Otway National Park in Australia ’ s southern state of Victoria . Yes , everything in Australia is prefixed with Great , that ’ s for another time , to locals the area is just known as The Otways .
I ’ d ridden here too many times to remember , a rabbit warren of tracks , varying condition , varying terrain . It ’ s a riders paradise , whether on sealed roads or sludgy off-road tracks . Yet nothing could prepare me for this … perhaps I tell a lie .
The evening before had been spent consuming one or three beers too many , the mind the next day was fine to ride , the body suggested otherwise . Dehydrated and carrying too many Covid kilos I was struggling to crawl up the hill and wondered how long it would take for someone to find me if I just rolled over into the thick underbrush of the rainforest never to be seen again .
This wasn ’ t riding , it was purely a ‘ walk down ’ to Carisbrook Creek , deep within the hills , a place that had a past . The natural history goes back to the beginning of time , the history of Aboriginal people tens of thousands of years , this history we ’ d witnessed was more recent , maybe as recent as the last 100 years . And it was fascinating .
Our guide , Rodney Brown of Mile Munchin ’ Adventures was taking us to places most of us had never seen before and as I fought to make my way back to the track , the location of our bikes , I wondered how anyone could know about this place . An abandoned sawmill village , deep within the rainforest , hidden in the depths of a value , overgrown , and
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