Early last night friends from Adelaide had arrived by car, dying to inspect the mad cyclist after a week of his lonely journey, ready to assist practically (drive me to the nearest bus-stop or air-strip and let me continue to travel in comfort), medically (tend all the bruises which, no doubt, reckless Australian drivers had inflicted upon my “weakening” body) and mentally (after a week on my own I must have surely started talking to myself, gone bananas, be close to a mental breakdown). In a day or two, I was to leave sealed roads, I was approaching an even less inhabited country and my friends probably envisaged this weekend to be their last chance to “save” me.Well, I had to disappoint them on all three counts. Firstly, I was getting fitter by the day and I did not feel a remote longing for any type of reclining seat, bus, plane or car. Secondly, against all warnings, I had nearly exclusively experienced careful drivers of cars, buses, trucks. Many of them slowed down, gave lots of space when overtaking, and, overall, showed far more consideration than European drivers.
Particularly yesterday, today’s mechanised followers of last century’s bullockies through Port Germein Gorge, truckies, with heavy loads to God knows where, had been extraordinary careful. A distinct difference to the majority of Irish truckies, whose jolly “here-I-come-attitude” can be dangerous at times, or German truckies whose attitude of “I won’t slow down for I have a time-table to keep” is just a dangerous, or British drivers in general, whose visual senses don’t seem to be recognising a cyclist at all. I do not want to be misunderstood: Australian drivers had not left me in a cyclist’s paradise, but overall, I had felt much safer on the road for the past eight days than on many a European road.
On the third point of my friend’s concern I had to admit that I am just simply an odd traveller. While I have nothing against company, I can be quite happy on my own. So far I had thoroughly enjoyed my relative solitude without beginning to talk to myself. Just as well, one may say, for South Australia is not one of the most populated places in the world.
With a population of 1.318.770, including Aborigines (Atlas of South Australia, p. 69) of which just under 900.000 live in Adelaide; there are only about 400.000 people left for the rest of the state. Subsequently, the towns I had travelled through had been small. Tarlee, near Riverton, with a population of 150 was probably one of the smaller ones, numbers rising to 500 (Wirrabara) and 1000 (Gladstone), leaving places like Kapunda (3000) and Clare (3000+) as the biggest towns. Nearly always, streets had been fairly quiet, not unlike Irish rural towns in winter. Who would venture out into the cold without reason if spring was only another 4 weeks away? Farmers and vintners were busy tending to the machinery that would soon be required to do hard work but farms being way off the road, one could only get hints of their activity at garages and hardware shops.
I had, of course talked to shopkeepers, publicans, their guests and so on but it had been nothing along the lines of the hustle and bustle of a hectic holiday social life. And I did not miss it. Instead, I had enjoyed a quiet pint, or rather a few schooners (glasses), and an otherwise quiet evening of reading. This surely put me outside the mainstream of Australian-male-activities, as well as way off the mainstream social habits of Ireland but, for the moment, I couldn’t care less
