Rod’s surfboard on the Gold Coast and didn’t trust my repairs, I borrowed a pair of Madeleine’s. Somehow, I managed to destroy these as well and decided to call an end to my travelling wrestling career for the year. Obviously, my thighs were out of control. Madeleine was very understanding, being a seasoned bicycle tourer herself. Madeleine spends her holidays navigating the outdoors by bike, foot, canoe, and sometimes even hand – every mountain she summits she likes to do a handstand upon. I first met Madeleine at a wrestling camp. We matched up very unevenly. She was about half my size, but exuded approximately five times the energy of most people. Between throwing me from fireman’s carries and flipping me over with hip heists, Madeleine – being a scientist as well as a wrestling whiz – had my head spinning with explanations of the structure of her favourite organic compound, and how electron microscopes work. After teaching me a few moves and answering my amateur science fan questions, she rushed off a few hours later to attend some sort of conference that was going to involve her speaking German.
Staying with Madeleine in Brisbane, it was wonderful to observe at close quarters a person who has got their priorities in the right place. I particularly appreciated Madeleine’s focus on waste. Besides the normal responsible round-the-house actions such as collecting food scraps for compost, and making sure rubbish is recycled properly, Madeleine aims to create as little rubbish as possible from food and other purchases. In a previous share-house she participated in a year-long, no-waste-creation experiment. Besides what they could compost in their own yard, the housemates aimed to not buy anything that created rubbish. Even in my current simple cycling lifestyle, I accumulated a bundle of rubbish each day, which would be strapped to Trailer in a plastic bag when I was away from the city and the convenience of rubbish bins. Maybe I should have dedicated part of Trailer’s surface to a small vegie patch.
In the morning, I made an early getaway from Madeleine’s inner-Brisbane home to speak at a high school on the outskirts of the city. En route, I was surprised to bump into Paul who was heading north out of town. It probably would have been a bit less surprising for me had I realised we were in a unisex, not female, public toilet at the time.
After my school visit, I pushed on, as I needed to be in Toowoomba by the next afternoon. I’d been hearing scary things about the steep climb up the Toowoomba Range, so was hoping to get close to the foot of the range by evening.
As the sun moved lower in the sky, I started looking for camping options. There was no open scrub around; everything was fenced off. I reached a small town and sat myself on a petrol station veranda to weigh up my options. I had the following choices:
A. Carry Bike and Trailer over a barbed-wire fence into the property of someone who may very well own a shotgun and large dogs.
B. Take up the offer of the seemingly friendly motorcyclist I met inside the petrol station to camp in his front yard.
C. Sneak behind some abandoned shops down the road and hope that no one noticed me spending the night there.
D. Ride fifteen kilometres out of my way to a caravan park.
Pondering these options, I realised what was missing from the list:
E. Go back inside and buy the huge bag of reduced-price muffins on sale for $1.20.
Feeling emotionally and physically renewed after taking up Option E, I decided to head down the side road to the caravan park. I had only turned off for a few metres when I spotted a school with a big empty lot full of long grass next to it. Perfect. I had myself an Option F.
I waited out the remaining daylight hours back in the main street watching the low, thick clouds with evening sunlight breaking through, and munching on muffins.
Under the cover of darkness, I moved back to the vacant lot and started setting up camp. When my tent was only halfway up, a motorbike roared into life across the street and headed my way with its headlamp blazing. The only thing I could think to do was duck down behind the long grass and pretend that I wasn’t there. Then I remembered: Bike and Trailer were covered from top to bottom in reflective tape and I was still wearing my fluoro vest. As hard as we tried, we could not become invisible.
The motorcyclist drove straight over to us and turned out to be the school caretaker. Instead of sending me to jail for trespassing and possessing indecently cheap muffins, he offered me the use of the school showers and toilets. I was relieved, although arrest could have provided valuable publicity for Cycle of Learning.
Tuesday 19 April
Chinchilla to Jandowae, Queensland
76 kilometres – 4 hours 10 minutes
I was particularly excited to ride into Chinchilla on Monday afternoon. Chinchilla State High School was the very first place to book me in to speak. The principal had called me the year before, just hours after I had sent a pile of emails out. He’d been so friendly and enthusiastic about Cycle of Learning that I’d imagined that within days I would have hundreds of similar invitations from around the country pouring in. That did not happen; but my entire itinerary had been planned around this small town that I’d not heard of until that first phone call. I should have been aware of it though, as it is the capital of my favourite food: watermelon.
I can still remember how I felt, around the time of that phone call from Chinchilla. I’d just started my planning, I was full of ideas and excitement and I was sure Cycle of Learning would be massive and awesome. My massive and awesome vision was hazy around the edges, though. The vague images included the army of people I would have helping me deal with logistics; newspapers and TV stations following my every move around the country; businesses trying to outbid each other to have me accept their sponsorship; teachers planning units of work based on the resources from my website; and school children across the nation logging onto my web forum to send messages and questions to students in Kodaikanal. I just wasn’t sure exactly what I would need to do to reach these massive and awesome heights.
Before my first visit to Kodaikanal in 2001, I had a similarly hazy and quixotic image of the time I would have “volunteering” there.
The Road to Kodaikanal
I had been backpacking through Asia and was looking for some volunteer work to do before I returned home. When Norm suggested that I join him on his trip to visit the Grihini program in Kodaikanal I was thrilled. On the long train trip from Calcutta to Chennai, I thought how good it would be to actually be useful and finally contribute something. If there is any emotion I am good at, it is guilt. I’d spent nearly eight months travelling through Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, China, Pakistan, Nepal and northern India. Like most people who visit these countries from a wealthy nation, I was struck by the poverty of many people I saw. I was also hounded by the disparity of my trip and their lives. I had worked a part-time job through three years of university and saved enough to travel in relative comfort through these countries for a year. I had the freedom to go where I wanted, buy food, pay for clothes and accommodation, and spend time reading, sight-seeing and wandering around because of the luck of where I was born.
I remember sitting at the top of a temple of Angkor Wat in Cambodia one evening, when a wave of guilt-ridden nausea overwhelmed me. From the pure, logical facts of the matter, I should not have been sitting there watching street kids run (or limp, if they were missing a limb from landmines) from tourist to tourist selling postcards. I had done nothing to deserve this position of privilege. Logic told me that I should return to Australia immediately and devote any earnings or resources I had, or gained in the future, to people who deserved neither the poverty nor the hardship into which they had been born. But, of course, as the sun set and I climbed down the temple ruins, I managed to push the logic aside just enough to return to the first-world mindset that let me justify my indulgence and privilege.
As
