Boggy Creek to the Snowy River

Awoke this morning to a breakfast of eggy fried rice, with added egg to make it all the eggier 🥚🥚🥚. We set off from camp about 9, and had another beautiful day of rolling gravel, green trees, trestle bridges — or half a trestle bridge! — and a lot of bird life.

We did see some wildlife today: a few rock wallabies, a goanna and a fox! We rolled along through a sun-drenched ‘road’ cut into the forest and lined each side with the greenest fernery, which lit up particularly greenish-yellow with the sun rising in the east and backlighting the foliage for us. It was just as I imagine the road to heaven might look like!

The nicer/harder-packed gravel gives way to an unfinished rougher section about Waygara Road (or just west of it). From there until Orbost (about 14–15 kilometres) it was more of a bush track, and in some parts almost singletrack. We found it hard going on our fully-loaded bikes, as we don’t have suspensionExcept for my Thudbuster seatpost and our wrists and trapezius muscles were quite sore by the time we made it to Orbost.

We did make it OK to Orbost however, and after visiting the tourist information centre — which is housed in a historic slab hut that had been moved from it’s original location on the Snowy River — had lunch at the Orbost Club Hotel. Danielle had a steak sandwich and I had barbeque pork ribs. We had too many beers, some friendly chatter with the locals and then headed back.

To avoid those ~15 kilometres of rough trail on the way back, we followed the Snowy River for a while on the road, then up the hills to rejoin the rail trail at the Simpsons Creek Road crossing. We rode past a farmer rounding up his cattle, and struggled a lot due to the excess of beer and pork ribs. We made very wise commitments for future trips to not drink a lot of booze and eat a lot of heavy food halfway through a ride, which we shall promptly forget the minute we walk into another little country pub somewhere.

We hadn’t quite skipped the rough trail when we got to Simpsons Creek Road: but we only had about 2–3 kilometres of it. Now we’re camped at the rest stop at Partellis Crossing Road. We pitched the tent under the shelter to avoid ants and hopefully have a nice dry tent in the morning. We’re about to cook dinner — spicy lentil tarka daal — call Anneliese and retire.

We covered 70 kilometres all up today; a solid effort which will see us be able to go a bit easier to Bruthen tomorrow.