Sidebar: During our visit to Frosty Mango, Alan, being the gem that he is bought me a gift. It was a miniature version of Frosty himself. I was overwhelmed. In early discussions with Frosty, he disclosed to me that it had been a delicious Mango-y dream of his to one day, be chilled and fruit-like on Ramsey Street from neighbours. Do you know what? Frosty is going to live his dream.

We awakened to a dew and wallabie covered scene, but as soon as we got up Alan and I promptly dropped trou and took our respective dumps in the bushes, cleaning our anuses with hose water. By this time, we had synchronised our lavatory requirements. It’s disgusting, I know, but I like to spare no detail.

We were away early, but again, the heat was absolutely crippling by mid-morning.

During the first part of the day, we had been sporadically teased by billboards advertising “Frosty Mango”. The thing was this: damn we wanted a mango, chilled until frosty, from Frosty Mango, and by golly gosh we were going to get it.

And boy did Frosty Mango oblige, supplying us with 4 of the largest mangoes I have ever seen. In all seriousness, I posit that they must’ve been spliced with pumpkins and grown out of the ground. There is no tree on the planet that could have supported those bad boys. They were as big as baby heads. Their name even made them sound like some kind of world-endangering science experiment. The R2E2.  Now, doesn’t that just send shudders down your spine? Yes it does.

We stopped eventually in Rolling Stone to cool off where we found an unbelievable creek and met Peter, a lovely man who, together with his parents, offered to put us up for the night should we make it to Townsville.

Much later than we wanted, we headed off. Our goal was now to try and reach Peter’s parents’ house before nightfall.

The road was long and hot, and was to get even longer when we arrived in town. I always hate summing up all the effort we put in with a sentence like this, but there you have it. We got lost, more than once, and ended up on the highway in the dark with no lights. It was a terrifying ordeal and not one either of us would like to undergo again, I’m sure. Oh, and we pulled over to eat bread with mango. Which was delicious.

Finally we arrived to the taste of sweet, sweet beer, awesome spaghetti Bolognese (of which I had 3 helpings), and some great company, supplied by Peter and the family. To top it all off, we fell sound asleep sprawled out on the basement floor. I was a touch sore but the day had been a success. 

I woke up after a shitty sleep. Alan had experienced similar. I had hazy recollections of waking up in the middle of the night, sitting bolt upright glistening with beads of sweat, and exclaiming, “God damn it, the nights are the SAME FREAKING TEMPERATURE AS THE DAY!!”

That morning, we snuck out, quiet as field mice playing hide and seek.

The day got going and after a while, we stopped for tuna breakfast at rest stop where we met a guy who informed us that it was illegal to cycle without a flag. That I didn’t know if he was joking or not says something about the state of affairs with regards to cycling rules in Northern Queensland.

2 minutes later, we were invited in by that same guy who had now driven past us, in order to fill water and check out free campsites up the coast. Nice as he was to us, he referred to pretty much everyone who was an ethnic minority as “the blacks”. Alan and I shared a knowing glance; this wasn’t the first time cultural sensitivity had gone amiss.

It was so hot.

Soon, we stopped in Cardwell and ware promptly told that it is the hottest summer they have had there for a very long time (40/44 degrees). Appropriately, we bought Hawiian shirts for Hawiian shirt day (the date was still to be decided) and then ate fish and chips in a pub before having a nap on the floor. We then spent some time reading about the history of Oz, and watching everywhere else in the country being destroyed by fires and cyclones on the news.

On our way out, we got into some pies from a vendor on the side of the road. He was a chatty fellow and spoke mostly about the need to “soy-cloyne pruuf haases” (cyclone-proof houses) and the need to improve the Bruce Highway, because “tha Broosies faaked” (the Bruce is fucked). He then gave us free pies for the road. YAY.

Though we had waited a considerable amount of time, it was still roasting leaving Cardwell and after an hour or two, we stopped at bridge creek to douse ourselves in cool water.

That was before we obliterated the Australian K2 - A 1.5 kilometre climb that had been talked about by the locals for the last 4 days as if it was some staggering Himalayan peak. It was not, and we were left distinctly underwhelmed.

Further still, we grabbed some mangos and carefully got some creek water to drink. We were careful, not because it was dirty, but because we had been told about the abundance of crocs in the area, and we wanted to avoid an, albeit freaking awesome, premature end to the trip.

After arriving in Ingham we bought chicken and set up camp near a football field under thousands of bats going somewhere and amidst a heard of wallabies. The experience was as Australian as it gets.

Grimy from the day, we showered naked using a nearby hosepipe, buttocks gleaming against the setting sun.

When we finally got our heads down, we were promptly woken up in the middle of the night by the police, who explained that they were checking we weren’t thieves. It seems that thieves in Ingham like to steal stuff and then camp with it overnight. They checked our IDs while we were in our underwear. Mosquitoes went wild with excitement, as you might expect. It was to be an itchy, itchy morning.

Luckily however, the night cooled off and we managed to get a great sleep. The end.

Splash, splosh, splish

That was the terrifying sound I awoke to that morning. Luckily, far from the flood I had feared, it was just aqua-Maizey spashing around in the nearby creek in some doomed attempt to get clean.

We hit the road about 7.45am and it took a while to shake off the cobwebs – I could have sworn my bike wasn’t as heavy as it felt and it was really kicking my ass on the climbs. I guess that’s what you get for taking enough clothes to survive an ice age into a place that is hotter than the inside of a slow cooker.

Still, despite the struggle, we were wheeling through some cracking, moist, tropical surroundings, and every now and again I was catching soul-cleansing wafts of raw vegetation.

After an hour or so, we hit up a driver reviver run by a couple of chatty volunteer OAPs. Driver revivers, for those of you who don’t know, are roadside stops offering free tea, coffee and biscuits to prevent truck drivers getting cranky (or, you know, falling asleep and dying in a ball of fire) on their epic journeys up and down the east coast. That particular driver reviver had run out of tea and coffee, but we managed to get a couple of biscuits in. It wasn’t enough, but it had to do.

A few kilometres further on, we were pulled over for riding 2 abreast on a hard shoulder wide enough to park several of the giant trucks that had been abusing us all day. I intelligently concluded that policemen in Australia are, in fact, the breasts.

Still not having eaten properly, we pushed through to Innisfail and stopped to pick up some delicious fresh mangoes (a ploy of ours for the trip). During the stop, we got talking to an avid cyclist named Mick who quickly invited us to lunch at his place down the road. We accepted his kind offer, and were soon looking over/in his amazing hammock-tent and playing with a camping stove he had made himself from a coke can.

All the while we were enjoying the company of Mick’s grandkids. Leo, the youngest of them played a fun game with us called “Threaten the visitors with physical violence and then act on it”. Never before had my bladder been used as a punch bag, and let me tell you, it was delightful. For the next several hours, it totally didn’t hurt to pee.

Mick, very kindly, offered to take us to the nearby beach, and we spent a couple of hours playing in the sea and sitting on the sand. However, the absolute highlight of the excursion was getting to see a cassowary.

Allegedly the most aggressive bird on the planet, cassowaries are not to be messed with, and if Alan and I were under any illusions about that, we had Leo to remind us several times that if we got too close, “his claws would be the laaast thing we’d seeeeeeee!!!!!!”. Seriously though, it had big-ass talons.

Leo was also apparently right. Male cassowaries stand roughly the height of a person (maybe a tad shorter) and they have a gruesome reputation of tearing out the innards of their victims. The reason is that young cassowaries are looked after by their fathers, and their fathers are dreadfully protective. If you go near the little ones, the father goes bananas. Think of it like this: you, a 37 year old man, goes to your 16 year old girlfriend’s house to pick her up for a date. The girl has told her father that her boyfriend is coming to collect her, and he is unhappy to say the least. Just before you arrive, she tells her father that she lost her virginity to you. He then opens the door and finds out that you are older than him. He also happens to be the Incredible Hulk.

The point is, these birds are capable of unleashing something monstrous.

Lastly, they also resemble dinosaurs. Their faces are red and blue, and for some bizarre reason they have a horn. Presumably to sift through your guts after it has spilled them all over the floor. In any case, anything that can both fly and has a sharp object attached to its head makes me uneasy. Take Nazgul-birds, Pteradactyls and Unicorns for example. Mean, extinct and smarmy. Shouldn’t trust ‘em.

I now realise that cassowaries can’t fly, but I am too lazy to remove the last paragraph.

We thanked Mick for his incredible hospitality, said goodbye to the grandkids, and hit the road again. It was late afternoon and we had some wonderfully atmospheric cycling alongside the purpling mountains. The sun nestled in amongst them as if they were a crumpled blanket being pulled up higher and higher to its golden ears.

My hypnosis was broken by a rustling in a roadside bush. In a split second, a creature emerged and bounded into the open plain. It was my first kangaroo. “ooooOOOOOOOO” I squealed. Alan chuckled.

Arriving in Tully, we stealthily set up camp and got our heads down. Great day. Not huge distance, but a riot nonetheless.

Hungover, I awoke because Alan, being the massive lemon that he is, was flicking water at my face. It was 6.30 in the morning. Now, I mean this sincerely; the boy needs to sleep more.

Together we scoffed down some cereal before falling asleep in deck chairs next to the hostel pool. It hadn’t even got to 7am and I already felt like I was being smothered by the rising heat. Waking up with a major sweat on, I went swimming in my underwear.

We needed to hit up a bike shop, and found one on the internet called “The Bike Man”. Just an FYI: when we got there, Bike Man was actually a woman.

We got our stuff in order over the next couple of hours and hit the now baking tarmac at 2pm. Road rolled under our wheels, and we were away. Before we were out of cairns, a plane momentarily blotted out the sun as it flew directly overhead. It was odd, but it occurred to me that it may have been the only time I have ever been directly in the shadow of an airplane.

It was so good to have Alan with me, though admittedly I was a touch jealous at how lightweight he had managed to be. Regardless, we were hot and sluggish as we headed away towards the elegantly beautiful mountains, greying against the increasingly sardonic sky. We had been given fair warning, and within the hour, the clouds kept their promise, lashing rain downwards.

After taking cover in MacDonald’s (where else), we went on, slicing through the now clean air. The humidity had gone and it was easy to breathe again. But all that breathing gets tiring, and soon we were naked and frolicking in the hyper-exposed Harvey Creek. It was kind of like Brokeback Mountain, except in Brokeback Mountain there was no danger that anyone was going to get their penis bitten off by an angry crocodile.

The search for food eventually took us to Babinda where we wolfed down some fish and chips and found our first camp – which was both free, and delightful.