Day 21 - Cloncurry to the Leichhardt River

What a cold start to the day! All the sleeping bags, jeans and jumpers were in use up until the last moment before the cycling gear was donned. The road trains (53 metres long with 4 full trailers) were still cruising through Cloncurry as we made our way to the local bakery for another one of the best coffees of the trip.

The riders loved the southerly wind that made the first 50km of the morning more like a Sunday ride. The landscape of the Gulf country is flatter than around Mt Isa with small yellow tufts of grass and loads of 1 meter high red ant nests.

We saw three Wedge Tail Eagles up close, and they must have had a wing span of over 2 metres.

40 km into the day we rolled pass Quamby, which was essentially one hotel. We were going to stop there for a break but it did not open until 10am so we continued on. Quamby has a rodeo each year - it seems that each small town aligns themselves with a yearly event. Boulia and the camel races, Birdsville and their races, and other towns with horse dressage or stockman competitions.

With 77 km completed of our 100km day we all thought we were in good shape to be having a beer at the Kajabbi pub by 1:00pm. All we needed was to change our tyres from road back to dirt for the last 26km of the day, when it all went pear-shaped for Pete's front wheel.

2 punctures and three failed tube patches, takes Pete to the leader board for punctures and the recipient of puncture jokes for the next week. This all happened before "Puncture Pete" even got on the bike!

It was relief when we finally got the wheel sorted out and headed off for a relatively tough 24km on dirt which took us to a lovely river called the Leichhardt. We have been unable to find the road across the river as we think that it has been totally washed away. We contemplated swimming across with our bikes, but that leaves significant risk with the cyclists and/or the troopie being stranded.

Today's cycling turned out to be significantly tougher than we first thought, and we stopped at about 3.00 in the afternoon after starting off at 7:15am. There goes our beer at the Kajabbi pub! We were all amazed that there was no information on the road that it was impassable (and looks to have been impassable for quite a long time).

We have now set up camp on the banks of the river, we can see small fish swimming, there are calls to go for a swim (which I will be doing in the next 5 minutes). The river is about 100 metres wide with large river rocks along a river bed that extends another 50 metres from each edge of the river.

There has been discussion of whether there are crocodiles this far south, so we have decided to send Dom in first as the test case. We'll let you know tomorrow how he went.

We are all grateful to be out of the "fly" areas, as we all looked like a bee keepers' convention with fly nets over our heads.

We are in the last week of our adventure now, with only 4 more days of cycling to reach Karumba on the northern coast of Australia.

Tomorrow will now turn into our longest distance riding as we have to back track back to the main road - so the day will be 140 km including 24km of rough dirt track.

The team has loved the kind feedback from people reading the blog, so thank you for taking an interest in our journey.