If you want to travel across Australia between Perth and Sydney, you should fly. It takes about 4.5 hours and it’s the sensible thing to do. Driving between the two is risky. Perth is said to be the remotest city on the planet. Heading east from Perth means driving about 1,700 miles on basically one road through the outback to Adelaide. It’s 450 miles from Adelaide to Melbourne and then, depending on your route, a further 500 miles to Sydney. The road between Perth and Adelaide — the Eyre Highway — is unforgiving. It crosses the Nullarbor desert, has very little shade, and can be blisteringly hot in summer, testing both concentration and the car. Everything that can’t go by boat or plane — wide loads and road trains of various types — uses that road. There are very few stops for fuel, food, water, or accommodation. Roadhouses that offer these are 100 to 200km apart. You can only drive safely during daylight hours. At dusk and dawn, kangaroos and camels make crossing the road something of a lottery. And patchy mobile coverage means that if your vehicle breaks down, runs out of fuel, or you have an accident, you could be in serious trouble.
Cycling between Perth and Sydney, then, seems like a very stupid thing to do. Unless, that is, you’re part of a group with back-up. So that’s what we did. We cycled from Perth to Adelaide with a group, then made our own way on our bikes to Melbourne and from there to Sydney.
Perth to Adelaide
We brought our own heavy touring bikes from the UK. If you’re going to spend many hours a day on a bike, it makes sense to ride something familiar. We stayed a couple of nights at the Comfort Hotel on Hay Street in Perth before heading off with the group. Alltrails. organised and supported the whole ride. They took the luggage (pannier bags in our case), provided vehicle escorts front and back of the riding group, set up food and drink stations at various points on the road each day, sorted the accommodation, supplied a bike mechanic, gave daily briefings — the works.
After four days of cycling on Great Eastern Highway we got to Kalgoorlie. This included a crazy day (from Southern Cross to Kalgoorlie) of 141 miles where we started at 6am and finished 12 hours later. It was our longest distance. We needed the following rest day. Kalgoorlie is a gold-mining area. When we were there we saw something of the scale of open cast mining operations – deep excavations, gigantic trucks shifting rock and dirt. The discovery of gold in this dry and barren region in the 1880s led to a population explosion. People needed drinking water. This prompted the construction of a massive 350-mile system to pump fresh drinking water from the Perth Hills (more on this here). So cycling on the road from Perth to Kalgoorlie you’re flanked on one side by a railway track and on the other, by a huge pipeline.
After four days of cycling on the Great Eastern Highway we reached Kalgoorlie. This included one extraordinary day — Southern Cross to Kalgoorlie — of 141 miles, starting at 6am and finishing 12 hours later. Our longest day. We needed the rest day that followed. And the scale of open-cast mining in Kalgoorlie is extraordinary — deep excavations, gigantic trucks shifting rock and dirt. Gold was discovered in this dry, barren region in the 1880s, triggering a population explosion. With all those people came an immediate problem: they needed drinking water. So they built a massive 350-mile pipeline to pump fresh water from the Perth Hills (more on this here). Which is why, riding from Perth to Kalgoorlie, a railway track runs along one side of the road and a huge pipeline down the other.
We started this ride in the Australian winter. The day’s heat vanishes quickly when the sun sets. Most of the wildlife was hunkering down — we barely spotted a kangaroo in this stretch. From Kalgoorlie we headed south through Kambalda and the beautifully named Widgiemooltha, before a friendly tailwind swept us into Norseman. Norseman is an old mining town that once produced a lot of gold. Gold mining breeds wild stories — like the one we heard that night: someone had settled an argument by returning to the local bar with an axe and demolishing it. A lot of stories circulate in or around these communities — “mad miners”, “violent drifters”, “haunted pubs”, people “disappearing into the bush”, “shotgun standoffs” — and they tend to get bigger over a few beers.
From Norseman we turned east again onto the Eyre Highway, heading for Balladonia. The Highway has a curious beauty in the very early morning as the sun rises. On the other hand, it’s surely notorious for sheer volume of roadkill per kilometre. Nearly all were kangaroos, in various states of decomposition. Roos are unpredictable — they tend to bolt across the road when startled by traffic rather than away from it. It happened to us, luckily without collision. Given the size of some of these animals, a collision not only kills the animal but will do serious damage to the vehicle. We saw one truck lying in the bush off that road. Could have been the result of avoiding animals, or just a momentary lapse of concentration — not surprising given the long distances between roadhouses and the relentless sameness of the landscape. Balladonia itself is little more than a roadhouse: a small restaurant, bar, petrol station, and collection of motel rooms, fringed by a parking area packed with enormous road trains.
From Balladonia, heading east, you enter the famous 90 Mile Straight — part of which serves as a runway for the Flying Doctor Service. Road trains and 4x4s towing caravans are constant companions. We quickly learned to pull off the road onto the gravel whenever a road train came up behind us. Those things can’t swerve, and need a huge distance to pull out, pass, and pull back in again. Our support vehicles used CB radio to warn truck drivers about the cyclists ahead. Some appeared to understand. Others regarded cyclists as a novel nuisance. As you approach Caiguna at the end of the straight, the bush changes: smaller shrubs, sandy soil, fewer trees.
Over the following days we moved between a series of roadhouses, staying in each for the night: Cocklebiddy, Madura, Eucla, Nullarbor, Nundroo, and finally the Ceduna roadhouse. At Eucla, standing out oddly against the sandy surroundings, is a golf tee — part of the world’s longest golf course (more information about this 1,365km course here). The stretch between the Eucla and Nullarbor roadhouses was our toughest day. We were followed by a dingo, passed the carcass of a camel, and crossed the border between Western Australia and South Australia. Then a headwind strengthened through the afternoon. If you’ve never cycled against a serious headwind, it’s like walking waist-deep in water — your speed just drops. After 102 miles, with 20 miles still to go to the Nullarbor roadhouse, we gave up the fight and loaded ourselves and the bikes into the support vehicle.
About 15km east of the Nullarbor roadhouse, we took a quick detour to the coast and found Southern Right whales and their calves in the bay. These magnificent mammals can reach 17m in length and weigh a staggering 100,000kg. They migrate between Antarctic feeding grounds and warm calving grounds closer to the equator, and you can spot them off Australia’s southern coasts during winter. As we pushed on towards Ceduna, the landscape gradually changed — desert giving way to farms, crops, and patches of green.
Coming into Streaky Bay we encountered rain for the first time. Less than an hour east of Streaky Bay lies Murphy’s Haystack — inselbergs, a unique group of 1.5-billion-year-old pink granite formations shaped by underground water erosion and surface weathering over unimaginable eons. Among the oldest rocks in Australia, these huge, oddly-shaped stones pepper acres of farmland near the main highway and are well worth stopping to inspect.
The road from Streaky Bay to Adelaide passes through more populated areas — small towns rather than roadhouses. We rode through Wudinna, Kimba, Port Augusta, Port Pirie, and Port Wakefield before arriving in Adelaide. There’s arable farming, livestock, and fishing, but also visible signs of decayed industry. Port Kenny looked as if it had seen better days, and so too did Iron Knob, near Port Augusta. Iron Knob claims to be the birthplace of Australian steel — it once sat on a rich seam of iron ore that fed steel mills across South Australia and beyond. We had lunch there and it reminded me of a ghost town we’d come across in Wyoming once (Jeffrey City) — abandoned mine buildings, a dwindled population, empty streets.
We rolled into Adelaide after three weeks of cycling and said goodbye to the rest of the group in the city’s Victoria Square. Three days off with friends and family — very welcome.
Adelaide to Melbourne
For this part of the ride, we were on our own. We carried everything in panniers on front and back racks, made our way through Adelaide’s city traffic, and found a bike path to Crafers alongside the expressway out of the city. The route then took us through Bridgewater, through the hills to Mount Barker and Totness. We had lunch at Langhorne Creek — wine country — and reached Wellington on the banks of the Murray River by mid-afternoon. The motel rooms turned out to be adapted shipping containers, comfortable enough for an overnight stay. We slept on the banks of Australia’s longest river, which stretches 2,508km from the Australian Alps to the Southern Ocean. In this dry region it’s a precious resource, and there are real conflicts between farming demands and conservation. The Murray also forms the natural boundary between Victoria and New South Wales before cutting through South Australia.
The next day we crossed the Murray on a small ferry and spent the following four days on small roads heading south through Policeman’s Point (once a camp for mounted police in the 1800s, now a bird sanctuary), Kingston SE — home to Larry the Lobster — Millicent, and across the border into Victoria (and a new time zone) to the town of Heywood. This was also when the magpie attacks started. These are not the magpies you know from the UK. They’re larger, more aggressive, and will dive straight down onto your bike helmet. Fending them off while staying in control of the bike is no easy thing.
At Heywood, the wind became a critical factor in route planning. There was a strong gale overnight and high winds continued the next day. We decided to find a route that, as far as possible, went with the wind. That meant riding to Warrnambool and then cutting inland to Camperdown rather than following the Great Ocean Road along the coast. The Great Ocean Road draws huge numbers of visitors — and it’s easy to see why, with sights like the Twelve Apostles, those iconic limestone stacks rising dramatically out of the Southern Ocean. Riding with the wind got us to Camperdown on day one and Geelong on day two.
The most direct route from Geelong to Melbourne heads northeast, but it’s industrial country with very busy highways. We chose the longer route around Port Phillip Bay instead — riding to Queenscliff, taking the ferry to Sorrento, and then following quiet roads along the beach as far as we could, round the bay and up into the city. Our destination was Doncaster East, to stay with friends. It turned out to be a very long day. All went well until we hit Melbourne’s outskirts, where the quiet roads ran out, there were no cycle paths to be found, and we were reduced at times to riding on the pavement to avoid busy traffic. It was dark by the time we arrived.
Melbourne to Sydney
Four days off in Melbourne to rest and see something of the city. On the fifth day the weather had cleared — the first day of spring — and we joined a bike path that runs alongside the Eastern Highway towards Mount Evelyn and the Warburton bike trail. The trail was a great way to move safely east out of the busy Melbourne area. It runs for 40km, following the old railway line through the stunning Yarra Valley, starting behind Lilydale Station and finishing in Warburton.
Over the following days we rode through Moe, Stratford, and Bruthen. There are more rail trails in this area. We tried the one between Maffra and Stratford, which a leaflet had described as hard-surfaced — disappointingly, it was compacted sand and gravel and didn’t suit our tyres. The Bairnsdale trail (East East Gippsland Trail) is far better, passing through spectacular scenery, over wooden trestle bridges and along embankments through thick woods. Bruthen apparently sat on the main stock route to Melbourne. When gold was struck at Omeo in the 1850s, it grew into an important stopping point, with a railway service from 1913. The railway has long since gone, like the gold and most of the travellers.
We continued on the trail for a second day, as far as Nowa Nowa. There’s an impressive trestle railway bridge near the town. Apparently there was a derailment here in 1964, with three logging carriages going off the bridge and more following during the recovery operation — given the height of the structure, it would have been catastrophic for anyone involved. From Nowa Nowa we finished that day at Marlo, a really nice spot on the coast with beaches, good views of the sea, and a small jetty with pelicans perched on top of tall lamp-posts.
By now we were close to the New South Wales border and had to rely on the Princes Highway. There are two main ways to drive from Melbourne to Sydney. The Hume Highway is the shorter route, cutting inland via Albury and Goulburn; and the Princes Highway which broadly follows the coast. Away from the bigger towns the Princes Highway is not a bad cycling choice — relatively little traffic at times — but it has some serious hills.
Cann River sits at a major junction with a route north towards the mountains and Canberra. We continued east on the Princes Highway, past logging operations — trucks, sawmills — and over a series of steep hills to Eden, roughly halfway between Melbourne and Sydney. Eden sits on what’s known as the Sapphire Coast. It’s a pretty place, known for its whaling history and a killer whale museum.
Moving north from Eden, the hills kept coming — the steepest climb of the whole trip waited just beyond the Murrah River. Something close to a 25% gradient, barely walkable even pushing the bikes. Other picturesque spots along this stretch included Tathra and Narooma. We stayed at Batemans Bay and the next day managed only part of the way to Nowra before the sun and the traffic got the better of us. The coastline in this area is spectacular — bay after bay, small settlements, beaches, waves lapping the shore, rocky cliffs and headlands. But the Princes Highway was getting busier. At times it offered a decent shoulder to ride on, but then the shoulder would simply vanish, leaving us exposed to lines of traffic clearly hell-bent on reaching Sydney or some beach destination before the weekend started.
We had arranged to stay with a friend in Nowra that evening and weren’t going to make it in time, so we hitched a ride on a train for the last stretch to Kiama. From there we followed cycle paths through Minnamurra and Shell Harbour, then threaded through the steelmaking area at Port Kembla and found our way to the harbour at Wollongong — a genuinely nice spot, which came as something of a surprise; I’d pictured it as purely industrial. From Wollongong a superb bike path follows the coast through Towradgi, Bellambi, Bulli, and finally Thirroul. At that point we were about 40 miles south of Sydney. The traffic was building, safe road cycling was becoming harder, and the bike paths were running out. So without a shred of guilt, we jumped on the train at Thirroul and finished the journey in comfort. We were at Epping by 3pm, and cycled the last couple of miles to Carlingford and a family welcome.