Day 5: The silent ‘h’ in Nhill

Today was a very hard day. It start­ed off nice enough — awoke to kook­abur­ras and cock­a­toos once again, and as I packed up my ham­mock I saw a lit­tle pos­sum moth­er climb­ing the tree my ham­mock was on, with its baby on its back — unfor­tu­nate­ly, the pos­sums had also tak­en the lib­er­ty to piss and shit all over my tarps dur­ing the night. Tak­ing the good with the bad, I guess…

I set out from Dim­boola and before long reached Loch Iel, more com­mon­ly known as the Pink Lake. This salt pan is home to a type of algae that reacts to the sun by show­ing a pink hue, mak­ing the entire lake vary­ing shades of pink depend­ing on time of year, sun posi­tion, etc. It was very beautiful…

Despite my ear­ly start, the wind was direct­ly in my face at 40 kph, gust­ing to 50–55 kph, and any time I saved in the morn­ing was quick­ly con­sumed by my strug­gle into the strong head­wind. I fig­ured out why Nhill has a silent ‘h’ — the hills are ‘hid­den’, in that it seems nice and flat by car but on the bike, espe­cial­ly with a head­wind, those hills are enough to wear you down.

By the time I reached Kani­va, near the Victorian/South Aus­tralian bor­der, I was utter­ly exhaust­ed. Des­per­ate to reach the bor­der today, I was very dis­ap­point­ed to have to call it a day at Kani­va, and I booked into a local motel for the day. My body had just had enough, and it’s unsafe to be rid­ing along a high­way when you’re men­tal­ly and phys­i­cal­ly exhausted.

Kani­va is a weird lit­tle town. Today is a pub­lic hol­i­day in Mel­bourne (for the AFL Grand Final Parade) but I’m not sure if it was being observed in Kani­va. There were some pret­ty dodgy look­ing char­ac­ters get­ting around, plen­ty of meth heads walk­ing the streets with no shoes and no hopes. Again, it could’ve just been a bad impres­sion left by a pub­lic hol­i­day but I was giv­en the dis­tinct impres­sion of Kani­va as a bit of a dead town. The sur­round­ing coun­try­side is pret­ty enough though. I popped by the lit­tle pub for a meal then hit the sack.