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Australia: From The Snowy Mountains to Chilli Beach
East Coast Australia
The clear icy waters of the Snowy River are framed in yellow leaves and the nearby ski slopes of the Snowy Mountains wind through the wooded hills. It's the end of May and winter knocks on the door in the southern hemisphere. To escape the cold, we're pointing our bikes north toward Cape York, 3,000 miles away, where the scenery more closely resembles what one typically sees in Australian travel brochures – sunny days on white strands fringed with swaying palm trees.
A Tiresome Search for B and B
The lines on the farmer's weathered brow deepened into a forbidding aspect when I asked about the shortcut to the town of Dorrigo. We had heard from various sources that the best bread in Australia comes from a bakery there, and if there is one thing in a German traveler's diet that makes him very happy, it is B and B: a thick slice of whole-grain bread washed down with a cold beer. Dorrigo looked so close on the map and it wasn't yet noon, so we thought we could easily travel the 65 miles on dirt through the New England National Park within a couple of hours.
The farmer directed us to what he called "a little obstacle in your way," a dilapidated bridge we would have to get our motorbikes across in a nerve-racking balancing act. "From there on," he added, "you just follow your nose." The sight of the bridge, two tree trunks over a creek nine-feet deep, made our hearts sink until we spotted a fresh set of knobby-tire tracks on the other side....
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