Day 460 | Near Thornton River: except there ain't no water
73 km | zzOz total: 14,327 km
Bummer.
A day when plenty broke but I’ll reveal all that tomorrow when I work out whether it’s just a major issue, or a close to an insurmountably humungous one.
Instead I prefer to ramble on in a Zen way about this week’s topic of discussion at the Crazy Guy forum: getting in The Flow while cycle touring, Flow being a state of total absorption with your endeavours.
This might surprise a few people but I don’t really consider myself a bike tourer, it kinda just has happened. I’ve been on quite a few tours over the years but really I’m a walker, happening to use the bike as means of transport as it makes a lot of sense here in Australia, at least to me, walking is just somewhat slow with the big distances on this continent.
Back in the day, in NZ, I spent plenty of time wandering in the hills, even working there in the Old Days for the New Zealand Forest Service, doing plant and animal surveys in remote bush areas.
On my own trips I started going for longer excursions, it wasn’t enough to do the standard 4 day Travers Saddle circuit down in Nelson Lakes National Park, I moved on to 8 days from the Lewis Pass to St Arnaud. I then discovered Stewart Island with the 10 day Northwest Circuit, which with a couple of rest days at Long Harry and Masons Bay became 12 days. The next time I included the Southern Circuit and was staggering under the weight of 16 days food in my pack.
It always seemed to take a couple of days to relax into the swing of things and then a couple of days from the end you’re thinking it’s almost over, so extending the time scale meant there was a week or 10 days of stripping away all the distractions of life, forgetting work issues and getting back to the essentials of life, appreciating that wind in your hair, err, face, struggling from the sleeping bag into cold early morning air, catching a fish and then eating it, lighting a fire after chopping the wood, often with an axe, seemingly used by others to crack rocks.
No mobile phone reception, just a little transistor radio for the weather forecast, it’s majorly peaceful, possessions beyond the absolutely necessary a hinderance.
For me, bike touring has extended that period of detachment from the often ridiculous demands from the hustle and bustle of everyday life.
So it seems Flow is all about getting back in touch with the most fundamental parts of life, almost meditative, where any sense of anticipation evaporates, I mean out here with 560 km between dots of civilisation as on the recent Chilligoe to Karumba deserted road, often no obvious objectives to the day, you concentrate on aspects as simple as breathing, it’s possible to be totally about just your own presence in the world, you get completely immersed in the moment, no desires, distractions, demands, just you with some distant birdsong under the enormous cloudless sky.