Mantaru – Remote Area Cycle Touring!

I’d been inspired Jim Fitzpatrick’s book ‘The Bicycle and the Bush’. Stories of overland cycle journeys in the 1890s had me pumped. Tweed cycling suits, swags and singlespeeds, the stock routes and camel pads of Central Australia, I was sold and winter had arrived. Time for some remote area, off-road cycle-touring yo!

Finally the temperature has dropped below two zillion degrees in the Western Desert. Summer-time makes riding further afield than the pub potentailly life threatening and winter is always a welcome relief. Day time temperatures are currently sitting around 25c dropping to around 2c overnight, perfect cycling weather in the outback.

Outside of Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park the land is Aboriginal freehold, controlled by the Central Land Council (CLC). To travel on or through these lands you must have a permit from the CLC and permission from the Anangu Tradional Owners. It is near impossible to get a basic transit permit for many of the major arterial ‘roads’ and it’s slightly easier to find rocking horse shit than it is to be given permission to camp on any of the homelands.

I’ve been working hard supporting Mutitjulu Community in protecting cultural heritage, my hard work didn’t go un-noticed and last week I was given open slather access to the Petermann Aboriginal Land adjacent to the Park. So stoked, to be trusted enough to be given access is huge. I couldn’t thank the Community enough. Now where to go? I asked a Wati where could I ride to without transgressing any tradional law and he suggested Mantaru, a mountain on the edge of the Olia Chain some 40kms south-west of the Park. He said no-one has ever ridden a bicycle to this area. NO ONE EVER? Correct. No one. Ever. Yep, sounds good. I’m going.

The Queens Birthday long weekend provided the perfect opportunity. Mish was keen to come in a support capacity and my trusty 650b wielding sidekick Sambo said he’d come along for the roll. We borrowed a Troopie, loaded it with swags, tucker and Sam’s kids and hit the road. 51kms out the tarmac to Kata Tjuta and the drop point. Mish and the kids left us, our bikes and some water on the road side as they set out ahead. Murpheys Law being what it is, the ‘nut’ on sam’s front wheel quick release stripped out in the first 5mtrs and for a minute we thought the adventure was over… but with a little ‘bush-mechanic’ lateral thought the malady was remedied using a band-aid as ‘plumbers tape’ to fill out the stripped thread. Phew!

We hit out along the heavily corrigated ‘Homelands’ track, following it through dune-country for 15kms before hitting an amazing Desert Oak Forest that stretched some 6kms to the next turnoff. So far the track had been heavy going, loose deep sand and the odd washout. To cope with the sand I dropped the pressure in my tires to 8psi which is slightly less than the ‘do not run below 30psi’ warning suggseted by Kenda on the sidewall. From the turnoff, we rode past huge rocky outcrops, through gibber and spinfex plains, over a 5 Striped Brown Snake (oops!) and passed by a grove of grass-trees. The track before us was littered with Camels and Dingo tracks but it was obvious that no vehicles had driven this route in a looOOOOOoooong time.

Finally after 40kms of cycling we arrived at our destination, Mantaru. Pump the co-ordinates 25’35’04’63S 130’27’36’15E into Google Earth and you can see the abandoned water-bore and (*cough*) ‘shed’ we camped at. Scroll the map due east, follow the creek line up to the top of the 1012 meter ‘Foster Cliff’ escarpment. This is the best of Central Australia I’ve yet seen. Magic spot. Can’t talk too much about what we saw there as this is a sensitive area for Anangu and out of respect we’ve got to keep a resonably zipped lip.

Best overnight cycle trip to date!

Author: Ben

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