{"id":1410,"date":"2009-06-07T23:46:49","date_gmt":"2009-06-07T12:46:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/?p=1410"},"modified":"2009-06-07T23:47:49","modified_gmt":"2009-06-07T12:47:49","slug":"mantaru-remote-area-cycle-touring","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/?p=1410","title":{"rendered":"Mantaru – Remote Area Cycle Touring!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’d been inspired Jim Fitzpatrick’s book ‘The Bicycle and the Bush’<\/a>. Stories of overland cycle journeys in the 1890s had me pumped.\u00a0Tweed cycling suits, swags and singlespeeds, the stock routes and camel pads of\u00a0Central Australia,\u00a0I was sold and winter had arrived. Time for some remote area, off-road\u00a0cycle-touring yo!<\/p>\n

\"mantaru\"<\/p>\n

Finally the temperature has dropped below two zillion degrees in the Western Desert. Summer-time\u00a0makes 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\u00a0in the outback.<\/p>\n

Outside of Uluru – Kata Tjuta National Park the land\u00a0is Aboriginal freehold, controlled by the Central Land Council (CLC). To travel on or through these lands you must\u00a0have\u00a0a permit from the CLC\u00a0and permission from the Anangu Tradional Owners. It is near impossible to get a basic\u00a0transit permit for many of\u00a0the major arterial\u00a0‘roads’ and\u00a0it’s slightly easier to find rocking horse shit than it is to be\u00a0given permission to\u00a0camp on any of the homelands.<\/p>\n

I’ve been working hard supporting Mutitjulu Community\u00a0in protecting\u00a0cultural heritage,\u00a0my hard work didn’t go un-noticed and\u00a0last week I was given open slather access to the Petermann Aboriginal Land adjacent to the Park.\u00a0So stoked,\u00a0to be trusted enough to be given access is huge.\u00a0I couldn’t thank the\u00a0Community enough. Now where to go? I asked a\u00a0Wati where could I\u00a0ride 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.\u00a0Ever. Yep, sounds good. I’m going.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0Troopie, loaded it with swags, tucker and Sam’s kids and hit the road. 51kms out\u00a0the tarmac to\u00a0Kata 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\u00a0‘nut’ on sam’s front wheel\u00a0quick release\u00a0stripped out in the first 5mtrs and for a minute we thought the\u00a0adventure was over… but with a little ‘bush-mechanic’ lateral thought the malady\u00a0was remedied using a band-aid as ‘plumbers tape’\u00a0to fill out the stripped thread. Phew!<\/p>\n

\"desert-oak-forest\"<\/p>\n

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\u00a0on the sidewall. From the turnoff, we rode past huge rocky outcrops, through gibber and spinfex plains, over a 5 Striped Brown Snake (oops!)\u00a0and passed by a grove of grass-trees. The track before us was littered with Camels and Dingo tracks\u00a0but it was obvious that no vehicles had\u00a0driven this route in a looOOOOOoooong time.<\/p>\n

\"benny\"<\/p>\n

\"rocky-outcrop\"<\/p>\n

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\u00a0top of the 1012 meter ‘Foster Cliff’ escarpment. This is the best of Central Australia I’ve yet\u00a0seen.\u00a0Magic spot.\u00a0Can’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.<\/p>\n

\"benny-and-sambo-on-the-way-to-mantaru\"<\/p>\n

Best overnight cycle trip to date!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’d been inspired Jim Fitzpatrick’s book ‘The Bicycle and the Bush’. Stories of overland cycle journeys in the 1890s had me pumped.\u00a0Tweed cycling suits, swags and singlespeeds, the stock routes and camel pads of\u00a0Central Australia,\u00a0I was sold and winter had arrived. Time for some remote area, off-road\u00a0cycle-touring yo!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1410"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1417,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions\/1417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bottlesandchains.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}