Cycling in theAustralian Capital Territory
Cycling in theI took my mountain bike with me, with the main aim of exploring Canberra's cycling paths and off-road trails, and of riding in the Namadgi National Park. The diary will be partly concerned with general, non-cycling stuff. You have just been warned.
Thanks to the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche - Gruppo Nazionale per le Strutture Algebriche e Geometriche e Applicazioni - Sottoprogetto "Calcolo Simbolico" del Progetto Strategico "Applicazioni della Matematica per la Tecnologia e la Società" for financial support. This supported only the mathematical side of my visit, of course!
Thanks to my host, Mike Newman, for his kind hospitality, and to Laci Kovács, Ralph Stöhr and Burkhard Höfling for all the pleasant time spent at Calypso over short and long blacks, talking matters mathematical and not.
![[Sorry, this would have been a thumbnail]](Namadgi/Art.html#Patterns.JPG)
There are some thirty pictures attached to this report. They are JPEG
files, on average about 30K big, the few big ones being still under
50K, with the single exception of a map that would otherwise be
unreadable.
The photographs are collected in what are hopefully reasonably sized
albums, based on a single theme, and containing a few pictures at a
time. All pictures are also linked here via small thumbnails (about
2K each), such as the one to the right here. Just click on one of the
thumbnails, and you'll access the appropriate location within the
corresponding album.
Comments are welcome.
I used my trusted Minolta X-500 with a 35-70 Minolta zoom, and Kodak Gold 100ISO film. The photograph of Roberto Soria and me was taken by Burkhard Höfling. The other photographs in which I appear were taken by Roberto Soria, except the one on the jetty on Lake Burley-Griffin, and the final one of me resting and drinking (water), for which I used the self timer. All other photographs were taken by me.
I like very much Kids on Canberra, which is another good proof of the power of the Web. Several school children wrote essays (with photographs) about their city and the surroundings. Now that the essays are on the Web, they can be of more general use than originally intended. One of the essays, Bush Walking in the Australian Capital Territory describes the Namadgi National Park, which was my weekend target.
The Department of Urban Services of ACT has an excellent article about the Canberra Cycleways Map
Paul Ratcliffe has a Cycling in Canberra page that includes the terribly useful Descriptions and Maps of Rides through Canberra Nature Park Reserves , and Links to cycling related sites for Canberra.
Pedal Power is a bicycle advocay group.
The next day I did a more serious ride along the lake. Canberra has an artificial lake, named after Burley Griffin, the American architect that drew the city plan. It was obtained by building a dam along the Molonglo River. There is a nice cycling path running along the lake.
ANU is located in Acton, which comprises a peninsula protruding in the lake. I rode toward the end of the peninsula, and when I found the bike path I turned right, starting a counterclockwise tour.
Canberra is known as a garden city. It is spread over an enormous area, and it has wide expanses of green and woods within the city area itself. The path rides partly along the busy Parkes Way at first, but most of the time you are close to the lake, with great views of the city, particularly from the Black Peninsula (which is really a detour).
Along the path I found many commuters going to work or to the University. Given the long distances that are involved when you move around Canberra, most bicycle commuters ride good racing-style bicycles and wear proper bicycle outfit (helmets are compulsory in Australia): they change into civilian clothes once they reach their destination.
I crossed the river at the Scrivener Dam, rode around Government House, the official residence of the Governor General, and crossed the lake back on Commonwealth Avenue Bridge. This makes, together with Parkes Way and Kings Avenue, the sides of the triangle of avenues that was part of Burley Griffin original plan. Commonwealth Avenue leads from the stunning Parliament House to the City centre, usually referred to as Civic.
All in all the ride was just about 45 minutes. It has pleasant ups and downs, which are good training for the more serious off-road rides I plan for the weekend in the Namadgi National Park. The path is generally good, but I understand why roadies with a racing attitude prefer to ride on the wide shoulders of the busy roads: the paths has to cross many roads, albeit minor ones with scarcely any traffic in the early morning hours, the surface is rough at times and some stretches are a bit tortuous. Fine to me.
Wednesday 4 was a glorious morning, so that's when I took most of the photographs here. At 7:30 it was already warm enough that I could dispense with my windbreaker and ride in my summer gear. There were plenty of people rowing or canoeing on the lake: with its lake and its vast expanses of green, Canberra is an ideal place if you like physical exercise.
This time I took the slightly longer route over Kings Avenue bridge. Along the lake between Commonwealth and Kings there are a number of public buildings I had visited during a previous stay here with my family in September 1996. First comes the National Library, then the National Science and Technology Centre, best known as Questacon (modeled on San Francisco's Exploratorium, and believed to be one of the best in the world.)
After the High Court comes the Australian National Gallery, which features among others the stunning Blue Poles by Jackson Pollock. I visited the Sculpture Garden outside the Gallery. Fujiko Nakaya's Fog Sculpture wasn't working (it is on from 12 to 2 every day), and the light was not good for pictures, so I came back a few days later for the photographs.
As I stopped to take one of the pictures, where the path zig-zags through the trees, another cyclist kindly inquired whether everything was fine with me. Nice chap! Later it was my turn indeed to ask a fellow cyclist that was repairing a puncture by the side of the path whether he needed any assistance. His only problem was determining the proper rotating direction of the front mountain bike tyre he had just refitted. I told him: he had got it wrong, but we agreed that he could safely ride back home and fix it later.
Some time ago I had asked the same to a guy I had seen running with his bike on his shoulder on the bike path that runs along the River Adige, near Trento. There was nothing wrong, he said, he was just training for cyclocross!
Laziness and bad weather prevented me to cycle again until Saturday afternoon. I went for another ride around the lake. It was nice and warm, and many people were out in the sun. There was some pedestrian traffic, a typical problem with multiple-access paths. I just slowed down and waited for the pedestrian to clear the path, and I wasn't riding fast to begin with.
At one point I stopped to watch a triathlon event. There were dozens of people participating, a clear display of the love of Australians for sports. Some of the participants had a very professional look, but some others were clearly doing it just for the fun of it, and they were riding very ordinary mountain bikes, not the very specialized triathlon bicycles.
It was a pleasant ride, lasting about an hour, mostly in the Canberra Nature Park Black Mountain Reserve, with some challenging sections. The trail follows wide doubletracks. The road-bed is tricky at times, mainly because of smallish loose stones that require a bit of body english to preserve traction when ascending the steepest sections. There are no real views, as you stay withing Eucalyptus woodland, but this is pleasant enough. I even met a gang of kangaroos.
I repeated the loop, with variations, a few other times, as it is easily accessible from the ANU campus where I was staying. There are so many tracks on the Black Mountain, that you can have fun picking up your favourite trails out of them.
This section is the report of a ride I took on Sunday, December 8
1996, in the Namadgi National Park. This was one of the epic rides of
my life, and keep in mind that I'm spoiled by the great landscape of
my home terrain, the Dolomites. I hope the photographs do justice to
this beautiful area.
The ingredients of an epic ride, IMHO, are the following. The trail has to be ridable basically in its entirety: carrying the bike for long sections can be boring or cumbersome. In fact the only trouble spots here were some stream crossings, and I pushed my bike up some steep climbs just because I was unduly tired. I like the trail to be moderately challenging, and this was the case here. You had to work your way up a sequence of relatively short but at times quite steep climbs, and you needed some control to zig-zag through branches and logs. The trail was also quite varied, the many ups were invariably followed by downs, and although I don't have the spirit of a downhiller I am by now confident enough in my means that I can enjoy the thrill of speeding in relative safety.
And then there's the landscape, of course. Well, the Namadgi National Park is a grand place, and touring it by bicycle gives you the possibility of tasting the variety of landscape it offers. I also like hiking, and Namadgi is a great place for walking too, but if the terrain is right a bike gives you the possibility of covering a larger area and have a bigger sample of what's in store. Here the landscape keeps changing all the time. You ride through the beautiful (and exotic to me) eucalyptus forests, and then come out in the open to discover quiet valleys, with peaceful streams running through them, surrounded by soft-shaped mountains. Then there are the boulders, scattered around, no two of them quite of the same shape: I could have spent hours just taking photographs of each one.
For information contact
The ManagerThe Visitors' Centre is located north of the Park, on the access road from Canberra.
Namadgi National Park
ACT Parks and Conservation Service
GPO Box 158
Canberra, ACT, 2601
AustraliaPhone: +61 62 375222
Pizzey's Photo Gallery has some nice photographs, including one of an aboriginal site.
The Kosciuzko Huts Association "is a voluntary organisation formed in 1970 to conserve the huts and homesteads within Kosciuszko National Park, expanding into Namadgi National Park in 1990."
There had been rain until the previous day, but we found the road-bed along the trails dry.
At first you ride in an open landscape. There are many kangaroos around. The powerfully built males will look at you not exactly aggressively, but as if saying "Do not try anything funny". The females and their offsprings will be looking at you very carefully, and perhaps jump away for good measure. The smaller kangaroos are likey to jump into the safety of the pouches.
The terrain was a typical examples of what we would have found for the whole day. There were some brief but rather steep ascents, followed by quick descents. We encountered our first stream crossing: riding through the crossings is not to be recommended, in my opinion, as the stream-bed can be treacherous. This one was relatively easy to negotiate on foot.
I walked this trail with my family in September 1996, during an
earlier visit to ANU. It's an easy trail, that leads you to an
aboriginal rock shelter, featuring some white-and-red rock paintings.
(See my photograph,
or another
photograph from Pizzey's photo gallery containing other pictures
of the area, and an article on Aboriginal
Art from Lonely
Planet.) I had taken good pictures of the paintings, and I have
the enlargment of one of them in my office. The grain of the rock is
clearly apparent on the photograph very time I look at it, I feel as
if I am touching the rock again. (Note: I haven't touched the
paintings, of course!)
There are several granite formations scattered around, usually no more than a few meters high, and a few meters wide. It is surprising to see these boulders, many of fascinating forms, sticking out of an otherwise relatively soft soil. Their origin appears to be the following. Between Australia and New Zealand there is a fault, that pushes the two away from each other. In Australia's eastern coast, the sea-bed is pushed under Australia's continental mass. This has lead among others to the formation of the Great Dividing Range, and the formation of volcanoes, now inactive for several thousand years. In some places no volcanoes arose, but bubbles of magma came up toward the surface. Erosion later peeled off the softer soil above, leaving these bubbles, by now solid granite rocks, exposed.
If you look on one side of the hut, towards the Boboyan Pine Forest, you might think you are not in Australia. But look on the other side, and the gum trees will give it away.
The trail continued with a pattern of ups and downs, the net result being here a slight ascent. In the forest we encountered a biggish group of hikers. We left the woods for an open landscape, with magnificent views.
As we were negotiating the stream, we saw a biggish group of cyclists coming from the Grassy Creek and continuing dozn the Boboyan Valley. We waved to each other, but they rode away before we could reach them, and we were aiming in the opposite direction. Pity, they were travelling with racks and panniers, and I would have been interested in asking them about their itinerary.
We stopped for eating, and then turned right in the direction of the Grassy Creek. We could have turned left, where the others had gone, and reach the Boboyan road by a more direct route.
We reached the ridge of the Boboyan Divide, that marks the southern border of the park. As we reached the bordering fence, we realized we had gone too far, but we had to retrace our step only for a hundred metres before finding the trail again. The trail through the woods was fantastic, not too technical but never dull. We came to a slightly puzzling fork, but we managed to find the right direction with the sun (just keep remembering that it's on the North). We descended through the forest, with some splendid sections, and came in the open again in the quiet secluded clearing of the Grassy Creek. We passed the ruin of an old hut, and came with a fast descent on a fire road to the Boboyan Road.
I couldn't even fully enjoy the final descent. The road bed has a fine grain of stones embedded into it, and despite the front suspension this sent all parts of body in a constant vibration. As I stopped for a banana, I felt as stiff as I have ever been in my life.
Once I was home I took a good shower, and I did my stretching under
the running water. I had a good meal, drank water regularly, with some
magnesium and potassium added into it, and went to bed early. After a
ten hours's sleep I woke up in perfect shape. I had a perfect
cyclist's tan, actually more red than brown. I should have applied a
sunscreen, as
the sun shines really hard at this latitude, but I am
relatively dark skinned, and I've never experienced sunburns in my
life, so I had taken my chances.
