The Chocolate Mill

A group ride for me today, with a run up to the Chocolate Mill just north of Daylesford. The chocolate mill is a shop that makes its own chocolate on site, and as a result it is so much nicer than the horrible chocolate you typically get in Australia. As a motorbiking destination rides to the mill usually go well since it's an enjoyable ride with no particularly dangerous roads. This one was no exception.

The basic route took us to Woodend via Whittlesea, Wallan and some roads around Mt Macedon. Then to the Chocolate Mill, stopping off to see Trentham Falls (pictured), with an unusually high volume of water given the recent rains and flooding in the region. Then back to Melbourne on the Western Freeway, but not before enjoying part of the well-known biking route between Kyneton and Mymiong.

Something I must focus on is not looking at unusual hazards. A bike goes where you look, so looking at hazards is a bad thing. In the first leg of the ride another rider ran wide ahead of me and as you can see from the video I left it unnecessarily late to countersteer around him. The video was taken from a new helmet mounted camera. Click here for some edited footage of the ride.



Riding Distance: 360 kms

The Red Chapel

I watched my last film at MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival) on Thursday: The Red Chapel. It's a documentary about North Korea - the Danish director and two Danish comedians born in South Korea (presumably without South Korean passports) visit the country on the pretext of doing a comedic theatrical performance. The film won Best Foreign Documentary at Sundance, and there was a full house of about 300 (mainly Australian) people to see it.

The monuments and places visited didn't interest me so much; I have been to North Korea and everyone who goes there, whether tourist, journalist or diplomat, sees the same things. What was great about the film was that the younger comedian Jacob showed so perfectly the contrast of emotion in any North Korean visit. Your North Korean hosts are so unbelievably kind and generous to you, it is hard to remind yourself of what actually goes on there, and even harder to bring it up in conversation.

There was a great moment at the end where the director gets Jacob, who has cerebral palsy, to ask his female host why he hasn't seen any other disabled people in Pyongyang. But before she thinks of an answer, Jacob rescues her by saying that he should meet some on his 'next visit'. I know exactly that feeling. It was very difficult for me to ask the hard questions, particularly when you are being filmed all the time (as all tourists are) and when there is a more senior onlooker in attendance. There is no danger to you, but the consequences for your host is one of the many unknowns.

There was nothing of interest to me at MIFF on its final weekend, so instead I took a cycle ride from the hills of Belgrave, on the Eastern end of the metropolitan train line, South West to the beach at Carrum. The first section of the ride links Belgrave to the pretty Lysterfield Lake area via some rather muddy tracks through Birds Land Reserve. It was heavier going than I expected, and at one brief point I had to get off the bike a walk it through the mud. A commuting bike was not the ideal piece of equipment for this section of the ride. Rough tracks comprised the remainder of the route from Monbulk Retarding Basin to Lysterfield Lake. Around Lysterfield Lake is the State Mountain Bike Course; a large network of mountain bike trails that were built a few years ago for the 2006 Commonwealth Games. The local cafe doubles as a bike shop where you can rent or buy mountain bikes, some with price tags of over 6,000 AUD.

It's a faster run from now onwards, cycling through some country roads and linking up with the asphalt bicycle track alongside the Monash Freeway. On this section, just South of Lysterfield Lake is Yun Yang Temple: a large Chinese temple complex (pictured below) which was well worth a look around. The residential roads of Wattle Drive and Box Street allow you to link up with the Dandenong Creek Trail and from there is the direct run, mainly on wide bicycle tracks, to Carrum. The Dandenong to Carrum run is a well known route for Melbourne cyclists; a good fast route away from traffic, and a nice energetic way to end a ride. After a quick stroll on the beach, a coffee was the order of the day before catching the train home.



Cycling Distance: 48 kms

A Weighty Issue

So I've registered for the Melbourne half marathon, more as an incentive to get back into running than for anything else. I'm pretty slow but have run three marathons (Thailand Temple Run, Bangkok, Edinburgh) and a few half marathons (Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore), though that was some time ago. I've got a couple of months to train so we'll have to see how it goes.

I'm fairly heavy now, at 82kg, and want to lose about 8kg for the run. Losing weight is a simple matter of mathematics. If you USE more calories (a unit of energy) than you CONSUME, you will lose weight, and you can even calculate how much.

USE: Even if you do absolutely nothing all day, you will use about 1 kcal per hour per kilogram of your weight. For me that's about 80 kcal per hour, or about 2000 kcal per day. For running or cycling I use an additional 700 kcal per hour, and for walking it is about 300 kcal. So I'll use about 2000-3500 kcal, depending on my level of activity, which I hope to keep at 3000 or more.

CONSUME: Calories are consumed either through fats (9 kcal per gram), carbohydrate (4 kcal per gram) or protein (4 kcal per gram). There are lots of websites that allow you to calculate your calorie intake. Cereal for breakfast, a nice focaccia for lunch and spag bol in the evening, with no snacking and sticking mainly to drinking water and tea, and I'm at a minimum of about 1650.

Which gives me 3000 - 1650 = 1350 as my biggest deficit. As there are 9 calories in 1 gram of fat, I should be losing 0.15kg a day, which is about 1kg a week, or 8kg in eight weeks. If I can keep it up, that is.

The 30th Icicle Ride

On Saturday I went to see one of the few films I was really interested in watching at MIFF (Melbourne International Film Festival), called 'The City of Life and Death'. It's a film about the Nanjing (Nanking) massacre; it was a big regret of mine that when I was in Nanjing a couple of years ago the museum dedicated to the massacre was closed for renovations. The film was a huge critical and commercial success in China, and the organizers correctly predicted a big turnout, putting it in the largest capacity screen available. It's great that so many people in Melbourne turned up to watch a subtitled film. As with Speilburg's 'Shindler's List' and Haneke's 'The White Ribbon', it was shot in black and white. It didn't disappoint, containing some of the most startling scenes I've ever seen on film. There wasn't much character development, but it didn't need it, instead going for a more overarching view in order to capture the unimaginable scale of events.

Normally I would have returned back home to sleep, but instead I turned up at midnight at the petrol station near the Calder raceway, meeting 150 or so other bikes for the icicle ride. This is a group ride run overnight in the middle of winter which is well-known in Victoria and has been running annually for 30 years. The ride is run over three legs of about 120 kilometers each, finishing this year in Healsville at about 6 or 7 in the morning. I wouldn't call it a fun ride but it was certainly challenging, with temperatures dropping to zero in some places. Getting my commemorative badge upon finishing brought a sense of achievement: I can now say that I have completed an icicle ride. There was a lot of wildlife about, with two riders colliding with kangaroos and one other with a wombat. It emphasized to me one of the key dangers of riding at night in Australia.

Doing the icicle ride got me looking into issues concerning wind chill when riding. The National Weather Service in the USA use an equation to model the effective (i.e. wind chill included) temperature based on the air temperature and the wind speed. I've plotted it below using degrees Celsius for the temperatures and kilometers per hour for the speed. The equation is only valid for wind speeds of 10 kph and above, and for air temperatures below ten degrees.

The three lines represent different air temperatures: 5 degrees (sold line), 2.5 degrees (dashed line) and 0 degrees (dotted line). At these sort of temperatures a good rule of thumb is that the wind chill factor when riding is about ten degrees. The non-linearity in the curves is to be expected. Perhaps of more interest is the fact that differences in the air temperature become larger once the wind is taken into account. No wonder I was so cold.



Technical Note: The equation plotted is W = 13.13 + 0.6215T - 11.36V + 0.3962TV where T is air temperature (degrees Celsius) and where V is speed (in kilometers per hour) to the power of 0.16.

Riding Distance: 405 kms

Day 4/4: Around The Hume

I've learned much about my tolerance for cold on this trip. With my current full warm gear (non-electric) set-up, and riding at 100 km/h, anything over ten degrees is pleasant. Between five and ten is no problem at all for long distance riding. Between two and five is okay, but not hugely comfortable, with tingling hands and feet that necessitates hugging the engine every so often. Two or below and I'm staying in bed.

And perhaps tackling sixty kilometers of dirt solo, in the middle of nowhere, may be a bit too adventurous for a dirt novice. But as always, the experience has been great. I set off back to Melbourne from Yass (appropriately enough) straight down the Hume, stopping off to see a dog on a tinderbox (don't ask me) and the submarine display at Holbrook, one of only three towns not currently bypassed. And that will be the last overnight journey for my rear tyre; I gave it a good send-off.

Riding Distance: 610 kms
Total Distance: 345 + 285 + 290 + 610 = 1530 kms

Day 3/4: Around The Hume

I crashed today. It was the first time my poor bike has been on its side for about 10 months. But it wasn't all bad. Firstly, I caught it on video. Secondly, it was on fairly wet dirt, and if you are going to crash that is the best place to do it.

Another cold morning and I was off to Corryong for a morning pick-me-up and some fuel, with the intention of taking the back-roads to Tumut via Towong, Greg Greg, Tooma and the wonderfully named Tumbarumba. Condensation from the mist was building on my visor and turning into frost. The petrol station attendant said that she'd driven up that way the day before, and gave me dire warnings about mist, kangaroos and ice in the shadows cast by the trees. It turned out not to be quite so dangerous today though, and it was a superb route to ride. The scenic lookouts, looking down onto cloud cover over the valley, were simply breathtaking.

At Tumut I stopped in at the modern tourist information center in the old butter factory and took the road to Wee Jasper, which contains two stretches of dirt, both of which are about 30kms long. Literally seconds away from the end of the first stretch the bike and I went down (see video below). I'm not sure why, and I didn't have the awareness to examine what I had just ridden through. Most of the road was dry, but this section at the bottom of a valley was damp. The video shows a patch of ground darker than the rest, but perhaps I am just looking for excuses.



No real damage to me or the bike, other than both of us being very muddy. I picked the bike up and got it going again by fully opening the throttle before cranking the engine. I tackled the second section of dirt and then rode from Wee Jasper to Yass underneath a brilliant red sunset. By the time I connected with the Hume again at Yass it was pitch black, but fortunately I finished the twisties before total darkness fell. I didn't travel many kilometers today, but those kilometers were perhaps the hardest I have ever ridden on a bike. It was an awesome day.

Riding Distance: 290 kms

Day 2/4: Around The Hume

It was an incredibly cold morning in Wangaratta; my new digital temperature gauge was reading zero degrees, and its ice warning was flashing away at me. So I left it until 10am by which time it had risen to a whole three degrees. Then bike problems, similar to those observed in another cold morning in Mt Gambier, meant I was having coffee instead of riding the bike. It cheered me up though, as I decided the problem was with the choke and therefore minor, and by the time I had my coffee the temperature had risen another few degrees.

All this meant that I didn't get my bike started until 11am, and I had decided to spend a more relaxing day drinking coffee and exploring. I felt that the bike needed a long straight ride to get itself going, so I took the C374 to Yarrawonga on the state border. I'm glad I did, because Yarrawonga-Malwala is a lovely town, and I picked a great spot overlooking Lake Mulwala near the tourist information building for my second coffee of the day. By now the sun was out; I could have stayed there all day, but it was time to reluctantly move on.

I headed East on the Murray Valley Highway (B400), through Rutherglen, connecting with the Hume again at Wodonga, where I followed the signs to the army museum. The army museum at Wodonga appears to have had a lot more money spent on it than the one at Puckapunyal. All the exhibits are well presented and have been restored to their former glory. It even had a few motorbikes, including a Suzuki GS450 (pictured). It was disappointing that on a Saturday afternoon I appeared to be the only person there.

Further East I got off the Murray Valley Highway at Bonegilla, heading North on the C541, crossing the bridge and taking a superb detour to Bethanga (22 kms return). Although it was getting late I had heard that this was a great road, and I had heard correctly. Looking up at the guard rail on the road running up the hill you are about to climb is awe inspiring. After chatting with some locals at a scenic lookout (pictured) about how I was crazy to ride when it was so cold (my gloved hands were clutching the warmth of the engine), I returned down the hill and continued East.

The C542/6 is a great motorbiking road running along the Murray River; it was difficult not to get distracted by the eerie sight of the river and the numerous leaf-less trees within it, all shrouded in mist. It looked like a scene from a horror movie. I planned to get to Tintaldra or even Corryong but darkness fell so I stayed the night as the only resident in the welcoming one-pub town of Walwa.

Riding Distance: 285 kms