Thursday, October 24, 2013

Veni, vidi, bici

Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I have hope for the human race. H.G. Wells.

Since we arrived in Cairns we have been riding bicycles every where we need to go. Cairns, it turns out, is incredibly well set up for bicycle commuting – there are marked bike lanes on most roads, an enormous number of dedicated paved bicycling tracks, and, right now, ripe mangos are plentiful for the picking at multiple points along any route. All in all, it's pretty hard to have a bad time.

The beauty of riding a bicycle is the connection you get with the landscape that you just don't get while driving in a car. Sweating up a hill under a humid tropical sky, coasting along under big mango trees, riding through the smells and scents of flowering trees and freshly mulched cane fields and scaring up birds as you pass. Everything is so immediate and you feel so present in the environment. For sheer enjoyment of travel, not much can beat the bicycle.

So, “when the spirits are low, when the day appears dark, when work becomes monotonous, when hope hardly seems worth having, just mount a bicycle and go out for a spin down the road, without thought on anything but the ride you are taking.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 

 

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