A flat, baked landscape dominated by knee-high scrub and devoid of trees, stretched in every direction as far as the eye could see. The one break in the scenery was the ribbon of blacktop ahead, looking as though it had shimmering water over its surface in the distance.

It was mid-November, nearly two weeks since I had started pedaling east from the shores of the Indian Ocean on a solo bicycle trip across Australia.

 On this day, I had been on the road at dawn to beat the sharp edge of the sun by a few hours. Now, at mid-day, well into a ninety mile straight-away, tar bubbles raised on the road by the nearly 100 degree heat popped under my bicycle tires, throwing small black globs on my legs, while the memory of the cool desert morning had been replaced by the prospect of the fifty more miles to Caiguna, the next settlement along the road in Western Australia.

Since adventure travel is something of an avocation for me, I was well accustomed to researching and completing unusual trips to a variety of places around the world. And, aware that Australia is roughly the size of the continental U.S., which I had cycled across six years before, I felt I had prepared myself for the length and desolation of this journey.

However the closer I got to Caiguna, the closer I came to the unfortunate conclusion that it may not have been such a great idea to take this trip.

The most direct route across Australia; the one I was taking begins by following the Great Eastern Highway from Perth to the boom and bust gold mining town of Coolgardie, a distance of approximately three hundred and fifty miles.

Over the major portion of this stretch, the highway meanders through hilly countryside supporting large livestock and wheat concerns. Small towns located every thirty or forty miles along the road reminded me of the farming communities of Kansas and Nebraska. All had about them the feel of a bygone era when life had a much more civilized pace.

Early in the evening as I relaxed on a store front bench in one of these settlements, I spotted a lone cyclist entering the outskirts of town on one of the most heavily loaded bikes imaginable. Immediately jumping up, I trotted the few hundred yards over to him. He was Japanese, perhaps thirty years old, and was forty-one days into an east to west crossing of Australia.

He spoke enough English to laugh when I asked him if he was carrying a Sony TV in his over-loaded bike panniers. As I soon recognized, it was surprising that he could laugh at all. Two or three patches on his sun-burnt skin were so severely exposed that they had blistered and were now festering. One six by four inch oval on his right thigh was fried to the point where it was difficult to even look at.

Since he was going east to west and the sun was in the northern sky, his right side had gotten the worst of it. Going in the opposite direction, it would be my left side that would require generous applications of the ample supply of block I had brought along.

Pointing to his leg, I suggested that he seek medical attention. But he brushed it aside, seeming intent only to find out how many days inland I was from Perth, the end of his journey.

At dinner that night, he told me he had been inspired to start his trek after reading the account of a Japanese adventurer who had bicycled across Australia well before the road had been paved. With the many hardships of that earlier crossing constantly in mind, he had not allowed himself to quit. Lighting up the last of a series of Marlboros, and looking blankly through the rising cigarette smoke, this curious fellow then said with amusing resignation, "It will be good to reach the ocean." That made me think about how good it would be to reach the Pacific, Sydney, and my flight back to the States; But that was a long ways off.

About two hundred and fifty miles from the Indian Ocean, the farming and grazing region in which I met the Japanese biker gradually gives way to a drier terrain with a preponderance of acacia and eucalyptus trees covering long, low undulating hills with troughs extending a couple of miles or more.

In traveling through this area, where the only breathtaking features emanate from kangaroo road kill, these hills did a lot to make each day's ride easier. Having been conditioned by life in the U.S. where there seem to be convenience stores around nearly every corner, the faint possibility that there might just be a 7-11 or similar oasis over the next crest, somehow lessened long hours on the bicycle seat. - A few days onward, I would come to miss the psychological relief provided by these low hills.

Looking in the window, I could see him sitting at a chrome legged, red Formica top table in the only diner in Caiguna, a roadstop so small it barely warranted a name. His leather like, tattooed skin and deeply corrugated face set a dull contrast against his dirty white T-shirt and oil smudged blue jeans. He and his buddy drank beers and laughed while they watched me out front propping my bike against the building.

Slapping off the day's coating of dust with my baseball cap, I came inside and planted myself in silence at an adjacent table to down several soft drinks in rapid succession. Under a pretty equal mixture of zinc oxide, dirt, fly repellant and sweat, I didn't look, feel, or smell especially good.

Toward the end of my third Coke, this long haul truck driver asked me why in the devil I was way out here alone in the middle of a "thousand miles of wasteland" on a bicycle, or more accurately, a "push-bike" as the Aussies call 'em.

"Shit!" he said with a tone of disgust in his voice, "sometimes the road around here gets so damned flat that I have to stick my head out the window to check if the wheels of my truck are turning!"

After telling him that the reason I'd taken this trip was for the challenge of riding from the Indian to the Pacific Ocean, he told me without hesitation, no offense intended...just as an obvious statement of fact, that I must be "short on brains."

Since there seemed little use in denying that being out there on a bike was kinda crazy, I leaned my chair back slightly on its two rear legs, smiled amicably, popped the top on another drink, and redirected the conversation to his life on the road.

Between generous bites of the steak and onion ring platter before him, he told me of his years on the seventeen hundred mile Adelaide to Perth run, years in which he'd seen everything from blinding dust storms blowing in off the Great Victoria Desert to the north, to summer days so searingly hot in late January and early February that birds occasionally flopped out of control on the road and died. Although it was plenty warm for me now with peaks in the upper nineties, an attempt at a crossing in late summer when temperatures rise into the one hundred twenty degree range would have been completely nuts. With the heat as it was, I often had to strap three or four plastic gallon water containers on the bike to see me through the day.

"Nullarbor" is Latin for "no trees." It is the name given to a vast section of Western and South Australia that is larger that the states of Virginia and Tennessee combined. With only a few stunted exceptions, the plain is utterly treeless, and owing to its porous limestone bedding, there are no watercourses whatsoever.

In the early 1840's the first white man to explore the region, Edward John Eyre, called it "the most wretched, dry country imaginable." In traveling over the two lane Eyre Highway today, one sees that little has changed.

The broad consensus among Australians is that the plain is a pretty miserable place. They nonetheless take something of a perverse pride in it. In Norseman, a not too cosmopolitan town named after a horse who pawed up a sizable gold nugget there in 1894, a miner I talked with compared the plain to "one giant bonsai plant farm." At another stop, a fellow I lost a game of pool against proudly stated that it was "without a doubt, one of the largest plots of totally barren land in the world." A few settlements even sold bumper stickers with the words, "We Crossed the Nullarbor," emblazoned over a map of the region.

Because of a lack of trees along nearly a thousand miles of road in Western Australia, the Nullarbor is commonly considered to extend much further than its actual boundaries. As I rode the flatlands a few days east from Caiguna, skirting the continent's jagged southern coast, I came to fully understand why Australians had come to apply the name, "Nullarbor," to the whole region.

The massive cliff dropped perhaps two hundred feet into the violent Southern Ocean below. I stood well back from the edge, not so much out of fear of falling as from the certain knowledge that if I did, I would have "disappeared" with no one figuring out what had happened to me for some time to come. I thought it odd that had I been with another person, the possibility of falling would not have seemed nearly as dreadful as doing so alone, in total isolation.

Looking south, I surveyed the open ocean, an area called the Great Australian Bight. To the west and east, it seemed as though the sheer cliffs were an unending wall against the frigid, white-capped sea. Here, where thousands of miles of plain and desert literally fell into a seemingly boundless ocean with Antarctica the next landfall south, I was on one of the Earth's most remarkable geologic boundaries.

Against the rays of the rapidly setting sun, I hurriedly pitched my tent a comforting twenty yards from the cliffs, and looked forward to a night of rest accompanied by the sounds of the pounding surf.

About three in the morning, I was awakened by the flapping of the tent's rain fly. The incessant wind which that day had held me to only seventy miles through ten hours of pedaling, had drawn most of my tent stakes out of the sand, and me out of a deep sleep. Emerging from the entry, I cussed the wind out loud, then abruptly fell silent, almost stunned by what I saw.

At this hour, the land and the ocean now had the brilliant backdrop of spectacular starlight cutting through the enveloping darkness of the night. I turned all the way around and nearly became dizzy with the strange, ethereal beauty of the place. The sky, the wind, the cliffs and the roaring sea amid so many miles of wide-open emptiness had combined to create a scene of almost surreal quality. It was not a beauty that could be conveyed through the lens of a camera. Rather, it was that of a land totally transformed from a barren, sun-burnt environment by day, to one draped in shadows and starlight so magnificent that the combined points of light seemed like hanging white smoke in the heavens. I pulled up the two poles of the tent, threw my sleeping bag on top, climbed in, and watched the unfamiliar constellations of the southern sky until they faded away with the light at dawn.

Shortly after sunrise I packed the tent and, taking a last look at the Great Australian Bight, I walked the bike through about a half kilometer of sand and scrub back to the road, then proceeded on to the next settlement forty odd miles to the east.

In Australia, particularly in the west, many of the points on the map that would appear to be towns are not much more than a filling station, motel and diner. (A couple of dots represent places that apparently blew away and aren't even in existence anymore.)

Riding into the next roadstop in late morning, I knew exactly what I was going to do...get a room with a fresh water shower (a number of spots offered only salt water showers) and clean sheets (judging from distinct lingering odors, a couple of dumps I had stayed in along the way changed their sheets with every third or fourth customer). I realized that during the next two weeks the monotony of the western road would gradually give way to increasing diversity and finally countryside with green trees. I hadn't even seen a sign warning motorists to carry plenty of water for some time now. - Things were definitely improving.

Supposedly, the Australian bush fly got to the continent on the backs of the Aboriginals as they crossed the ancient land bridge from Southeast Asia. Now, much further east in New South Wales, as I threaded my bicycle through a few thousand sheep waiting to be loaded on trucks, I was entirely convinced of the theory's validity. Over each of my shoulders, a dozen or so of these amazingly elusive pests were hitching a ride. Lighting every now and then to venture up under my sunglasses, into my eyes, even into my nostrils...the damned buggers... their aggressive behavior was the definition of a nuisance. Catching one as it became tangled in my beard, I smashed it, very slowly, between thumb and index finger with a palpable feeling of vengeful satisfaction. Immediately upon doing this, I remembered thinking, "I've been on the road too long."

Due to unexpected headwinds over much of the journey, it'd now been nearly forty days and a fair number of lost pounds since I'd left the shores of the Indian Ocean.

Since repellants were largely rendered useless by the heat and resultant sweat, I tried to ignore the irritating discomfort of the flies by turning my mind to the collection of contrasts I had found the Australian continent to be. I thought of the hundreds of miles of featureless land on the Nullarbor, and compared it to the landscaped parks, wide boulevards and thriving population of Adelaide, one of the most charming cities in the world. I remembered the lush vineyards and fruit groves of the Murray River region which I had cycled through only a few days before, and compared them to my immediate surroundings of flatland, sheep and flies. And, as the tide of wool around my bike began to recede, I anticipated the contrasts between the dryness of this place and the ocean to the east I hoped to reach in just a few more days. After celebrating my 35th birthday with an ice cold Coke in a little town called Hay the next morning, I got back on my bike and headed for the shore.

Depending on the particular map at hand, either the South Pacific Ocean or the Tasman Sea washes the beaches of Southeastern Australia. The now tattered map I was carrying showed the Pacific, and over maybe the next hill I would see it. During the last four days, over the eastern Dividing Range, the anticipation of reaching the ocean was heightened.

Suddenly, at the crest of a rise the other side of which appeared to descend unendingly through thick tropical greenery, there it was...spread out, magnificent and blue as all the Australian sky in the distance. I let out a yell at the top of my lungs, threw my right fist up, and hardly noticed the remaining miles I flew to the water's edge.

From an article, "Plain Crazy", by Scott Shelton, published by BikeReport Magazine in April of 1991. (Trip - November - December 1989)