Wave Rock Weekender

The Munda Biddi may be the jewel in the crown of bike touring in Western Australia.

But what if you prefer a little more road in your ‘off road’ riding? The Wheatbelt region, just east of Perth, offers some interesting alternatives for gravel cycling.

A closer look on Google Maps, as I spend my spare time doing, reveals a thriving black market in B-roads, fence linetracks and rail service roads, all avoiding the few high-speed highways in the area.

It was from these options that we cobbled together route over an Easter long weekend.

Day One

The plan was to drive out to Corrigin, leave our car at the pub and follow a triangular loop out to Wave Rock, down to Kulin and back to Corrigin. About 300 kays over three days.

Three friends, three steel bikes and our credit cards for the cheap pub rooms and roadhouse food.

While the Wheatbelt gets its name from the main crop to be grown out that way, on the morning of the first day we also passed yellow expanses of canola and circumspect sheep. Also popular was rock farming, as the saying goes.

Lunch was a slightly squashed salad roll from a roadhouse five hours previous. In the shade and among the ants on the side of the road.

Closer to Hyden the landscape changed and salmon gums welcomed us down the fence line roads. Their smooth trunks looked oily in the autumn light. But a curious sweep of their trunks we found them to be bone dry.

At Karlgarin, official population 50, I was hoping there might be an afternoon tea option. But we had to be content with peering through the windows of the single – closed – shop in town and filling our bidons at the water bubbler in the town park. The lawn had died long ago but the roses struggled on.

The final run into Hyden included an unavoidable stint on the main highway, slightly alarming after so many hours of solitude. The long shadows we cast ahead of ourselves led the way, urging us on.

That night we stayed at the Wave Rock Motel and tested our skills at the cook-your-own grill restaurant. With a beer in hand, we approached the indoor hot plates and found space among the fellow tourists to cook our steaks.

And as with any barbecue in Australia, there was no shortage of unsolicited advice about how we were doing it wrong.

Wave Rock and Blazing Swan survivors

Known as Katter Kich by the Noongar, the formation was an impressive lesson on the power of weather and time – some 2,700 million years of it. 

As we walked along the base of the rock wave, we were joined by other pilgrims and a variety of strange props, including surfboards, skateboards and drones. 

Back on our bikes, day two featured, unsurprisingly, more long, long gravel roads. It was meditative. Bumpy. Painful. Or just boring. 

We each dealt with it in our own way, and our own pace, spreading out along the route with the expectation that we’d meet at the next turn 10, 20 or 30 kilometres down the road. 

I put in the headphones and let my one downloaded album, XX, carry me into the afternoon heat.

Off in the distance I caught a flash of reflection. Looking closer it was the fabled Blazing Swan event. Modelled on Burning Man, from the hazy distance it appeared as a strange city of vehicles and tents beside a salt flat in the middle of nowhere. 

In planning this route, one mystery Google Maps couldn’t answer was whether we could shave off some highway kms by following a faint line through the salt lakes. 

It turns out we could. Just. It was a strange landscape of dazzling pinks and white from the salt. Reeds, miles from any other water source, ringed the circular lakes. 

As long as a maximum speed, and minimum tyre pressure, was observed we were able to skim across the crust. However, when we stopped to take photos, we struggled to get up out of the soft sand and back up to planing speed.

Off the salt and onto the highway, we rolled into Kulin on a very quiet Tuesday after Easter. As the closest town to Blazing Swan, it was the first stop for many participants to resupply after a week at the festival.

They seemed as surprised to see us, three cyclists in the middle of the Wheatbelt, as we were to see them and their eccentric vehicles. Particularly the truck with the enormous papier mâché head perched on top. It looked like it had been an awesome festival.

Rolling roads

The third and final day took a zig zag route north-west back up to Corrigin and our parked cars. 

More headphone time for me, tapping out a steady rhythm on the blacktop, my 35mm tyres back to full pressure and suited to the rolling B-roads.

By my count it was an achievable 290 kilometres and 2900 metres elevation over the three days for our reasonably lightweight touring set ups. 

There is an almost endless number of routes you could ride out that way. The only limiting factors are time – and a fondness for deep fried roadhouse food.