Day 8 - Tuesday 10th February

Day 8 - Tuesday 10th February

It’s a week now since I left Sydney, and I am getting pretty used to life on the road. In fact, it’s not a bad way to live, I’ve seen so many things that I’d never have noticed if I’d been travelling by car, stayed in a different place every night but always somewhere new, had some good meals and met lots of very nice friendly people. Of course, the weather has helped enormously and I guess I’ve been very lucky to have had no rain so far. Although it’s been uncomfortably hot all the way, anything’s better than cycling through the rain. Today I was on the road nice and early, at 6.30 am. The temperature was cool, but there was a lot of fog and mist over the river and it seemed rather humid, as though rain was finally approaching. The route ran alongside the mighty Clarence River towards the Pacific coast.

Early morning mist over the Clarence River

I crossed the river on the cable driven ferry at Lawrence, about 25km from Grafton. The going was flat and smooth along a quiet riverbank road and I made good progress, pushing the top gears all the way.

After the river crossing there wasn’t much to see until I reached the coast. I took a brief stop for a drink and a banana at Maclean, a small town on the river (see below) -

As I approached the coastal resort of Yamba, the road went past a number of mangrove swamps (see above). Yamba looked to be a lively place; however there was no time to explore it properly because I needed to get the ferry over to Iluka to begin the next stage of the journey; I arrived at the jetty just in time for the 11am ferry and the next one wasn’t due to leave until 1.45pm.

Pacific beach at Yamba

Ferry across to Iluka


The journey over to Iluka took about 35 minutes. I was hungry by now, having covered about 75kms already, but I soon discovered that Iluka is a very quiet place with very few restaurants. A fairly nondescript barramundi and chips at the bowling club was the best I could find.

The rest of the day’s ride was a fairly uninteresting slog. Not a slog because of the terrain, which continued to be flat, but because of the increasing humidity. It really did feel as though a big storm was on the way and I had to keep drinking masses of fluid at every opportunity to replenish all I was sweating out.
After about 20kms the route rejoined the Pacific Highway, again a single carriageway road at this stage, but with a good wide hard shoulder for cycling on :

The only minor thing of interest on the rest of the route was New Italy, a museum complex and memorial dedicated to a bunch of Italian settlers who’d developed the area in the 1880s.

Pioneer memorial, New Italy

I arrived in Evans Head, the destination for the day, at about 5pm, and checked into the Pacific Motor Inn. Evans Head is a very quiet resort, nothing much going on here. Nowhere seemed to have wifi access (always a bad sign) and there weren’t many restaurants, though I did manage to find a reasonable good Thai where I had a good meal washed down with a wine whose label was somewhat more interesting than the contents:

Total mileage today - 142kms