If anything, I thought I probably looked a bit peculiar today whilst preparing to go out for a cycle-ride. With more regard to sun-damage than aesthetics, I had decided to wear my cotton cap under the cycle helmet so that the visor would give me added protection; then I put on my sunglasses – so dark they render me almost blind, but necessary against the dust and insects carried in the wind. In fact, I had a little laugh imagining the strange sight I cut (the side plait, falling apart, was the finishing touch), but I didn’t worry – no need for vanity when you’re cycling in the countryside (or is it called bush?) – after all, who would be looking at me?

As it happens all the truck-drivers and ute-drivers in the world were out and about on the same roads as me at around lunch-time, and some of them were obviously hungry. I felt like some weird femme fatale and regretted wearing my red shorts (or was it my red and white striped top that proved so alluring?).

“Surely there must be some beauty spot around here other than the pretty footbridge over the Albert River at the end of Bannockburn Road (which I know quite well by now)?” I queried to myself (seeing that Chris has gone back to England and I now have to resort to lone cycling).

A white ute passed by slowly, turned around and came back on the other side. He did this twice but I pretended not to notice and he stopped showing off and gave up as I entered the cycle-lane on a bigger road.

“How can they all be trucks and utes on these country roads?” I asked myself, as another enormous truck and his big brother passed by.

Some of the trucks drove close and sent a rush of engine warm air past me, others changed to the inner lane, as a courtesy no doubt. Still nothing but wide new roads cutting through barren or bushy land and I wondered why there were cycle lanes at all in such a remote place; perhaps it was a decree from on high – “All new roads must be bicycle-friendly” (even if there is no-where to go and the trucks play good guy/bad guy).

Another ute, distinctive from behind because it pulled a small red tractor (or similar style machinery) on a trailer, went past ominously slowly for a second time. Opting to get off the main road, I took a left turn and found myself in an industrial estate. I cycled by a forecourt filled with strange machines maybe as much as thirty feet high and painted white and orange – not cranes but like fork-lift trucks for giants – and the red tractor passed again. I couldn’t see the driver – just the trailer and the dark red tractor, its glossy enamel paint glinting in the sunshine. I cycled by a factory with a sign that read “Baby Blues” (or something akin to that) and the red tractor, having turned and come back, passed on the other side. Feigning disinterest, and a certain obliviousness to the only other traffic on the estate at that precise moment, I looked studiously at the factory sign.

At the end of the road I turned left again in the hope that I would find my way back to the main drag. It wasn’t. It was an even less inhabited street and the industrial blocks were few and far between. The red tractor appeared again and slowed to a stop about twenty metres ahead of me; the driver, tall and wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat, got out and pretended to check the trailer – he stood inches from the pavement upon which I was riding. A tree grew on the edge of the pavement and the nature-strip and as I neared it I imagined the tall man grabbing me with his strong long arms and bundling me into his ute – I veered off the pavement and went around the tree, and the man, via the grass.

Seconds later the tractor passed me again. Two tattooed and pierced young men were having a smoke by a gateway ahead so I stopped, asked for directions to the main road and told them I feared that I was being followed. They didn’t offer any assistance other than to give directions from a mobile phone but, less than a minute after my departure, they would have seen a ute pulling a trailer with a red tractor. I was coming up to a roundabout and the red tractor took a turn to the right; I went left, dipped into the first gateway and hid behind a bush for ten minutes or so until a man in his twenties, with a nice intelligent face, came out to use his mobile phone and found me there…

Some time later I was back on the road I had come down. At the roundabout I saw a red tractor, but not the one from earlier. And the trucks kept coming and going, and utes, and I wondered why there were so few cars. While I made my way back to the one beauty spot I know – the bridge for pedestrians and cyclists – a blue and yellow machine that looked like a tank in the shape of a crab drove by and beeped his horn in appreciation. I waved back.

“Now the old method of getting attention I can handle,” I thought to myself. And I smiled to myself because, honestly, I thought I looked rather odd with my cap under my cycle helmet….

(Will try to do more painting than cycling tomorrow!)