38. Outback Odyssey

[00:00:00] Nico:  As an insatiable, curious person I have a thirst for learning first-hand. I mean, I'm a nerd... I study a lot. I've always been a very, very good student. But through travelling I realised that what I learned on the road is something that nobody and no books can teach you.

Early days - Argentina

[00:01:05] Nico:  I was born and raised in... Argentina. I lived there until I was 28 years old. And... I grew up in a middle class family. We never had too much, we never had too little. My dad and my mom, they're both avid drivers and we basically drove thousands and thousands of miles everywhere. And they love nature and they love people as well. They love the... human experience of travelling and obviously that's where I got a lot of the influence from.

 First solo adventure - Europe

[00:01:38] Steve.: At the age of 19, Nico Marino set out on his first personal adventure, backpacking across Europe, which led to many more backpacking experiences, including Eastern Asia and India. At the age of 28, having graduated with a degree in architecture, and having saved money hard, he's set off again on a new backpacking adventure. To Iran.

Iran

[00:02:08] Nico: I've always wanted to live in Asia. I've wanted to travel in Asia. I had enough money saved for a year of travelling, and I left with the intention of settling down in Asia. I didn't know where yet, so I chose Tehran because it was the part of Asia that I hadn't backpacked in before.

Discovering bicycles

[00:02:28] Steve.: Well, as with all great plans, sometimes events just get in the way.

[00:02:35] Nico: So as I was travelling in Iran as a backpacker, I came across a new sort of traveller... the bike traveller. Travellers cycling from one place to another. And that completely blew me away. So I was in this hostel, this very cheap hostel in...Tehran. I met this Dutch couple and I met a French traveller. So the Dutch couple had been cycling from Holland and they were on their way to China. And then the French guy was a key part because he flew to Tehran with the intention to buy all the gear there to start cycling there. So when I heard the stories from the Dutch couple and somebody right next to me that had come to buy all the stuff there, I made the connection. In just in one week's time, I turned into a bicycle traveller. I bought all the gear that I could get with the advice of the Dutch couple who came to the shop with me. I was up and... ready to go.

[00:03:43] Steve.: And the irony is, you never had a bike as a kid, did you?

[00:03:47] Nico: No, no. I did but... not something that I... used to ride often.

[00:03:52] Steve.: And it was an extraordinary trip, which led to Nico living and working as an architect in China for six years. But he'd been bitten by the travelling bug and was hungry for more adventure. But this would be a big one. Five years on a bicycle across Africa, Europe, and then... Australia.

Why Australia?

[00:04:22] Nico: While I was living in China, I applied for Australian residency. I always thought that Australia would be a good place to settle long term and I had the residency approved since 2011. By 2016 that residency was about to expire, so I had to either come or lose it. So I said, "Okay, I'm going to Australia but I'm not ready to stop travelling". So I decided to fly to Perth and basically cycle across the entire country.

Perth to Uluru

 (distance - 2,500 km, 27 to 30 days)

[00:04:59] Steve.: So all that remained was the question of which route. The obvious solution would be to cross the Nullarbor Plain, that well known empty space across the south section of Australia. But not for Nico.

[00:05:13] Nico: If I'm going to ride across Australia, I'm going to to make it worthwhile". So Trevor, my friend, suggested that I go across the Great Central Road. And the Great Central Road is a piece of road in the middle of nowhere that runs from basically Western Australia to South Australia. 90% of the road is not paved and it just crosses the heart of the country.  

[00:05:39] Steve.: In fact, the Great Central Road is the western end of the Outback Way, or more affectionately known as Australia's longest shortcut, linking Western Australia to Queensland. It's pretty remote. But without too much further thought, and after his usual preparations, Nico was off. Perth to Sydney, right across the middle of Australia.

[00:06:09] Nico: The road from Perth to Kalgoorlie is a pretty straightforward paver road. And then that's when everything changes. From Kalgoorlie, I headed north to Laverton. Laverton is one of the heads of the Great Central Road. So as you leave Kalgoorlie, it becomes increasingly deserted and there's way less traffic, heading north of course. And then you turn right on the way to Leviton, that's where it starts getting fun basically.

Courtesy of 80 Lives

[00:06:44] Steve.: Kalgoorlie was established in 1893 during the gold rushes in Western Australia. Australia's first gold rush had started a little earlier in 1851 in Orange New South Wales, closely followed by the likes of Clunes, Ballarat, Bendigo and Castlemaine in Victoria, further south. Well, I've been to Kalgoorlie and it felt pretty deserted to me. So what does that mean for the likes of Laverton and beyond?

[00:07:14] Nico:  From Laverton, you've got a few more miles of tarmac and then the tarmac disappears and you're... you're literally in what you imagine the Outback should be. This endless orange and bushy landscape extended to infinity, 360 degrees. And it's magical. That's the point where I was truly captivated. That's what makes Australia special. You know, this vastness and... and this completely empty mass of land.

[00:07:56] Steve.: So amidst this vast emptiness, what sounds were you aware of?

Sounds of the Outback

[00:08:01] Nico: The typical day between Laverton and Yulara is basically filled with wind and the cracking of the pebbles on the gravel under your bicycle. Now the moment you stop, it's the most deafening silence that you could ever hear.  It's like being in space... it's otherworldly. It's not only infinity visually, the hearing sense goes to infinity as well.  

 (Consider putting some kind of void sound here?)

[00:08:35] Steve.: so, very little sounds. What about landmarks to segment the journey?

Landmarks

[00:08:42] Nico: There are basically no real landmarks, but there are a few communities. In Australia communities are the places where some aboriginal people still live in the wild. So in these communities I was able to basically refill my water tanks and food. I think there are three or four only in 1200 kilometers. So the stretches were anywhere from 200 to 350 kilometers, if I recall well, of nothingness, absolute nothingness.

[00:09:19] Steve.: What kind of wildlife did you see?

Wildlife

[00:09:21] Nico: I was looking forward to live among the kangaroos and I didn't see any until South Australia. And in South Australia I only saw dead ones on the road. Basically it was mostly dead animals everywhere, like dead camels, dead kangaroos, and I saw a few dingoes alive. They were very elusive and I saw many, many dead snakes. And luckily I didn't find any alive, especially when going to the toilet. So that's one of the aspects that really shocked me about Australia. When I say nothingness, it's literally nothingness. I had crossed the Gobi Desert, the Sahara Desert twice, the deserts of Angola, Namibia. But in all of them, every 20 to 30ks you find people,  you find wildlife. In Australia, there are no people and almost no animals at least in mid-winter, right?  When you say you're... in the middle of nowhere, you are really in the middle of nowhere.

Solitude

[00:10:34] Steve.: One thing that strikes me in your description of this part of your journey is the sense of solitude. No sounds, no people, no animals. Can you tell me a little bit about that?

Courtesy of 80 Lives

[00:10:46] Nico:  I guess the most difficult part of travelling cross Australia is that that nothingness comes in the form of solitude, and that solitude at some point starts taking a toll on you. In Australia, you go day after day after day of being unable to talk to anyone. So all that neurosis that usually flows outwards, when you find people, it stays inwards. It drives you insane not to be able to talk to anyone for too long. Doing something on your own is not the same as being alone, literally.  

[00:11:29] Steve.: We talked for some time about the subject of solitude, which was fascinating from someone who'd experienced it so intensely. If you wanted to hear more about Nico's philosophy on solitude feel free to sign up for the newsletter over on the homepage of the website and you'll hear it in the edition that comes out just after this episode. So, very little sound, few landmarks, and practically no wildlife. What then were the main issues to worry about?

Concerns

[00:12:05] Nico:  The main danger is just basically getting lost or coming across some deadly snake and get bitten.

[00:12:16] Steve.: Tell me about getting lost.

[00:12:18] Nico: Yeah. I've had that many times and I got lost and I got in really serious shit. But it didn't happen in Australia. It happened in Mongolia, it happened in Tibet, it happened in some parts of Africa and it was really scary.

[00:12:32] Steve.: I guess the Great Central Road is just straight?

[00:12:36] Nico: Exactly, yeah. That's what makes it kind of easier. I mean, it's a complexity that is not there. In Mongolia it would be like that, but the roads fork out a thousand times every 20ks, so...

[00:12:53] Steve.: And then, obviously water is key?

[00:12:57] Nico: Running out of water can be a serious problem. I remember one of the major concerns was not knowing how long it would take me to get to the next point where I could refill my bottles of water. And I remember being extremely stingy and mindful of every single drop of water that I would use because it... was scary. It was scary.Running out of food, fine, you can go for days, but running out of water. It's, it's terrible.

Reaching Uluru

[00:13:32] Steve.: Two and a half thousand kilometres later, Nico arrived at Uluru - that enormous and magnificent sandstone formation right in the heart of Australia, sacred to the local Aboriginal population and first visited by European explorers in 1872 when the explorer William Gosse named it Ayres Rock after the incumbent Chief Secretary of South Australia, Sir Henry Ayres. From Uluru, you can see the mystical site of Kata Tjuta and its 36 domes some 25 kilometres to the west. So this arrival must have represented something very special to Nico.

[00:14:19] Nico: You might be disappointed by this but when you cycle the world, the experience becomes the transition between A and B and C and D rather than A, B, and C. So by the time I arrived in Uluru, I said, "Well, yeah, this is nice... quite unique". But it's so much less powerful than the experiences that I had already been through to get there.

[00:14:46] Steve.: So success really is the journey, not the destination.

[00:14:50] Nico: No matter how amazing the... landmark of a country is, it's the journey that took me there what I enjoy the most. And that's what changes when you travel by bicycle because the bicycle is slow enough to push you to experience every bit of the way. Whereas if you take a bus or a train, which is... there's nothing wrong with that, but it's just faster. And the speed doesn't allow you to fully absorb what goes on around you. Yes, you can see it, but can you fully absorb the smells, the visual experience, the sounds. You can't, you can't. With a bicycle you can submerge yourself in the experience.

Uluru to Port Augusta - The Flies!

 ( (11-12 days)

[00:15:42] Steve.: After a short break, it was time to move on from Uluru to Port Augusta, some 300km north of Adelaide.

[00:15:51] Nico: So from Uluru, I went on the Stirling Highway. It was mainly emptiness as before, but quite a lot of traffic. Enough traffic to be disturbed, especially after two weeks of isolation. Lots of... road trains. You know, the very long Australian trucks. Lots of dead kangaroos, it was a kangaroo cemetery. But it was mainly marked by two things; headwind, which was a nightmare for 10 days, and flies. The flies and the mossies, the mosquitoes, they just drove me insane. They wouldn't let me leave. You cannot get away from it. The mosquitoes were so bad that after a 140 kilometers of cycling, I went to sleep without eating because I just couldn't be outside.  Just couldn't.

[00:16:51] Steve.: Well, you did say you wanted company.

[00:16:55] Nico: Yeah exactly! That's not what I was wishing for. All this buzzing, they drove me insane, and it was only around 10 o'clock in the morning with the sun pretty high that I was actually able to eat. Flies are so bad that if you don't have a head net, you actually swallow them by just breathing. You breathe on them. It's really, really bad.

[00:17:21] Steve.: And how did this leg of the journey compare with Perth to Uluru?

[00:17:26] Nico:  It was roughly about a thousand kilometers from... Uluru to Port Augusta, and they were marked by extremely bad mood and an increasing feeling of getting out of there. When the magic of the the outback in its purest state went away with that Stirling Highway, for me it was over.  So, yeah, it wasn't a nice stretch. It was just barren and ugly.

[00:17:55] Steve.: You won't be rushing back there by the sounds of it.

[00:17:58] Nico: No way. Never, never. Just by, by car probably.

[00:18:02] Steve.: Yeah.

[00:18:03] Nico: No, no. By bicycle, definitely.

[00:18:05] Steve.: Nico had highlighted how silent the outback could be. That was the daytime. Presumably night times was something else again?

Night time

[00:18:15] Nico: Well, night times can have different flavours of course, but the nights in Australia, in the Outback in particular, they're otherworldly  - such vast pieces of land where there's no electricity, that the absence of light pollution makes the stars pop like anywhere else. From the horizon to the top of the sky, you've got stars. It's like blanketed with billions of stars. So that makes it extremely mesmerizing. And the other thing is that it's combined with the absence of noise. It's marvellous. Brushing your teeth can become distressing because of the noise. It's so noisy. It's unbelievable. It's just the perfect conditions for a perfect sleep. It's unbelievable.

Courtesy of 80 Lives

[00:19:21] Steve.: It sounds amazing. But the practicalities of pitching up and back down each day must get a bit monotonous, don't they?

[00:19:29] Nico: Yeah. Basically when I stop, I start unpacking. I try to pitch my tent as fast as possible, get all the camp ready, the stove ready for cooking, the sleeping bag spread out. It doesn't take long. And I try to get it done as soon as possible because it gives me this very strange feeling of having a home when I don't have a home.  There's a very nice saying around that says, " My tent is my home. The world is my garden". It's a beautiful saying.

Fear

[00:20:04] Steve.: Certainly an amazing garden. But, particularly at night time, how did you cope with fear?

[00:20:11] Nico: There's so much about fear that is not related to an impending danger, but just related to thoughts, ideas, things that pop up into your mind. So many times you realize that you're fearing your fears. Instead, when I experienced fear, I become very analytical. Do I have a lion in front of me or I'm just imagining that there might be a lion coming out of the bush? It's two different things. I guess that traveling in the way I do allowed me to reframe my experience of fear and make it a much more sensible objective thing.

[00:21:03] Steve.: So, put that into the context of your travels, not necessarily limited to Australia, but anywhere where you've tried to, as you say, analyse fear.

[00:21:13] Nico:  Dangers are always going to be there. So when it comes to animals, like for example, in Africa, I would try to inform myself as much as I could about animal behaviour. One of the worst encounters was in Botswana with an elephant. I had this seven ton bull elephant in front of me. He got very irritated by my presence. And I didn't know what to do, so what did I do? The worst thing you can do when you have an elephant in front of you which is take off, run away. You need to stay put, you need to become predictable. You need to let the elephant know that he's not in danger. And then 'cause elephants don't attack like lions for food. The only reason they attack people is because they're freaking scared of us and with good reason. We've been exterminating them for... ages.

Extract from Outback Odyssey: The 7-ton elephant and me

[00:22:09] Steve.: And you mentioned lions? How did you deal with them?

[00:22:13] Nico: When it comes to lions it's the opposite. Well, there's more nuance than just running away. Basically, if you if you come across a lion, you need to keep the same pace as the lion found you in, so the lion confuses you with some sort of vehicle. So you keep your speed. That said, I never came face to face with a lion. If I had come face to face with a lion, honestly, would I have been objective enough to say, "Okay, now I need to keep my face even though I have this massive lion next to me". Probably not. I would probably have taken off and ended up... being dinner, right? In Tanzania I came across this... ranger because I was cycling across a... national park illegally by bicycle, because I was being very cocky, right? But nothing happens, it's daytime, the lions don't hunt at day time, they hunt at night time. So the guy who is like two heads taller than me, this very big Tanzanian guy holding a... holding a machine gun, he looked at me, point his finger at my face and said, "When you are face to face with a lion, you don't get to decide who leaves".  And that was for me the defining moment of my cockiness coming to an end.  

Extract from Outback Odyssey: It's always the lion who decides

The Last Leg: Port Augusta to Sydney

[00:23:43] Steve.: The last leg from Port Augusta to Sydney was pretty straightforward. Supermarkets, people, you know, that sort of thing. For Nico, the adventure was coming to a close. Not just the adventure of 5, 000 kilometres across Australia, but of the 90, 000 kilometres across four continents in five years.

[00:24:04] Nico: I started seeing the entire trip in retrospective every day because it was coming to an end. When you set on a trip, you think it's never going to end, you know, you've got the entire trip ahead of you. But here's the thing; when... you're approaching the end, it's like you want it to be over because you know it's over. I enjoyed the comforts of the developed world, the easier roads, better weather, summer was coming. So it... was all sort of converging into a beautiful end, so to speak.

[00:24:44] Steve.:

And that was it. Sydney. It was time for rest, recuperation, and reflection. Nico reflected on a whole host of experiences and emotions, but at the most granular level, he'd sat on a saddle for hundreds and hundreds of hours pedalling. What were his reflections of that?

Courtesy of 80 Lives

Reflections

[00:25:05] Nico: Well, it's inevitable to talk about the physical aspect of cycling without, talking about the mental aspect, they're intricately connected. The physical part I would say is the easiest because if you keep cycling, you will inevitably get stronger every day. It's like any other discipline. The more you do it, the better you get at it, the stronger you become. What changes everything is the mind, because throughout all this strenuous effort that you need to make, there's your mind talking all the time. You say to yourself, "This is f*** horrible. You shouldn't be here", then it all conspires against you finishing that stretch. Just hitchhike a truck and... make it disappear, right? Make the pain go away. Now, if in the same circumstances you... encourage yourself by any means, it can be saying, "Okay, but if I finish this, I will feel amazing after that because I will have finished it", right? If you have the ability to switch your thoughts and reframe the experience, then It becomes physically easier and you become stronger.

[00:26:22] Steve.: did you find listening to music helped in that respect?

[00:26:25] Nico: Music has this incredible ability to switch your mindset. Many times I turn on the music and it helped dissipate all these thoughts and the strength that the music gives you, it makes you into a freaking locomotive. It's unbelievable. Like blood starts pumping and the muscles become stronger and you go up and up and up and up and you never get tired. It's all in your psyche. It's unbelievable. And as I said, I'm not saying this because I read it on books or because I watched it on YouTube from some influencer. I'm saying it because that's what happened. It's first-hand experience.

[00:27:13] Steve.: But perhaps the most powerful reflection of all for Nico across his five year journey related to people. He'd fully experienced diversity; geographical, cultural, religious. What had that taught him?

Courtesy of 80 Lives

United by our similarities

[00:27:30] Nico: On a very basic intrinsic level, we're all the same because we all seek the same basic things. Given the choice nobody will say, "Hey, I wanna suffer today, I wanna be in pain, I wanna have cancer". Nobody does that. Everybody seeks happiness and comfort. So in that sense, we're all the same. Now, the way we choose or the ideas we develop on how to get there, they're extremely different. And there are differences that vary depending on belief, on culture, on genes as well. We're not the same but it's fine, because we are unified by seeking happiness. If we are tolerant, if we are accepting of the differences and we are respectful of those differences, there's no reason to be threatened and there's no reason to threaten others.