First published in 2017, Bushranger 1100 is a little known bikepacking route from Morresset to Dungog in NSW, Australia. This is Brad Mertins’ antithetical response to the Tour Divide style of bikepacking. As a resourceful singlespeeder who travels incredibly light, Brad likes his rides to be heaps of killer and minimal filler. The Bushranger 1100 be that.

There was an organised group departure in 2017, with around 30 riders setting out from Morresset. The weather, terrain and mechanicals claimed them all, none finished. In May 2022 four of us set out for a ride on the route: Stan, Brenton, Brad himself to lead us out for a few days and I. It was a fantastic, brutal, beautiful ride. The late Brenton Rodgers and I rode into the Dungog finish after nine days.

It’s April 2023 now, and May 2022 feels like the dark ages but if there’s one story from the ride that needs to be told. It’s the story of Lee.

And we’re going to call this the Parable of Lee the Leech. Because there is meaning in this story and it's not safe for kids. And here we go:

Seven days into the ride, after bush bashing through the Never Never and traversing the Barrington Tops, I was heading more or less to the coast. I’d negotiated my release through the vegetal, vulvic threshold of the high coastal plateau and out into the low, lush and spacious dairy farming country. The bitumen back roads made for an easy lyfe in contrast to the pleasurable horrors of the previous nine days.

Among those hours and days of pushing and pedaling there was a theme that became experiential knowledge. And you know as well as I that platitudes will spill from the most vacant of vessels, but the idea that change is the constant settled into my small but treasured library of experienced knowledge on this ride.

And so the smooth, wide and fast bitumen road gave way - changed - to a car swallowing landslide crater. And it was there as I was threading my bike and body through the branches of a prostate eucalypt that I met Lee. And by ‘met’ I mean that’s where Lee attached himself to me.

Lee was a glistening black elongated teardrop with stripes, a boiled licorice lolly from a pedo in a van that was stuck to the inside of my left calf. But who was I to weigh the actions of a barely sentient land mollusc? I let him be.

Lee and I had lunch together. Lee had bikepacker blood and lactic acid. I had a muesli bar.

Lee and I rode through the rain, through muddy firetrails, over derty, filthi dubstep corrugations. Lee was getting sandblasted, jolted around, I could feel his weight tugging against my skin but apparently my blood was good enough to hold on for.

For 50 odd kilometers, through the rolling foothills to the coastal hinterland, Lee hungrily drank my sap. Saviouring its salty iron flavour and forward haemoglobic viscosity on the pallet. Until finally Lee had his fill and, of his own accord, Lee released his salivary ductiles from the meat of my leg and dropped himself onto Wattley Hill Road.

The video below record the moments that followed Lee’s decoupling, the photos render unto your LCD the other bits.

After Lee and I parted ways I returned to the simple temporal and spatial minutia of traversing a landscape by bicycle: push pedals, eat garbage, sleep in the dert. The spatial challenge that afternoon was another 35km of firetrail before a body of water that could not be waded and the temporal was a 5pm ferry. I loaded garbage into my mouth hole, I pushed pedals with purpose and I rode out of the saddle for most of that 35km in an ITT against the departure of the last ferry.

I got there with time to spare.

And it was fucking closed.

I sat on the ferry ramp, looked across the estuary at the stagnant slag heap of a ferry. I cracked a beer that I’d intended on drinking on the beach to celebrate a coastal arrival but, rather than doing that, I’d ridden through, ridden all the way through to make it to the SS Tits on a Bull now beached over the other side.

As I weighed the options of a 30km detour, or a swim with improvised drybag flotation for my bicycle, I saw a humble mariner in a tiny tinny motoring along not far from my ferryless shoreline. I waved nautically and he came over and said g’day. Apparently the ferry was closed because of recent floods and a bunch of people had been caught out, the ferry operators hadn’t updated the website. He offered me a lift to the other side so I loaded my bicycle into his vessel and we crossed to the far shore.

Loading and unloading my bike from that tinny involved wading into the estuarine waters, washing most of the blood from my leg. The physical signs of Lee’s intrusion succumbed to entropy while the effects of the experience were only just settling.

Now, a decade in a year later, I’ve seen Lee’s stripes in people. And it’s freeing to know that, without needing to intervene, the wheel always comes down the road.

Photodump