Bellingen - Dental, distraction & deviation

Bellingen - Dental, distraction & deviation

Bellingen is ace! A wonderful town perched on the high bank of the Bellingen river surrounded by a lush valley. Its spectacular now but it takes my breath away (& pains my heart) to imagine how phenomenally amazing it would have been filled with rain forest, red cedar, animals & plants before it was logged and cleared! :-(

Bellingen has gathered an amazing community of people from all walks of life, locally & around the world including the farming, logging, town/city, plateau/escarpment, coast, valley, sustainability, professional & transition communities. Its funny how even now with all the development & clearing and so called progress the community is still bound by the same sort of geographical connections that the indigenous people were. With all in the Bellingen Shire bound together by the river with Dorrigo up the escarpment on the plateau at the head waters of the river, Bellingen the valley / river community & Urunga the coastal river mouth community making up the shire and the real community that is Bellingen from my view. Its funny how it has been the river / valley community that has gathered the stronger sense of sustainability around it being much more tied to the rhythm and constraints of the river and its cycles and impact on the valley. Dorrigo almost a little aloof and removed caught in the clouds of farming and the immensely lush fertile conditions of the cold climate mountain position on rich volcanic soil and the great rainfall has produced. With much of the landscape cleared and turned over to farming as a result yet providing a huge contribution to the sustenance and economy of the valley & beyond. Urunga on the other hand open to the ocean with the highway passing through it, subject to the coastal climate & the flooding influence of the river, flatter and more open, exposed to the sun & moderated by the cooling sea, and shaped by the rhythm of the waves & the arterial nature of the pacific highway.

So here we stopped for a bit over 2 weeks while Chris continued his dental surgery inspection tour of Australia with some more emergency dental work. It was a welcome break for us from the physical aspects of the ride and a time for some of the stresses that we have been confronted with to surface and for us to see how we can clear, shift & communicate about this. I can't speak for Chris but suspect he agrees that the ride has been a huge undertaking. The physical nature of the ride is a challenge at times but remarkably easier that I would have expected, so much so that I think almost anyone could ride what we have done given the time. Especially as there have been plenty of towns along the way that would have given less fit people opportunities to take the ride at a pace that works for them. Yet is is the combination of the physical nature with the psychological & emotional aspects as well as the scale and breadth of what we have taken on that has been a challenge for us to manage in the 24 hours available each day.

Like many small business owners starting their business this is a 24/7 commitment on many levels. We are living this while on the road and constantly calling upon ourselves to see what more we can connect with. Our riding days are .5-1 hours meditation + .5-1 hour yoga / stretching + .5-1 hour for breakfast + often .5-1 hour admin & logistics for the day, & + .5-1 hour connecting with our hosts & or community people + 4-8 hours cycling + often with a .5-1 hour lunch + at times a .5-1 hour logistical / admin / email/ media connection session + .5 – 2 hour meet and connect with our new host /set up camp / or find & get into a pub or hostel, .5 hour to shower and get cleaned up + 1-2 hour dinner with our computers or our host + .5-2 hour time to check emails, contact future places we are connecting with & or staying, email media, plan interviews, update the blog & facebook & twitter. All up we rise about 6;30am and go to sleep usually 11+ pm and are working all that time between 6+ days a week over much of our journey. Looking over this I am struck that they stress of the personal financial implications of the ride, the close nature of the working / living situation Chris & I have created & the work we are trying to do & living on the road has stressed me greatly and definitely contributed to my perception of time and work done and what is needing doing. Mmmmmmm....

On the other hand for me Bellingen will always be a special place. Our host Olivia Bernardini is great! An awesome supporter and contributor to what Chris and I are doing. On modest means she opened her home to us, offered food, taught us yoga, showed us around and helped us to look at the ride in new ways & connect with others so that we could be more effective in what we are doing. It was also wonderful to connect with her on a personal level and to be able to inspire and support her in all she is doing and who she is being for her community in Bellingen in the small way we were able too.

A week in to our time in Bellingen we went off to Broadwater in NSW to run a small introduction / symposium for the community around the area organised by Tony Gleeson. We caught the train & bus up which was both a pleasure and a strange experience. A pleasure to be not riding an able to talk about what we planned to do and to enjoy the comfort & relaxation that powered transport provides. Strange as the bus went such a circuitous route which meant a 80km direct journey took almost 3 hours and the motion & claustrophobic environment of the bus was strange after the freedom cycling. I also found myself worried and nervous that at any moment their would be a cyclist on the road as there was no shoulder and in the dark, with no shoulder and narrow roads at high speeds almost no chance of the bus stopping in time. Reminded me clearly why riding after 4pm on Australian rural roads in the evenings is so dam terrifying!

The event went well with a small and committed group of local people clear that a shift in the local sustainability initiatives was important. The direct questions of one of the participants and the sound levels made for some challenges and in the end it was a great result with everyone very supportive and inspired by what we were doing with a young woman considering joining us as a cyclist! Not only is she a keen cyclist but had lots of experience working in sustainability roles in a number of countries and spoke a number of foreign languages including Arabic & Indonesian!

The return journey got off to a troubling start after a great morning seeing us at the bus stop by 7 am fed and ready before the bus arrived, said good by to our host and jumped on the bus, only to have Chris realise that he had left his wallet in our hosts jacket he had worn when we arrived and went in the rain to see if any whales were playing of the coast! A quick call to our host and a dash by him to the 2nd bus stop down the road had the wallet reunited with Chris!

Back in Bellingen (Bello) to the locals Chris and I spent some time unpacking the challenges we were facing and found a space to work from. It is frustrating for both of us when we bounce of each other and especially if this is not cleared fully each time as these things tend to fester. So it was great to get down in that murky territory and clean it out.

One of the great things we got to do was to go to a free adult indigenous language class held at the local school and funded by the local community so as to allow non-indigenous people to connect with and learn more about the local indigenous culture. This is held by a local indigenous man Michael Jarret who actually had to relearn the language as it was actively discouraged when he was younger. Aided by some of the late the local indigenous elders realising that they were the only traditional speakers left and so pooled their pensions & engaged a young interested & supportive Jesuit Priest to assist them to document with writing, & recordings of the language such that now the local language is one of the best preserved indigenous languages in Australia. Michael was fantastic and agreed to have us interview him for our video documentation. It was a great privilege for me to have this opportunity (it was on the day that Chris had 3 teeth drilled & filled!). The interview was plagued by dusk setting in and cleaners & other noises causing us to shift location 3 times and thus getting very dark by the end but the content of what Michael shared is awesome and we have now started in include an edited version of this in our symposiums and will have this online as soon as we understand how to do this.

We also created an opportunity to tell some more of the locals about what we doing through the transition film night by assisted by Olivia. We spent a long while preparing as we only had 15 min and really wanted to create something fun, interesting and compelling. A last minute change of venue to a park with the darkness and ambient noise proved challenging and a shortened time due to the late start found us from my view not achieving what we intended. I would even say a complete flop. Chris on the other hand took it more positively.

Roland