Читать книгу Wild Ride - Daniel Oakman - Страница 14

The 3,380-kilometre route — such as there was — from Glenelg on a gulf of the Southern Ocean, to Port Darwin on the Timor Sea, was ripe for the taking.

Jerome told few people of his plan. Those he did tell either laughed in his face or declared the idea impractical, indeed impossible. He even asked a few of his more adventurous friends to join him, but soon heard a lot of excuses why they were unavailable. The quest for a sponsor was met with a similar response. One agent explained that, if he succeeded, he would gladly refund the cost of the bicycle. But should he fail, he’d rather not have his name associated with the attempt.

So be it, thought Jerome. He would ride alone, free from any commercial interest. He arrived in Adelaide from his home in Broken Hill and purchased a bicycle, painted over the maker’s logo and replaced it with his favourite word: ‘Diamond’. He spent the next four days kitting out for his new ride, then testing his set-up in the Adelaide Hills.

The steel-framed roadster was a sturdy and sensible choice, weighing a shade over 13 kilograms without luggage or water. Jerome immediately replaced the saddle with an older, more comfortable one. To reduce the likelihood of punctures, he fitted a thick tyre to the rear wheel and glued an extra strip of rubber over the tread of the front tyre. A single gear of 62.5 inches (roughly equivalent to a 34 x 15 set-up today) made for slow going over flat ground, but it would allow him to spin a little more easily over the sandy unformed trails he expected to find. A luggage-carrier attached to the handlebars held a waterproof sheet, a change of clothes, socks, a towel and other personal effects. A small waterproof bag protected his journal and other papers. A leather satchel slung over his shoulder contained food, tools and other bits and pieces.

Jerome spent a night at the Pier Hotel in beachside Glenelg. In the morning he rode down the firm sand and straight into the water, until the bike was completely submerged. The local postmaster, whom Jerome had approached to bear witness to his official departure, watched the bizarre spectacle from the shore. He dutifully signed and recorded in Jerome’s notebook what he had seen.

With Diamond baptised in the Southern Ocean, Jerome was ready to begin. On Wednesday morning 10 March 1897, he shook hands with the proprietress of his boarding house and told her that he might not be back for tea. Jerome Murif was clearly a trifle eccentric. And his idiosyncrasies extended well beyond an ambition to pit himself and his personalised bicycle against the Australian outback.