Ride Up Mt. Coot-tha

After a few days of doing not much more than turning pages of a book – I am reading Three Worlds Gone Mad by Robert Young Pelton – I am getting really restless. The weather isn’t all that great, but I will have to go outside and do something.

So I hop on my bike and head toward Mt. Coot-tha, a hill just west of the city center. It’s a good climb to the top at about three hundred meters in elevation. I breeze through the familiar bike path along the Brisbane River, go through a couple of suburbs, and start the steady climb at the six-kilometer mark, according to my cycling computer. The climb isn’t that steep, just enough to make you aware that you are doing a good cardio workout. After six kilometers and a three-hundred meter climb, I reach the observation point with a nice view of Brisbane and the surrounding suburbs.

This is what the city of Brisbane looks like today:

This is what it looked like in February, 2003, when I came to Brisbane as a backpacker:

That’s quite a few more tall buildings just in the span of five years.

All that hard work to come up only means an exhilarating coast back down. The road, devoid of any cars, is all mine. I lean forward with hands just touching the brakes, and let gravity pull me along the surface of the road at speeds up to 55 kmph. In just a couple of minutes, I am at the bottom of the hill, back to where I started. And I continue on my leisurely ride home along the river.

What a good work out. Now that I’ve worked up an appetite, I can’t wait for dinner.

Tonight’s dinner: that old standby during my college days - rice, black beans, and salsa. Except this time, the rice is not instant rice, the beans are cooked and not out of a can, and the salsa is not from a jar – I made that yesterday.