Sydney to Melbourne e-Bike tour

(Actually Nowra NSW to Castlemaine VIC)

Days of riding: 12

Total distance: 1060Km

Lowest point: Sea level

Highest elevation: 1861m (Mt Hotham, Vic)

This was our first unsupported e-bike tour and it turned out to be a stunning trip, full of jaw-dropping landscapes and beautiful people. If you are reading this and have helped us along the way, thank you so much! Touring on a bike is a real privilege and we’re well keen for more. Below is a little run down of how the trip happened if you’re interested.

Planning

Planning was kept to a minimum! We’ve had our electric bikes for a year or so now and are familiar with what might go wrong and tried to plan for such. We did the Sydney – Canberra trip last year with a support vehicle, but this was our first unsupported trip, so we were a little nervous. The bikes are heavy (especially the Golden Motor one – 38kgs); we knew to pack light and ended up with 20kgs total in our front and back ortlieb panniers. My bike fully loaded just tipped 60kgs.

The Route

There was a marital disagreement about whether to go down the coast (Princes Hwy) all the way to Melbourne or down through Canberra and over the Snowy Mountains, so a compromise was made which involved the South Coast of NSW as far as we could (Merimbula – basically the same latitude as our destination Castlemaine) then cut west across the Snowy’s trying not to zig-zag north/south to much. There was only one problem with this – there were no roads heading west across that part of the Snowy’s. After some research we found McKillops Bridge Rd (billed as the “most precarious roads in Victoria” with an old crossing of the Snowy River built in 1934) and then a little track called Limestone Rd which delivered us out at Omeo. This chance bit of planning turned out to be the most amazing part of the trip.

Route on Bikely.com

Here’s a map of the route on Bikely.com

Photo’s

Check out the slide show of the trip

Video

Or watch the video – sorry about the shaky camera – the iPhone mount wasn’t that stable!

The e-bike Set up

We have two 14Ah batteries on each bike, each battery gave us a range of about 60Km (120km range total). This is the range we get riding around the city and what we found with our (pannier-less) ride to Canberra. We knew it could be less with all the extra weight, especially in hilly terrain. Our route involved 6 days of over 110kms, so we were on the limit of our charge and two of those days were in the mountains with no towns or even hamlets for potential top-up charges. So we left home knowing we may need to change our route if we were not getting the range out of the batteries we had hoped.

Basically, we charged both batteries at night and rode them flat each day. Some days when we were concerned about running out we plugged in at a cafe while we had lunch for an hours top-up power (it takes 4 hours for a full charge), or found a power-point in a toilet block / BBQ etc while we made lunch. We only really needed this boost on 1 occasion, but better safe than sorry and better to have more power to spare when you need it more at the end of the day!