1 month ago
15
January 11, 2026 — 5:00am
Melbourne. I’m still only in Melbourne. My flight home to Sydney has been cancelled, and the next freedom bird doesn’t leave until tomorrow evening. Now I’m stuck in this hastily booked hotel room, as the walls move in a little tighter.
Tomorrow, I’ll have a day to terminate with extreme prejudice – but I’ve already marched the laneways, reconned Federation Square and the NGV, hitched the trams to hipster suburbs including Fitzroy, Preston and Carlton.
I need a mission. And casting around on Google Maps, a tantalising plan forms. Conjured up like room service.
Melbourne is flat, flat, flat, and graced with a network of well-maintained bike paths. One of them, the Main Yarra Trail, follows the bends of the river that snakes through the city like a main circuit cable, to paraphrase Captain Benjamin Willard from Apocalypse Now (whose tormented spirit has possessed me this evening). So I’ll set off upriver, but I won’t be on a navy patrol boat – a bicycle will suffice.
The next morning – with last night’s cinematic fever dream a distant memory – I set off for Blue Tongue Bikes, centrally located at Batman Park at the CBD’s western end.
Blue Tongue offers a range of bicycle tours and reasonably priced rentals. There are mountain bikes, road bikes, e-bikes and gravel bikes, but I opt to go solo on a three-speed Dutch-style cruiser ($40 for the day).
The company’s website is an excellent resource for bike ride ideas, with all the trails helpfully mapped out on Google Maps, and starting from Blue Tongue’s doorstep. The Yarra River Trail forms the first half of the 30-kilometre Capital City Trail loop, which circles the inner suburbs. This seems like a doable day trip, so I head east, past the Royal Botanic Gardens, along the south bank of the Yarra.
While Sydney has swank suburbs such as Rose Bay and Vaucluse beside the glistening blue harbour, much of Melbourne’s primo real estate overlooks the river’s brown waters, and there’s some stunning residential architecture to be found along the South Yarra and Toorak stretch.
By the time I reach MacRobertson Bridge, however, the trail comes to a dead end – I should have swapped over to the north side a little while back. Not to worry – getting slightly lost is all part of the adventure, and after a 100-metre footpath backtrack to Gibdon Street, I rejoin the Main Yarra Trail on the northern bank.
From here, the Yarra bends north at Burnley, and I ride past rowing crews from the various posh colleges (St Kevin’s, Scotch, Genazzano, Xavier, Strathcona) whose boatsheds line this section of the river. It evokes a world of aristocratic gentility that seems far from the suburban grid of Richmond, just a stone’s throw to the west.
However, a temporary bike path closure a little further along forces me away from the river, and onto those suburban streets. I cycle past the CUB brewery at Abbotsford and along Nicholson Street, before picking up the Yarra Trail once more at Collingwood Children’s Farm.
This not-for-profit working farm sits adjacent to the Downton Abbey-like Abbotsford Convent (now converted into an arts and cultural precinct), which only adds to the pleasantly surreal experience of cycling past herds of sheep, goats and cows in the middle of the Victorian capital.
At Dights Falls, I watch a kayaker practise his whitewater skills in the shallow rapids, paddling through a series of dangling poles. Here, the trail forks between the rest of Yarra Trail – which heads east through Kew, and on to the Heide Museum of Modern Art at Bulleen and beyond – and the Merri Creek Trail, which continues north and forms part of the greater Capital City Trail.
Merri Creek is delightful, and a highlight of the ride. Once a gathering place for the Wurundjeri people, colonial settlers turned it into something of an industrial waste site before it was rehabilitated by dedicated community volunteers and returned to its former glory.
The trail hugs the tree-lined banks of the creek in parts and even crosses it at a small weir. I post a picture of this rural idyll in the family WhatsApp group and ask them to guess where in Victoria I am. My adult son takes a punt on Bright, which is fair enough – by this point, I indeed feel like I’m out for a ride in the Victorian countryside, rather than Australia’s second-most populous city.
After two very leisurely hours of cycling about 16 kilometres, I arrive at Fitzroy North’s Rushall Station – a name I vaguely recall as the title of a 1991 album by the Melbourne indie rock legends Underground Lovers – which is roughly the halfway point of the Capital City Trail.
I could keep heading west and complete the rest of the trail, but I’ve been so entranced by what I’ve seen so far that I decide to head back the way I came, and take it all in for a second time.
I’ll finish off the Capital City Trail next time I’m in Melbourne. Or maybe I’ll do the rest of the Yarra Trail, or head to Williamstown on Port Phillip Bay, or take a beach ride to St Kilda and Brighton …
I need never fear another Melbourne flight cancellation – because I’ll always have a mission.
THE DETAILS
CYCLE
A wide range of well-maintained bicycles can be hired from Blue Tongue Bikes from $40 a day for a Dutch-style cruiser to $100 a day for a dual-suspension mountain bike. Guided tours are also available, including the Classic Melbourne Bike Tour for $109 a person. See bluetonguebikes.com.au
EAT
Before the ride proper, I’d opted to fuel up on a delectable smoked salmon focaccia ($16.90) at Brunetti Oro, a Melbourne institution on Flinders Lane. See brunettioro.com.au
If you’d rather avoid the CBD streets, Kanteen at South Yarra would make for a good pitstop, situated as it is on a river bend opposite Herring Island, about 5.6 kilometres from Blue Tongue Bikes. See kanteen.net
The Farm Cafe at Collingwood Children’s Farm is charming and tasty, with a relaxed rural vibe and views over a market garden and orchards. See farm.org.au/the-farm-cafe
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