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.

Flat, flat, flat … Melbourne is a cyclist’s paradise.iStock

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 do-able day trip, so I head east, past the Royal Botanic Gardens, along the south bank of the Yarra.

Tracing the Yarra on two wheels … Kings Domain.Blue Tongue Bikes

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.