I’m an early riser. My alarm beeps into the darkness at 5 a.m. every morning, rain or shine. Vilis, however, is an evening person, so for him to rise at 5:30 a.m. two days in a row on the weekend was a stretch. However, to beat the later scorching intensity of the sun, we set out at 6:30 a.m. beneath a bald blue sky (with one of us groggy) and cycled from Rowe’s Bay in Townsville to Cape Pallarenda.

In Rowe’s Bay, the paved path near the shore led us past colourful sculptures of water creatures inlaid with tile mosaics – sea snake, fish, turtle, crocodile, jellyfish – as well as a playground, picnic barbies and tables, and stinger warning signs complete with bottles of vinegar to treat jellyfish stings. Palms and she-oaks edged the beach, which stretched in a long, shallow crescent for 6 kilometres north to Cape Pallarenda. Enormous fig trees shaded the path in places, their rusty fruits falling around us, their copper-coloured aerial roots smacking into our helmets like coarse hair as we rode beneath massive branches. In a dog exercise area, canines romped along the beach and splashed in the ocean.

The morning settled in around us, still and warm, with the yodelling of magpies, the rapid chatter of masked lapwings, the muted calls of peaceful doves, and raucous squawks of rainbow lorikeets decorating the air with sound. We shared the path with runners, walkers, and other cyclists. Vilis stopped to chat with a fellow grubbing in the soil alongside the path and learned that he was a cyclist digging up goat’s head burr plants, which produce globular, spiky seed capsules that can puncture bike tires.

Farther down the shore, beach walkers strolled near a marine stinger resistant enclosure empty of swimmers, and boaters backed vehicles with boat trailers down a brick boat ramp to the beach and launched their craft onto brilliantly blue water.

After the pedestrian and cyclist path ended at the suburb of Pallarenda, we cycled on Pallarenda Road until it narrowed into the access road for Cape Pallarenda Conservation Park. Cruising through the welcome shade of the wooded park leading to the headland, we again noted brush-turkeys scratching and pecking in the forest litter, as we had on our Cape Pallarenda hike in early January. Near the cemented-rock breakwater at the south end of the cape, anglers with multiple rods in holders braced in the sand stared east at an ocean that assaulted my eyes with scintillating, silver flecks and bars of reflected sunlight.

Leaving the cape, we cycled back to Rowe’s Bay, the return trip much faster than the outgoing one and the mosaic sculptures in Rowe’s Bay refreshing our spirits after two and a half hours of cycling. For the first time in weeks, the weekend had offered us back-to-back days of brilliant tropical blue skies and dry weather for our explorations.