Munda Biddi Trail

The Munda Biddi Trail is a 1000km long mountain bike track from just outside Perth Western Australia, down to Albany on the south West of W.A. Munda Biddi means ‘forest path’ in Noongar language (local indigenous people) and it’s currently the longest such bike trail in the world.

If you were to cycle the complete trail they recommend allowing up to about 4 weeks or 28 days to complete the whole track, though if pressed for time and if you’re an experienced rider, total riding time is about 19 days. It took 12 years to complete the building of the trail and a lot of thought went into the finer details of the track. Each daily section is about 40-50 kms of riding though they say that each kilometer of trail riding is about equivalent to 2 kilometers of bitumen riding.

 

The trail is set up so that every second or third night you arrive in a town so that you can have a nice soft bed at a hostel/hotel, caravan park or B&B, have a good meal, stock up on your supplies and then be on your way. Between the towns the daily ride sections are spaced out with camping huts along the way, these can be quite impressive and will sleep over 20 people.

 

The laout of the huts are very simple, a corridor straight through the middle of the hut, then on either side there are large camping/sleeping areas, one down low and then another up higher with ladders for access, a bit light giant bunk beds down either side. This allows plenty of room for people to layout gear and beds to camp in shelter. Other facilities at the huts include 2 rain water tanks which collect water from the roof of the hut, a long drop toilet, and a covered area for bike parking as well as covered areas with picnic tables and seats. Most also have a bike repair rack where you can get your bike up and service it.

Still my experience of the munda biddi is only small, I cycled a small section about 10km from William Bay near Denmark across to lights beach. This is a magnificent section, not only the trail itself but also the coastline here is very picturesque, and this is the closes the trail gets to the coast in all of the 1000 kilometers.

Riding this small section of trail left me wanting to find and experience more of the Munda Biddi trail and in writing this small section of blog about the trail, I’ve googled off and found many blogs from adventurous people who have traveled large sections if not all of the trail. I’ll be seeking out some of the better sections to ride over the coming months, though there are some sections that have a lot of normal road or track riding rather than trail riding like in my photos above.