Drinking
Water
Drinking is a very important issue, especially in the often hot Australia and for this purpose we needed approx. 5 to 15 liter water per day depending on the heat (water for cooking, etc. included ). We always filled our canisters at water taps at public places and roadhouses or at water tanks at rest areas for free. Often the water was bore water which sometimes hat a strange smell and taste. But since we never became sick, it will not have been that bad. Sometimes we got the moist element of rainwater tanks - the best water you can get for free. In the cities water is mostly purified before and thus it has a chlorine taste at the beginning. But after keeping it in the canister for one day, it does not taste of chemicals anymore.
Not everywhere you get drinking water from the tap
At the beginning we sometimes used Micropur for the preparation of the water if it had a strange coloration. Later we did not use it anymore and still remained healthy. We also had a water filter with us, but we only used it once, when we drank river water. We would not take a filter with us anymore for Australia, because in the hot areas, where it would have been useful, the rivers had dried up.
Since drinking water is very precious in Australia, unfortunately there are some roadhouses which refuse to give away the water freely to cyclists. This situation we had two times. First in Western Australia between Carnarvon and Northampton, where most gas stations and campsites only had taps with salt water and thus charged extreme prices for drinking water (maybe just because of the drought) - beer was cheaper than water!!! Since we did not know about that before, we had too little water for this region and so we asked the drivers of mobile homes which gave us free water from their supply. The situation would not have been a problem if we had know of the water scarcity, because we had enough canisters and the region was not that big (in Denham you can get fresh water and about 25 km after the Billabong Roadhouse there are a few water tanks).
The second situation was at the Nullabor between Norseman and Ceduna where cyclists get drinking water against a few dollars. The prices were not that extreme, but since there was fresh water at the washbasins on the toilets, we took it from there free of charge anyhow.
Sometimes there are restareas with water tanks on which you should not rely however, because a lot of them were empty due to the drought. In addition these were often plotted wrongly in the maps or the water was dirty because of bird dung.
Beer
Beer is the most popular drink of the Australians. The inhabitants of Darwin even have an entry in the Guiness book of records due to the consumption of about 200 liters per head. There are numerous sorts, light beer too. The more alcohol, the more expensive. Our favorite sorts were VB and XXXX. After all it was amazing, how few beer one can bear after one day biking in the heat!
In Darwin there even is a beer can regatta - here one of the competition boats
Wine
Australia also has some famous wine regions. We visited Barossa and Clare Valley, where we simply went from one winery to the next and to taste their wine for free. Seppelts Winery was especially impressing because of the more than 2000 palms on the property of the winery.
Palms and Wine
Wine is better than beer to pack it on the bike, because it does not matter that much if it gets a little warmer. Practical to take away is the wine in alu bags (2 or 4 liter casks). Its taste is nothing special obviously, but cheap and better than always water.
4 liter wine in the carton
Alcohol in general
Often it is not allowed to drink alcohol in public. In some towns there are "zones", in which it is allowed to drink several kinds of alcohol at specific times of the day - sometimes only in combination with food
. Once we were caught with one (!) bottle beer by the police (what drime!). But according to our observations mostly only Aboriginal were controlled.
Alcohol in public is mostly only allowed at especially labeled places
In Australia you cannot buy alcohol in the supermarket, but only in special bottleshops which have other opening hours than supermarkets too. Also in many restaurants you can not by any alcohol. These restaurants are called BYO (Bring Your Own). Here the people need to bring along their drinks themselves.