Around the world with The Bear – Part Three

The King of Every Kingdom – Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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In Part 1 we covered preparations, while you left us out on the Nullarbor last time in Part 2. Here we are back again, still keen and heading towards Singapore.

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Nullarbor is from the Latin and apparently just means ‘no trees’. That’s reasonably accurate, too. The road is mostly straight and not very interesting, unless you find flat ground with occasional small, dried-out bushes interesting.

There are signs warning of camels crossing the road, but we didn’t see any of the actual animals. Camels were imported into Australia to carry supplies out to work parties in the desert and have multiplied in the wild.

These days, Australia is the largest camel-exporting country in the world, so I’m told. I cannot vouch for this. Other animals which might get in your way out there are kangaroos, wombats, emus and wedge-tail eagles. There are also innumerable but reasonably polite venomous creatures. As far as I know we export none of these, which does seem a bit strange.

To make camp, we went half a mile or so off the road and found ourselves a little sheltered hollow. There was plenty of small timber for a fire, and the stars looked the way they only ever do in the desert: cold, fat and piercingly bright. There are twice as many out there as anywhere else.

When we finally reached the coast the next day, we found a slip road that someone had bulldozed down to the waters of the Great Australian Bight. We couldn’t resist it and took the heavily overloaded bikes down there.

A shelf of rock at sea level had once contained petrified tree trunks, but these had been eroded away leaving vertical pipes through the rock. They now acted like fountains, and whenever a wave came in under the shelf it produced water jets of different heights.

Going back up the road was a comedy. The surface consisted of broken limestone on a bed of sand, and it was steep. I took quite a bit of it on my rear wheel, with Charlie laughing himself silly at the faces I was making. Then we had a 200km ride before we could get a beer.

There were lots of bikes on the road and a lot of dead kangaroos next to it. People will insist on driving across here at night. The crows and enormous wedge-tail eagles were gorging themselves. A stop at Newman’s Rocks, one of the few waterholes along the road, refreshed us and the long, sweeping bends as the road drops down from the plateau made riding interesting again.

We arrived in Norseman, the first town since Ceduna 1000km to the east, in quite good spirits after spending three days out in the desert. The newly tarred road really makes the crossing easy. Norseman boasts a good, traditional pub that serves passable pies as well as Swan Lager.

Highway I took us down its narrow, potholed length back to Esperance, which is blessed with truly beautiful beaches of fine, white sand and clear water; it’s also cursed with the most comprehensive collection of signs forbidding anything that might conceivably be fun. We spent the evening, thoroughly depressed, in one of the local dives called, would you believe, ‘Casa Tavern’.

Before leaving Sydney, I had wrangled an invitation to stay with the west coast correspondent of Two Wheels, the bike magazine I was writing for. I now rang this unfortunate to advise him of our imminent arrival and to ask him for some help with tyres and spares. I’d forgotten that it was Sunday morning, and got him out of bed. That wasn’t to be the end of Ray’s troubles with us.

The rest of the day was spent dodging road trains – trucks with two and three trailers – and squeezing past a huge, wheeled hay rake someone had managed to arrange immovably across the highway. When we made camp, we could just see the outline of the Stirling Ranges through the evening haze.

In the morning a short detour took us up to the foot of Bluff Knoll, where the national parks people, with an unerring eye for the most objectionable siting, had built an enormous brick toilet block so that you could see it 20 or more kilometres away. Bless their furry little heads. The Stirlings are still lovely, their steep but soft slopes covered in evergreen forest.

We lunched at Albany in the London Hotel, feeling rather homesick. Our local in Balmain is also called the London. It was a good lunch, too, and reasonable value for money. You can tell Western Australia is a prosperous state—food is dear and the people are dour. Wealth doesn’t seem to cheer people up at all.

We didn’t put our tent up that night, but slept in a little hollow in the sand hills at William Bay, cozy on thick grass. We swam out to the rock bar across the bay, and there was a gorgeous sunset. After Walpole, we reached the forest of great karri and jarrah trees which covers much of southern Western Australia.

The cafe at Pemberton had an old Seeburg jukebox, stocked with records of the appropriate vintage, and we amused ourselves playing ‘Running Bear’ and the like. After a day of riding through chocolate-box scenery, we camped near Busselton and were confronted by a rather scary array of enormous insects. I’ve no idea what they were, but they were huge and looked nasty. None of them bit us, I will admit.

We found Ray’s house when we got to Perth, and the key was in the letterbox as promised. By the time he got home from a hard day at the scrambles track we had emptied his refrigerator of Swan Lager. We sang the Swan Lager Song in an attempt to mollify him.

The agents for Palanga Lines, with whom we were to sail to Singapore, were helpful and told us to bring the bikes down to the wharf on the morning we were due to depart. Formalities were minimal. In Sydney we had been told to get there a week early, so we now had that week on our hands.

The time passed quickly enough, mainly bikini-watching on Perth beaches and sampling various batches of Swan Lager as quality assurance. We also located an old Singaporean pal of ours who was running his own restaurant and discussed Lee Kuan Yew, the Angels and the martial arts with him. Hoppy knows more than most about all three.

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Cruising on the MV Kota Singapura

Ray and Kerry hosted a very small (the four of us) farewell party on the night before our departure. The number of empty beer cans this produced is now, I believe, a legend around the Two Wheels office. Badly hung over, we watched the bikes being slung aboard our transport, the MV Kota Singapura, and then tied them down ourselves.

They were down in the hold with a shipment of live sheep. Once boarding started, we staggered up the gangplank and found ourselves some deckchairs. Then we broke open the flagon of wine which we had, with uncanny foresight, rescued from the previous night’s debauchery. Just as well, for the bar didn’t open for hours.

Cabins were quite comfortable, there were a lot of congenial people on board, and it didn’t take long for the trip to take on the atmosphere of a cruise. I started a water polo competition, which was incredibly rough and lots of fun. To be able to tell the teams apart, we played beardies against cleanskins. Us beardies cleaned ‘em up every time. Mind you, it was mainly because we tried to drown as many of the cleanskins as we could get our hands on.

I also met Annie, the attractive, petite lady of whom you will be hearing more later in the story. A shipboard romance! You see, it does happen.

On talent night, we presented a musical version of Waltzing Matilda (for the cognoscenti, it was the Queensland version) a traditional Australian poem concerning a sheep thief.

Australian legends are almost exclusively about thieves of one kind or another. Charlie rustled a real sheep from the mob in the hold. Its stage debut was rather spoilt by the fact that it crapped all over the dance floor. Still, we were all nervous…

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Singapore

The ‘Paper Tiger’, Singapore’s preoccupation with paperwork, sprang as soon as we berthed. It was a Sunday, and therefore not possible to arrange the multitude of documents necessary to get the bikes off the ship.

The ship was going back out into the Roads as soon as the passengers had been offloaded, and would not return until Wednesday. Palanga’s agent was unhelpful to the point of being rude, and we had to settle for a bus ride to town.

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I’m sorry to say that Ray has since shuffled off this mortal coil. I hope there are dirt bikes wherever you’ve gone, mate. More of our ride in Part Four.

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part Two

The King of Every Kingdom
Around the world on a very small motorcycle

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

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In Part 1 we covered preparations for the trip to Dublin – and onwards. This week we head off!

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To Adelaide

The bikes were finished in time for our departure, but only just. It is truly amazing just what can turn up to delay you, but we were ready when the first guests for our farewell party arrived. The bikes were all packed and lined up outside the front door.

I will draw a considerate curtain of silence over the activities of the Sydney University Motorcycle Club that night. When the time came for us to leave, I had had half an hour of sleep, Charlie had had none and the guard of honour to see us off had shrunk from 80 to one. The entire club, barring only one intrepid soul, was asleep, some in distressing positions on the lawn.

So were we, not long after departure. Not on the lawn. Our route took us through the Royal National Park south of Sydney, and we took advantage of a shaded river bank to catch a bit of shut-eye: we’d done all of 30km so far.

The afternoon saw us a little further along our way, but the weather was already demonstrating some of the nastiness it would be handing out later on. By the time we had passed Wollongong, some 80km from Sydney, a cloudburst had caught us.

Its relatives followed us for the rest of the day as we rolled south on Highway 1 at the 80km/h that the XLs found congenial. We discovered a river cave to sleep in that first night, with a pool in front, but we left some of our clothes under a drip from the stone ceiling. A lot to learn, yet.

Julie and Trevor, friends of Charlie’s, sheltered us the next night and tried to teach us mah-jong into the bargain. Then we sat out on the verandah, looking out over their little bit of the Ranges, and had a few quiet drinks. Trevor, who is quite a brilliant mechanic, brazed up some braces for the backs of our pannier racks the next day. His workshop was across the road from McConkey’s pub—’The Killarney of the South’ so we ducked over there for a Guinness with lunch. They were out of Guinness.

We played boy motocross racers on some of the mud roads along the coast, and Charlie’s Trials Universals beat my Avon Roadrunners every time. Not being much of a dirt rider, I was mostly petrified. Back on the tar, we rolled down through the state forests that straddle the border ranges, still in the rain, of course. But it’s so peaceful down there, ridge after ridge of forest rolling away to the horizon.

Lakes Entrance provided fresh scallops from the local Fishermen’s Co-op, and I fried them in butter in my old Army dixie for a memorable meal. Lunch the next day was marine again, the Yarram Hotel turning out a seafood platter for $3 that consisted of grilled fish, deep-fried battered scallops, oysters and prawns with an excellent salad. Australian pub lunches can be superb, although the prices have increased over the past forty years.

Gippsland’s straight roads took us further south, to Wilson’s Promontory. This is a national park and the Department of National Parks and Wildlife makes absolutely sure you don’t forget it. There are more signs than plants in the otherwise lovely, rugged, stony park. We camped at Tidal River among the black dripping ti-trees and drank quantities of bourbon and milk. For medicinal purposes only.

Friends put us up in Melbourne, and we spent a great deal of time in the excellent Chinese and Greek restaurants that city has to offer. As a Sydney-sider, I am obliged to add at this stage that Melbourne doesn’t have a great deal else to offer… we take our inter-capital rivalries seriously. There being a shortage of helmets, we got around by car.

‘Err… this car has a bullet hole in the door,’ noted Charlie. Gaby, the proud owner, nodded. Apparently she had been driving along out in the country one night when there was a bang. When she got home, she extracted a .303 bullet from the padding in her seat. My friend Lee grinned, ‘Who said Australia isn’t the frontier any more, eh?’ she asked.

The Geelong freeway took us out of town a couple of days later and no one shot at us. We took the Great Ocean Road west along the coast, throwing the poor little XLs around as if they were desiccated Ducatis. This is a marvelous bike road with twists and turns along the cliffs and a reasonable surface, spoiled only by some loose gravel and tourists. Lunch was at Lorne, in a pub that reminded me of the Grand at Brighton, then we were ready for the dirt and gravel surface after Apollo Bay.

Down to our campsite at the Red Johanna, the gravel was deep enough to swallow a bike whole, but we survived to sit on the cliff top and watch the sea mist roll in and envelop the coast in gauze. The next day took us through equal parts of state forest and grazing land to Mt Gambier with its famous Blue Lake, which every year it seems to claim one or two skin-divers looking for its mysterious water supply.

We had a very Australian dinner at Mac’s Hotel, the local cocky’s pub. Cockies are farmers, not cockatoos (although that seems to be where the name comes from), and you can have cow cockies, wheat cockies or sheep cockies. I imagine that in the backblocks you can even have marijuana cockies… They all eat and drink well, as we found out.

The Coorong, a seaside desert rather strangely full of waterways, kept us amused the next day as we tried out its numerous little sand-tracks. We needed the rest by the time we found a campsite on the shores of Lake Albert; I wonder what makes my body think that hanging onto the handlebars really hard will stop the bike from falling over? It doesn’t work, you know.

We left the pelicans nodding sagely on the lake the next morning and made our way up past Bordertown to Tailem Bend. Our first sight of the Murray River gave us not only a view of the longest river system on the continent but also of the Murray Queen, one of the last paddle steamers plying it. Very majestic she looked, too.

The run into Adelaide was a bit grim on the new ridge top motorway, which was exposed to the scorching desert winds. We had lunch at Hahndorf, in the German Arms pub; there’s a large expatriate German community down here and they haven’t forgotten how to cook a decent schnitzel. The Adelaide Hills provided a last bit of riding amusement before we rolled into the South Australian capital, dry and tired. Once again we had friends to put us up and put up with us, and Adelaide provided its famous Arts Festival for our amusement.

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Desert days (and nights)

Then the road took us towards the Flinders Range, and we registered our best petrol consumption figures for the trip: 77mpg, thanks to a substantial tailwind. Not far out of Adelaide we thought the end of the trip had come rather early as we rolled into a little town called Dublin! We camped that night in Germein Gorge in the Flinders and had to be very careful with our fire—everything was dry; even the creek had long since ceased to flow. Fortunately we were already carrying our own water.

At Pookara, we turned off Highway 1 to go down the gravel road to Streaky Bay. The campsite was rather uninspiring, although the bay itself looked good with its alternating light and dark sea floor. We did find some inspiration that night in the pub, watching a little blonde, who was dancing in the tightest gold lame pants I have ever seen.

Nothing was open the next morning, and breakfast had to wait until we reached Smoky Bay, where the General Store provided some geriatric biscuits. It’s grim country down there, but the people are friendly; Ceduna was pleasant enough, more like a suburb of Sydney than a town on the edge of the Nullarbor Plain. There we met a bloke who was touring the country in a converted bus. As a runabout, he carried a Kawasaki 1000 in the back—complete with sidecar.

Outside Penong there was a forest of windmills all mounted on wheeled trolleys—another testament to the inhospitability of the land. It wasn’t much farther to the ‘Nullarbor—treeless plain’ sign, where we saw our first wombat of the trip. He was just trundling along minding his own business, and disappeared before I could get the camera out.

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Tune in next installment for our ride across the Nullarbor and onwards.

Source: MCNews.com.au