Around the world with The Bear – Part Four

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

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

In Part 3 we completed our Nullabor journey and sailed over to Singapore. Now it’s time for more fun with Annie, and then a parting of the ways. But we know it turned out well, don’t we? You can find Part 1 and Part 2 here.

Singapore

Most of our fellow passengers were on a Sea-Jet tour to Britain, which included a hotel stopover in Singapore and then a cattle jet to London. The driver of the bus taking them – and us – to their hotel was an optimist and pulled the old, ‘Whoops, we just happen to have stopped outside the shop of my brother, why don’t you just look in,’ routine.

I spotted a little Chinese hotel across the road and we ducked off the bus, leaving my camera case behind. After checking in at the Tong Ah, I discovered my loss quickly enough – and nearly had a heart attack – but the case had been offloaded at the tour hotel and I had no trouble getting it back.

Before Annie flew out to London, we had a couple of marvelous days together. We shopped, sightsaw and, of course, dined. Down by the harbour we discovered the statue of the ‘Merlion’, Singapore’s heraldic beast. It bears a plaque reading ‘The Merlion is a mythological beast created by the Singapore Tourist Board in 1971.’ Don’t laugh; at least they know the difference between mythological and mythical (and mystical), which is more than most people seem to.

With Annie gone, it was time to tame the Paper Tiger, so we went down to the insurance office for Third Party insurance, valid in Singapore and Malaysia; to the Singapore AA for an import licence and a circulation permit; to the shipping office for a delivery order, and to the wharf for… the bikes?

Oh, no! First the bikes had to be lifted out of the hold. They were covered in a stinking film of lanolin from the sheep with which they’d shared their home. Then the wharfage had to be calculated. A clerk measured the bikes over the extremities, and arrived at a figure of two cubic metres each. This was transmuted, by the magic of Singaporean arithmetic, into a weight of two tonnes each. Just wait, I thought, until Soichiro Honda hears about his new two-tonne 250cc trail bikes.

Clutching a form given to us by the measurer, we then had to queue for a delivery list. A very thorough questionnaire with three copies, this form actually demands the time of day- in two places. Is this some way of measuring how fast you fill out forms? Is there, perhaps, a prize? ‘Most Improved this month goes to Charlie and The Bear, who have come up…’ A very kind Indian fellow-sufferer helped us wade through this.

We paid the wharfage and got the bikes, which refused to start. After a lot of pushing, swearing and checking of spark, we located the trouble. The carburetors were blocked by muck no doubt settled out of the petrol by the vibration on board. Red faced and still puffing, we ran the gauntlet of Customs and police, who checked all the papers.

The sergeant in charge, a large Sikh, had a brother in Sydney who was stationmaster at Coogee. There’s no railway station at Coogee, but I was not about to tell the sarge that. Singapore traffic, here we come.

We took full advantage of the city’s attractions over the next few days: eating in Coleman Street; watching Chinese opera in Sungei Road; eating in Arab Street; delicious roti pratha across the road from the Tong Ah for breakfast; drinking the superb fruit juices made from real fruit in front of your eyes.

It’s a bike city, but most of them are 50 and 70cc tiddlers. Suzuki was advertising the ‘power alternative’, an 80cc step-through. We saw a well-preserved Norton and two Gold Wings as well as a number of ex-War Department BSAs with girder forks, and large sidecar boxes, which the Japanese had obviously disdained to take home after WW2. Even some of the 50s had boxes on the side and delivered everything up to lengths of angle iron.

Singapore is a clean city. It might be more accurate to say that it’s quite compulsively spotless, except for the waterways. Fines for littering are astronomical. I could well imagine living there for a while, but only for a while. It’s all a bit too heavily regimented and conformist for comfort. When the time came for us to leave, we rode out on Changi Road and back around the reservoir to the border post at Woodlands.

Malaysia

Dr Mahathir also said that Malays are lazy. Perhaps, perhaps. I think that Malays just like to choose their own methods and priorities. Leaving Singapore, out on the Causeway, was much easier than coming in. The gentleman processing us at the Malaysian border was in civvies, and we had a little argument.

I maintained that a Carnet de Passage was necessary for Malaysia and he disagreed. ‘Perhaps I’d better see a Customs officer,’ said I. He drew himself up to his full four feet ten inches, threw me a withering glare and replied, ‘I am a Customs officer!’ What else could I do but accept his ruling? I was to regret that later.

We rolled out into Johore Baharu and soon found the way to Tinggi. A good if slightly bumpy road took us up into the hills and the rubber and palm oil plantations. With rain threatening, we stopped for a moment to don wet-weather gear and saw a chilling tableau. Up the hill towards us, into a blind corner, came two trucks side by side having a drag on the narrow tar. I was very glad we weren’t out on the road…

In the little hotel in Tinggi I renewed my acquaintance with the dipper that takes the place of the shower in most South-East Asian countries. You just ladle water over yourself out of a large cement trough. It’s marvelously refreshing after a hot, sweaty day. A little farther up the coast we filled our tanks for the first time in Malaysia and discovered that a full tank cost about as much as a hotel room and three meals put together, which is to say bugger all. This proportion was to hold true in most places; half your daily expenses go for petrol, leaving half for you.

We rode on up the east coast, jungle swamps alternating with hill plantations. I cashed a traveler’s cheque at Mersing in a bank guarded by a little bloke armed with an enormous shotgun. Bit dangerous being a bank robber here, you could get hurt.

Lunch was consumed at the harbour, overlooking the colourful fishing fleet. All the boats had eyes painted on their bows to enable them to find their way through the shallows. People were only too happy to be photographed and I snapped some enormous grins.

The little village of Nenasi, where we had intended to stop for the night, didn’t have a hotel, so we went on to the regional capital, Pekan. Dinner of excellent kway teow, boiled and fried noodles, rounded off the day and we retired under the gently rotating ceiling fan. We left the luggage in the room next morning and rode the unburdened bikes up the beach. It was great fun and pleasant to be out of the traffic.

The South China Sea looked so inviting in the heat that we stopped for a dip, but the tepid water made it less refreshing than it might have been. When we came out, our feet had suffered a sea change—not into something rich and fine, as Bill Shakespeare has it, but into something black and sticky. The beach was full of blobs of half-solidified oil, no doubt washed from the bilges of passing giant tankers.

There was a fresh coconut lying on the ground near the bikes, and after a struggle I managed to get it open with my clasp knife. We found the milk refreshing and the meat delicious. By the time we rode back to town, the sun was high and very sharp. Fortunately we still had our shipboard tans and didn’t burn. Despite my tan, I was feeling pale and fat alongside the slim, beautiful Malays.

The Sultan’s museum provided quite a bit of amusement. All his possessions seemed to be kept there, from the stunning collection of Kris knives to his old toothbrushes. You could even admire his used underwear, lovingly labelled.

We also found that Malaysian TV wasn’t very Malaysian. After the news, they showed The Osmonds, and that was followed by Combat—dubbed. It was fascinating to see Vic Morrow opening his mouth and fluent—if badly synchronised—Malay coming out.

That all sounds good, doesn’t it? Tune in again next time when there are tears before and after bedtime!

Source: MCNews.com.au

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

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.

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.

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…

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Source: MCNews.com.au

Around the world with The Bear – Part One

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

With J. Peter “The Bear” Thoeming

Thinking about going for a good, long ride? Around the world perhaps? The Bear did it 40 years ago, and now you can follow his journey here, in the first of a 35-part series we are running on MCNews.com.au.

Father Time gives and takes

The serial you are about to read (assuming you stay the course), is the first book I ever wrote. It covers the same trip that I described in monthly episodes in the now sadly defunct Two Wheels magazine but it’s not the same. I’ve had a chance to think about it a bit…

The ride described was a genuine adventure; we didn’t know what would happen, because we didn’t know what awaited us. The trip was also almost totally irresponsible. I say ‘almost’ because we did get the recommended inoculations and carried hypodermics and drugs to be administered in Kabul.

But we had no insurance – not for the bikes and not for ourselves. In this age when nobody leaves home without a policy guaranteeing that they will be flown home in Business Class if they get a hangnail, that must seem rather incredible. And we went wherever we wanted to go, irrespective of advice to the contrary. But we did it because we were pretty sure that we would be able to look after ourselves. As it turned out we were right.

We met many wonderful people and few nasty ones. I firmly believe that, just as you get out of your life what you put into it, so you find the people in your life whom you are expecting. That’s not always true, mind you, and the people I’m thinking about here will know who they are. Some people are simply shits, and no amount of positive thinking will overcome that.

Many folks along the way told us that they desperately wanted to do something like what we’d done, but were held back by… oh, jobs, family, all the circumstances that nail people down. I guess it was probably too late for them; if you’re going to go off and be irresponsible it’s best to do it before you have a family and a career. But maybe it can be done after you have a family and a career, too; I’m harbouring some thoughts along those lines as I write this. I am, after all, only 72.

I have done a lot of travelling by motorcycle since the ride described here, and I love it just as much as I did when I set out on this my first real trip, with Charlie on our brace of Honda XL250s. These days it’s my job to take motorcycle trips, and to write about them – mainly for the publication I part-own, Australian Motorcyclist Magazine. I hope my love of motorcycling comes through in the things I write.

On those many rides I have discovered that people are much the same everywhere, no matter what the country or social standing. Worse luck.

In the time between this trip and now, I have launched four motorcycle magazines; edited another; and written for the likes of The Bulletin, The Australian, Playboy, the Sydney Morning Herald and The Sun Herald as well as numerous other publications in Australia, the USA, Britain, Germany and New Zealand.

Along the way I edited a beer magazine for a while; tough job – but someone had to do it, as they say. My liver bears the scars of that time to this day. I am proud of my contribution to the founding of the Ulysses Club, and equally proud of the Bear Army, an organisation for some of my motorcyclist friends. ‘Busy, busy, busy’ as Bokonon says.

Let me clear up one thing. The ‘J’ in front of my name is not an affectation. In these days of official ‘oversight’, everything has to be consistent, and that includes your name. My real first name is Joerg; I don’t use it because hardly anyone can pronounce it.

Instead I use one of my middle names. But if I turn up anywhere remotely official as ‘Peter’, the powers that be don’t believe that I’m me. So I have to have that initial there. Forgive me. I am not really pretentious. Well, not that pretentious, anyway…

See you on the road. Say hello if you see me.

Today, which is to say as we approach 2020, around the world motorcycle rides are not particularly rare. You can even join a tour group and do it in stages, or all in one go. Things were a little different forty years ago.

For a start there was far less information available. In retrospect, that was a good thing; we might have done things differently if we’d known what awaited us, and not had as much fun. As it was, the ride could not have been much better. Mind you, it could have been a lot easier…

Many things have changed in the past forty years. For one thing, I don’t seem to be able to run as fast or as far as I used to. But as Father Time has taken away, he has also given – I don’t want to run as far or as fast as I used to. And the international scene has changed both for the better and the worse.

I don’t think I would ride through Afghanistan these days, and not just because I’d find it harder to run. You can’t outrun a bullet. Likewise, I suspect that Iran would be a tougher nut – although I would still trust to the basic kindness of its people. And Burma is now open, a near-miracle.

To tell you the truth, though, I think I would take a different route entirely, from Thailand to China via Laos, then to Kazakhstan, Russia, Georgia, Armenia and into Turkey that way.

I haven’t been to many of those places, you see. New people, new roads, new sights…

But let’s meet the protagonists of this trip. The year is 1977, and the place is inner Sydney suburb Rozelle, and Charlie and I were doing something we were quite good at – namely drinking.

Have a drink…

Charlie and I were comfortable. With generous glasses of something alcoholic in our hands we were lying back in overstuffed armchairs in Charlie’s living-room. It was very late, the party had been over for quite a while, and we were talking in the desultory way you do at such times.

Both of us were at loose ends. Charlie had nearly finished his thesis for a PhD in botany, disclosing the private life of an obscure little wild flower; I was heartily sick of working in an advertising agency. We were both in our very early thirties. The talk revolved around alternatives, our bikes, booze . . . and suddenly it all came together in my mind. Or maybe in Charlie’s… ‘Why don’t we ride over to Ireland and visit the Guinness brewery?’

Our touring experience at this stage was fairly limited. Charlie had covered some amazing distances on his old Honda XL250, true, but it had been rallying rather than touring. My long-distance runs had been to get somewhere: opening the old WLA Harley up and pointing it at Melbourne, or perhaps my mother’s place in Ballina, hardly counts as touring.

Although there had been one memorable trip…

My friend Campbell owned an eleven-year-old BMW R60 and we were going to the Intervarsity Jazz Convention in Armidale in northern NSW on it. Seeing that we had a bit of extra time, we thought we’d have a look at Queensland on the way. The first few hundred miles went quite well despite persistent overheating on the part of the bike.

On the north coast of New South Wales we had our first flat tyre: the tube was butyl, but we didn’t know that and fixed it the way you would a rubber one. Naturally, the patch came off again. Flat tyre number two.

We bought a new tube, but could only get one that was slightly too small: that lasted a day. The next tube was the right size, but by now the tyre was so badly split inside that it chewed the new tube up. Eleven flat tyres, three new tubes and one new tyre in three days, not to mention the steamroller that nearly ran the bike over in Yeppoon, was the final score.

It wasn’t all like that, of course. We had some marvellous times in the little pubs and enjoyed the scenery and the riding. We enjoyed the jazz, too, when we finally made it to Armidale – but not the ride home; the bike seemed to have lost an enormous amount of power. When Campbell stripped it down after our return it wasn’t hard to see why.

There were hardly any rings left: that overheating must have done a bit of damage. Not exactly the most brilliant background for a bike tour around the world. We had by this stage decided that we might as well go on around the world, coming home via America. After all, once the bikes were loaded up…

The choice of bikes wasn’t difficult once we sat down and listed our requirements. We wanted single cylinder bikes, for simplicity and lightness: a single is easier to look after, to tune and to repair on the road, and when you have to ship the bike, be it by air or sea, the lighter it is the cheaper it is. Trail bikes, dual-purpose on-off road machines, seemed indicated for ruggedness. Some of the roads in Asia, and not only in Asia, don’t deserve the name and road bikes can be a little flimsy. In addition, trail bikes cope with mud and rivers much better.

The bikes would have to be Japanese. It’s bad enough trying to buy spares for fairly common bikes, but just imagine trying to find a clutch cable for a Malaguti in Rawalpindi. Neither of us liked two-strokes so the choice was simple— Yamaha XT500s or Honda XL250s.

These days the choice is much wider, but in 1977 the only other four-stroke trail bikes around were tiddlers. I wasn’t about to attempt the Afghani desert on a 125cc machine, so we settled for XLs, partly because Charlie already had one. I had little trouble finding another in good condition and at a reasonable price. Our friendly bike shop stripped the bikes down and checked them over: both bikes were found to have worn camshafts, and these were replaced, unnecessarily, as it turned out. Apparently XL camshafts wear to a certain point and then wear no further.

We bought some plastic panniers that looked reasonably waterproof. Jim Traeger, a friend of mine, a rider from way back and a descendant of the man who built the Flying Doctor’s pedal wireless sets, made up strong cage-style steel carriers for them. These would double as crash bars, and they also carried one-gallon containers, originally filled with reagents, donated by a friend who worked in a hospital.

One was designated for spare fuel and one for water. Plastic enduro tanks replaced the tiny metal fuel tanks on the bikes and we fitted larger rear sprockets for easier cruising. Charlie was given some aluminium tank boxes as a farewell present from the Botany Department at Sydney University.

These had holes cut out of their bases which fitted over the filler holes in the tanks and were secured by the petrol cap. It meant unpacking them every time we filled up with petrol, but with the lids of the boxes locked, the tanks were effectively locked also. Unfortunately the electrical system of the XL wouldn’t support better lights and air horns, so we had to make do with the inadequate originals.

Then came the hard decisions. What to take? We packed a large and comprehensive first-aid box containing antihistamines, antibiotics and pills against malaria and stomach bugs, antiseptic, burn creams and bandages. In my experience you rarely use this yourself, but it comes in handy for people you meet along the way.

Spares for the bikes filled half a pannier; they included cables, bulbs, electrical bits and pieces, chains, liquid gasket and WD40. Our toolkits were augmented by a set of sockets and an impact driver.

We would take a tent and camp until Perth, then send the tent back and use hotels and hostels for the rest of the trip. That sort of accommodation is cheap and convenient – and relatively safe – in the developing world.

We bought wet weather gear, yachting clothes in my case, because I wanted the stuff to be light. Charlie bought heavyweight working gear: he was right, of course. His gear lasted the whole trip; mine failed me badly. Completely, really.

Up next in Part Two the boys get started with the trip from Sydney to Perth before leaving the mainland…

If The Bear’s travels gets the itch going in you check out Get Routed‘s options for shipping your motorcycle to Europe.

Source: MCNews.com.au