Darwin, NT, Australia (Day 23, 4211 km)

Well, the warmup round is complete. And thank you all for your thoughts, prayers and emails. God has kept me safe, and my motorcycle reliable. There were a couple of days of less interesting "endurance" riding, but even that was part of the feeling of achievment.

Warning - long log follows - go make yourself a cup of coffee...

I arrived in Darwin two days ago, on Monday, and yesterday afternoon dropped off my bike to the shipping company, got it signed off by customs, and expect to see it in Singapore in a couple of weeks. Strangely, my shipping costs for this leg look like being less than to Brisbane, partly because the man with a tape measure very generously "didn't see" large parts of the bike that I could see (but I didn't care to enlighten him) (the bike ended up being less than 1m^3 for this shipping, whereas for the last one, when the front wheel was off and the bike was packed down all compactly in a crate, the volume was 1.65m^3!), and partly because it seems that Singapore will be far cheaper and more efficient than Brisbane - at least here's hoping! For Auckland->Brisbane, I paid $289 for the shipping (volume dependent), but about AU$300 (pretty much volume-independent) for clearing it on this side! For this leg so far I have paid a very reasonable AU$185 (the distance is similar) and have been told the charges are much less in Singapore. We shall see.

Anyway, for now I am bikeless, and spending a bit of time in Darwin. However, although the bike shipping is cheaper, the Anton shipping seems to be far less reasonable - one-way is (like it always was in the past) almost as much (or sometimes more) than return here, unlike FreedomAir, etc. Anyway, it seems that it will cost me the same to go to Bali and Java for a week, so I may do that instead of waiting around and flying direct to Singapore. The other alternative is Brunei for the same cost.

As to the trip here from Airlie Beach...

After a lovely day snorkelling, etc, I returned home to find everything rather sodden, as I hadn't expected rain, so I hadn't bothered putting the fly on the tent. But that was not long to dry, and the next morning I packed up and headed towards Townsville. All along the Bruce Highway the road quality has been as good as one could expect, with every minor bump or ridge well signposted - a luxury I won't be able to rely on for the second leg! I decided to bypass Townsville, having heard that it's pretty much just a regional sugar-cane centre, and having done all I intended to on the reef for this trip. The short-cut to cut out Townsville was of far inferior road quality, but they were working on that - it was here that I encountered my first bit of wide dirt road with a strip of tar seal down the middle.

Once back on the main highway (reasonable quality all the way, although not as good as up the coast), I rode for another 2.5 days (stopping at rest areas (every 50-75km) - tiring riding!), through Charters Towers, Hughenden, Julia Creek, Cloncurry and the rest, through Mount Isa, where they have one of the biggest copper, silver and lead mines in the world, and eventually into the Northern Territory, across the 450km stretch of nothing (except the Barkley Homestead roadhouse after 264km) to Three Ways and down to Tennant Creek for a day off.

I can imagine David Attenborough's voice on the documentary... "... to Australia, the red continent, one of the harshest, hottest, dryest, most inhospitable wastelands on earth..." His voice fades out, leaving only the persistent sound of the didgeridoo as the camera pans across a Mars-like surface, with the sun beating down causing the heatwaves to shimmer above the kangaroo skeleton. Well, no! Certainly not where I was, anyway! There was never a time where the grass didn't more or less cover the plain, and it was very seldom when there weren't hundreds of scrub trees as far as the eye could see.

The ground certainly is red, but in between the vegetation - I looked on my map again, and it seems this entirre area is classified as "semi-arid", so I'm sure the stereotype still applies south of Alice - I was just a little disappointed (although relieved too, I suppose) not to see the Australian Outback that I had always imagined. There were many kangaroo carcasses, but all of them roadkill. But even this was different from expected - until going to the national park a few days ago I'd only seen 2 live roos in the wild in over 3000km of riding! I had been warned so much about riding into them, but I actually had far more trouble with the stupid cows in the unfenced areas - a couple of times they decided that crossing directly in front of me was just what they wanted to do. (There were a few bloated bovine carcasses too - no photos of those, please!) Oddly enough, some of the cattle "grids" were painted onto the road - I assume this means that the cattle see the stripes and don't attempt to cross?

Other wildlife? Lots of interesting birds, some like cranes, other light-grey ones seemingly plain, but then a flash of pinkish red as they flew away. Only one live snake in the wild, just at the side of the road - a good size, but it darted off into the grass. One smallish goanna, many lizards of varying sizes, grasshoppers in some regions, and of course multitudes of termite mounds through the entire outback. These provided an interesting sideshow, as the range increased in size from less than a foot high to 10-12 foot high in places. Some places have hundreds of little ones, giving the impression of a cemetry, whereas others are just dotted here and there. The colours varied from light greyish brown all the way through olive and red to dark brown, depending on the soil of the region. And the shapes were interesting too - some pillars, some with all sorts of buttresses and castellations - even with the termites, I wonder how the little critters can figure out making a complex structure so much bigger than themselves - with the polyps on the coral reef I am amazed.

The ants haven't been a problem, although they are huge, and occasionally do bite. In fact I've been very impressed with their efficiency - within 10 minutes of parking up my bike and putting my helmet on the ground they will be hard at work, taking away all the shattered insect remains from my wheels and helmet, and after an hour or so, will depart from whence they came, their garbage cleaning complete.

The flies, however, have not been fun at all - at most of the rest-stops and some of the towns (to a lesser extent), they would be landing all over my ears, eyes, mouth and nose, which made me resort to the "Bride of the Flies" approach shown! A pity, because when lying down at the rest-stops, apart from the flies and the occassional cicada, there was very little noise - hardly any breeze, and of course very little traffic. This led to the illusion of time almost stopping.

The traffic, too, was different from expected - I had been warned about nobody coming past for days or weeks - this may be true up the York Peninsula, but on the main highway, there were never fewer than 5-10 cars an hour. Some of these were the road trains, up to 3 or 4 trailers long - big, but I had no problem with their windblasts - I just kept well over to the side, and was affected only about as much as a big truck at home on the far narrower highways (and much less than the wind I encountered on the Harbour Bridge!). All but a few of the road trains I saw were going the other way, so I didn't have to worry about overtaking or being overtaken too much.

One thing about Australia (as I can share from my vast and extensive experience :-) ) is it is FLAT! A lot of the time I would be riding and would be unable to see any real contour in any direction - just grass and trees as far as the eye can see. I found this quite unusual, as nowhere in NZ (or SA as far as I can remember) is there a place where you can't see a mountain range, a hill, or at least a kopje (Afrikaans for a mesa or butte, usually a flat-topped hill). The highest place I went over was 550m, and they call this the "Great Dividing Range" - a mere bump in the road - no mountain pass or anything.

Ok, I hope all this doesn't sound too scathing thus far - my comments aren't intended to express disappointment - I just had a different mental picture of the ardour of the Australian Outback from what I actually encountered. One day I will go through the middle and across some more barren areas, and I am sure I will stand corrected then. Regardless, I have had a wonderful trip thus far, and it certainly has been interesting seeing the different lifestyles of people across the regions.

Just before Tennant Creek, I searched for a "secret" waterhole that a traveller on the East Coast had told me about - I was happy to actually find it, but unfortunately it was dry, or I would've definitely spent the night out in the wild - Yes, I have spent almost every night at campsites, the only reason being that they almost all have pools, and after a long day in a riding suit, I find a swim a very desireable thing.

I took a day off in Tennant Creek, and had an enjoyable time, partly because of the people I met, in this case a lone traveller from Melbourne, on his way back from Darwin, and a couple of Dutch guys travelling in a van. All through the trip so far I have met interesting people, from the young English couple touring around Australia for a year in a van, trying to stick to a budget of $50 per day for the pair of them, to the guys from Manchester, the Royal Flying Doctor relief nurse, who has done the Postie Bike Run (an organised bike ride from Brisbane to Darwin by hundreds of people on tiny "postie" bikes) and is also into his US conspiracies, the concrete layer who is much richer after divorcing his wife, and many more. All across the outback there is a definite "small-town" community feel, and you greet everybody on the street, and wave to people you pass on the road. Where this breaks down is when passing Aboriginals, who culturally avoid eye contact and seem to "ignore" you until they know you better - it's rude to look at you - I found this hard, because I felt like I was ignoring them too.

In Tennant Creek, almost everybody on the street was Aboriginal, and again, unfortunately there were a number of inebriated ones - one of them came past when I was talking to Wendy in the mid-morning, asked for the phone, and talked to her for a bit. Unfortunately there is also a bit of begging going on in Darwin too. Apparently there was a hiccup with the government "pension" not coming through the day before I arrived in Tennant Creek, so there were some smashed ATM's that night, and then a lot of drunken fighting the night after when the money did come through.

In Tenant Creek I also used my tent fly for the first time and we had a really refreshing tropical downpour. Since then, after heading north again up the main highway, most nights have had extensive distant lightning activity, and there have been one or two good showers and a good thunderstorm too - I am now in the "wet" region, and of course it is a lot more humid to match. I don't think it is quite as warm, though, although it only reached mid-30's in the shade in the outback when I was there. Last night was actually not too bad at all.

Things are cheaper in Darwin than through the sticks, but still a bit more expensive than up the coast - over there I was paying 49c for a pineapple, less than $1/kilo for watermelon sometimes, and there were huge mangoes on sale for less than a dollar sometimes. Petrol ranged from 89c I think in Brisbane, up to around $1.36 at Barkley Homestead and other isolated areas, and back to just under a dollar here, I think (but I have no further need for petrol here). I never had any trouble with petrol availability across the outback, except occasionally when I assumed from the map that something was actually there when they had a place name! Up the east coast, there had been a place where I arrived with no fuel, and found that they hadn't had any for weeks - they advised me to go and see Steve round in the house at the back, and he sold me some to get to the next place. I am slowly learning to fill up, even if I still have half a tank, and to buy the oil I will be needing later, because not all the roadhouses have the oil I need.

Having been used to the concept of Australia and NZ being "down under" and far away from the rest of the world in terms of military importance, it's been a bit unexpected coming up towards Darwin, and realising that I am actually now quite close to the rest of the world. Darwin was actually bombed by the Japanese in the war, and all the way up the highway (which was actually built because of the need to shift supplies around during the war) there are numerous "attractions" like abandoned airstrips, army camping places, and even a "victualling station".

The last night before Darwin was a highlight, when I turned off into a national park late in the afternoon, and saw quite a few young kangaroos (I love watching them jump). I camped the night there, alongside a river - the sign said that there are freshwater crocs, which are harmless, but I didn't see any anyway - the water must've been over 30 degrees on the top layer, but it wasn't too bad below that, and the next morning after it had cooled off a bit. The stars were out in full force, and it was a good wrap-up to the Australian ride.

Now I'm in Darwin, at a motorcamp in line with the airport, so we get a lot of air traffic.

Sorry if it's been a bit of a long report - I guess that's what happens when a week's worth needs to be summarised - if you're still reading, thank you.