3200 miles in 2 weeks!

Australia is known for having among the toughest quarantine regulations in the world. Before loading my bike onto the ship in Singapore, it was dismantled and washed 4 times with a power hose and, short of using a toothbrush, every piece of dirt was removed. Whilst the bike travelled by ship, I flew into Darwin. When I landed, it was a balmy thirty-odd degrees at 1.30 in the morning. When the light returned later that morning, I was already off, visiting the various customs, quarantine and shipping offices to get things though as quickly as possible. Most previous borders had been crossed with me travelling together with the bike. Having the bike out of my sight introduced the potential for things to go wrong. For it do have been sent to the wrong port or the wrong country, or to be tied up in bureaucracy. In the end, after a couple of paperwork glitches, the bike cleared quarantine's intense scrutinisation and I could finally move onto the step of registering the bike and getting it appropriately insured. Whilst in Kazakhstan, the concept of insurance was both unfamiliar and not expected by the law, in Australia, it is sensible, required and enforced. To the people at the Darwin vehicle registration office, I was too unusual, so they gave me a waiver document and left me to get to another state of the country for them to sort it out!
So, off I went into the remote wilderness to explore this massive, sweltering hotpot of nature. On the first day on the road, I saw everything from kangaroos and cows to a swarm of dragonflies, which left both my bike and myself splattered with a yellow goo! And, of course, how could I forget the flies. It seems that as soon as I stop anywhere, I am allocated a hundred flies that swarm around me incessantly. They land on your eyes, on your lips and are enough to drive an insane person even more so. It's just another of the angles of nature and wildlife that one must get used to out here. There is a lot of roadkill here. These are animals that have been hit by cars and trucks and just lie by the side of the road. Visually, you become accustomed to this quite quickly, but, riding a bike introduces a new aspect to it. This is the smell of the dead animals in the scorching heat. Riding a bike, I had previously described one of the benefits as being able to smell the surrounding environment, but here, it is no longer a positive! The trucks are big. In fact, here, they don't call them trucks, but 'Road Trains'. They often lead 3 trailers, can be up to 37 metres long, have over 80 tyres and can take up to a kilometre to stop. It is these guys that leave the trail of animal debris strewn across the road. When you see the road trains coming, the only option is to move out of the way. When they are passed in the other direction, the amount of air that they displace can be clearly felt on a motorcycle, when one mush crouch down to maximise the aerodynamics and hold on for dear life!
I must say that the roads here are excellent. Clearly marked, pretty straight and as smooth as anywhere else that I have visited. After a couple of thousand miles, I have still not encountered a set of traffic lights and the Aussie rural idea of a traffic jam is having to stop at an intersection for 15 seconds. In many of the previous countries, whilst I could travel at speeds of 100 km/h, I could only usually average 60 km/h. Here, you can just sit on 100 all day long and whilst the distances are vast, you can get to places much quicker. With such high temperatures (e.g. 47 degrees centigrade), the bike overheating becomes more of a concern. It is probably my fault because whilst I was in Darwin, I bought a digital thermometer, which details the temperature to a tenth of a degree. The result is that rather than thinking that it is hot outside, I now know that it is and set myself targets of when it would be prudent to stop. Initially, this was an arbitrary 38 degrees, but that was significantly overshot by 10am on the first day, when it hit 42, and so the target continues to move upwards, but the bike seems to be running fine.
The sights so far have been impressive. In Australia, everything is the biggest, deadliest, hottest or most remote. Cruising in a boat down the Katherine Gorge was a humbling experience. The vastness of it, especially at the end of the dry season, when the waters run up to 15 metres lower than usual. The red rocks signifying this country rusting away are now familiar, as is the residual sand that covers my bike and is in my clothing and luggage. After riding for 1300 miles, I finally reached the coastal town of Broome. It is a bit of a tourist mecca, but the beaches are white and the 'surf is up' in the sea. When it comes to this sport, I a merely a spectator. If I was to partake, I would become a spectacle and an opportunity for the excellent Aussie life saving crew to jump to action. It was a bonus for me being able to swim in the sea here. I had thought this was the season for stingers (also known of as the box jellyfish, famous for being somewhere between deadly and merely life threatening if they sting you).
For the time being, the status of my trip has been firmly repositioned from an 'adventure' to a 'holiday'. Travelling down the West coast pretty much entails visiting a series of sunbathing and snorkelling beaches, occasionally interrupted by the odd 600 mile area of nothingness. The coast really is stunning here. The Ningaloo Reef running from Exmouth and the Cape Range National Park, through to Coral Bay and Monkey Mia offers white beaches, marine wildlife (including manta and sea rays, sharks, dolphins, the extremely rare and unique dugongs and turtles). The sea varies in colour from clear to green to blue. The sky rarely seems to show presence of clouds. That is, except for when it rains. It is then that the heavens literally open and everywhere is flooded. December is firmly in the wet season, and the volumes of rain explain how one can be in the middle of nowhere, on a totally flat plain, only for there to be a flood depth marker of over 2 metres high. To reach this kind of depth must take vast amounts of rain. The winds can be pretty fierce too. On one occasion in Denham, a gust actually picked up my tent, leaving it more to resemble a kite than a tent. The result was me comically chasing it across a campsite!
Christmas day on the West Coast entailed a visit to Coral Bay beach, only to find an ice snowman there, and a Father Christmas coming ashore to give the children gifts and, of course, the traditional five and a half hours of snorkelling on the reef. I had not planned out be out for so long, but ended up following a turtle for some time and then hunting for baby sharks in a secluded bay. By the time I got out of the water, I think that resembled Father Christmas as well. During the day, my sun block had worn off and I had got a little burned.
With festivities out of the way, I pressed on towards Perth, stopping to explore Kalbarri National Park over New Year. Kalbarri is a series of gorges lying along the Murchison River and is just 600km short of my 3 week stop-off in Perth. Celebration was in order after having completed 21,000 miles and reached the final destination country...
...albeit with another 4000 miles to be covered before reaching Sydney.