At the edge of the earth

When I finally escaped the captivating but typically Australian branded 'Snowy Mountains' and approached Sydney, the excitement of finally reaching a destination that I had been working towards for the past 10 months and 27,500 miles built up. They say that life is a journey, but ever since I had left London, this journey had become my life. I wasn't sure if I wanted it to go on or to end. As I was riding into town, I started to recognise the roads from when I had lived in Sydney 6 years ago. Then, seeing the city of Sydney standing tall in the distance, the AMP tower, the Anzac Bridge, the Opera House and, of course, the Harbour Bridge, I realized the enormity of what I had done. Now that I knew where I was, I headed for a spot that was as close as I could get to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and decided that that was the end. I had wondered how I would feel reaching this point and now I knew! Whilst there was a sense of achievement, I just thought 'oh, that's it then'. It felt very business like, closing the deal. Perhaps the fact that there was no welcoming committee reminded me that it was a personal dream that I had fulfilled.
It wasn't really until the next day that I really felt that I had arrived. As I crested a hill, nearing Bondi Beach, the sea suddenly came into view. For some reason, driving over a hill, or around a corner and being presented by the sea sparks something inside of me. I had done it! It felt like the edge of the earth. If I went any further, I would be IN the sea. I had gone as far as I could go and the adventure of a lifetime was now truly complete.
A couple of days later, I did a day trip down the coast. All of this time, it had been about the journey and not the destination, but now that I no longer had a destination, the journey seemed less relevant. It was time to move on to the next chapter and take a break from this journey and see what adventures the next one has to offer. Perhaps, it has already begun without me realizing it.

The United States of Australia

The rugged coastline being pounded by the white waters of the Indian Ocean and the long straight roads of nothingness were all meant to be part of the experience, but I was bored. I had now titled Australia as the USA (the United States of Australia) because of its newly found love for rules and protection for the foolish. It used to be that when hiking along a track, it felt like exploring. If you were foolish enough to fall over a cliff, then it was your fault for being stupid. Now, there are warnings every couple of paces and barriers just in case you can't read the warnings and want to sue!
Just as I was following the coast around to Sydney, disappointed by the weather and after 7000 miles of coastline, having seen it all before, somebody suggested that I visit the mountains. Given that the highest mountain in Australia is only around 2500 metres, I was hesitant at first, but as soon as I began to ride along the Great Alpine Highway, the spark was back. The roads were great, the scenery varied from winding cliff roads to winding forest tracks. It was all new. Similar, but different to the Karakoram Highway. As a bonus, the weather had improved. A 2 day planned detour ended up being almost 2 weeks. Whilst I covered over 1500 miles on those fabulous roads, I also slowed right down in terms of moving on every day or so. I stopped in the tiny villages and sat back to watch the world go by. Previously, I had ridden along main arteries and noticed many capillaries (tracks) leading off to the sides - some sign posted, some not. They seemed to apparently lead to nowhere, but now I ventured into them, sometimes finding dead ends, but always finding something of interest. The tracks looked worn and beaten, but I was no longer on the 'beaten track'. These places weren't towns or even villages. They led to another world, a world without time or want. This world escaped the Americanisation of the rest of Australia and offered silence and unspoiled nature. I almost expected to see Felicity Kendall here as this was living 'The Good Life': self sufficiency and integration with the surroundings. The people were warm and genuine here, wanting nothing but to talk and share. Throughout my trip, I had found that those who had, wanted, whilst those that did not have, gave. This is where the heart of a country's real culture lies, and I was delighted to find it in a part of the world that had begun to wane in my favours. I should not have been surprised as this has been the case in most of the places that I visited - get away from the service industries that deal with tourists and people don't try to extract what they can from you. They give the most precious thing that they can: their time.

The Nullarbor in a jumper

Leaving Perth on the west coast of Australia and heading inland across the Nullarbor Desert was both exciting and daunting. The Nullarbor Desert is considered to be one of the most remote roads on earth. There are 1400 miles before the first signs of civilisation are reached and a further 800 before the next major city of Adelaide.
I set out, equipped with extra water supplies, some 'emergency food' and a mind prepared for some 50 degree blistering heat and the possibility of coming face to face with some of the indigenous people. In essence, I didn't know what to expect but had all sorts of expectations.
When I had been travelling down the West Coast, I had received warnings about Aboriginals who stood across the road, joining arms so as to force vehicles to stop prior to stripping them of their worldly possessions and feeding them 'to the lions'. I had seen the Aboriginals in the cities and villages and been approached by them with requests for 'smokes'. I had seen them staggering around drunk on alchohol (alchohol genetically has a poisonous effect on them). Despite what I had seen and heard, my view remained that those of them in the big cities, mixing with us Westerners had been led astray and lost their ways, whilst those living in the way that they did naturally, out in the bush, would behave totally differently.
After just a few miles on the road, I found it necessary to stop by the side of the road and don some extra clothing. I was cold! It was 9am in Australia, and for the first time, I needed MORE layers to keep me warm. This continued for the whole crossing of the Nullarbor, and somewhat took away from the challenge of the remote road. The road surface was excellent, albeit very straight. At one point, it was dead straight for 90 miles. The days were long but there was no point in cutting a day short and looking around as there was nothing to see. Anywhere! The evenings gave way to some of the most stunning sunsets over the barren landscapes. In the southern hemisphere, when the sun sets, the 'show' has only just begun. Within 5 minutes, the sky will have turned red and purple in one of the most eerily serene displays that can be seen. As expected, the terrain changed constantly, from forest to bush land to scrub, on to cliffs being pounded by the fierce seas and then to vast open brown fields that had been raped of their crop. The sheep and cows replaced the kangaroos and flies and the landscape became more and more manicured.
After a few weeks' break from riding, it was great to be back in the saddle with all of the time in the world to contemplate nothing and anything.
Continuing along the Great Australian Bight, a coastal region along the south of Australia, I arrived at some tiny seaside towns. Each of them looked pretty much the same with a pub (known here as a hotel), a pier, a caravan park and a smattering of shops. What they also had in common were slogan. Every town in Australia seems to have a slogan, be it at the 'gateway to the goldfields' or 'where the vines meet the ocean', no town can have a town status until it is famous for something. The vineyards of the Barossa Valley and Adelaide Hills were yet another change in landscape, this time calm and almost Tuscan in feel. The lines of vines in the fields played an interesting illusion as they flashed past.
Still on the subject of towns and places, the names themselves are also quite interesting. Whilst many come from England (e.g. Brighton and Hove), others are chosen based upon 'appropriateness'. There is a desert, which is quite big and has sand. They call it the Great Sandy Desert. There is also a mountain 'range' with snow on it. It's called the Big Snowy Mountain. I stayed in one seaside town called Coffin Bay, but did not dare to ask why and say no signs of a booming trade in undertakers. Of course, one of the most famously named of Australian places is a road the follows the coast of the sea and had great views. The Great Ocean Road really is outstanding. Not only is it an excellent driving road, but the views are unbelievable. The rough seas beat away at the cliffs and beaches relentlessly, leaving behind an array of rock formations. This, combined with both sharp sunlight and a hazy mist from the sea results in some of the best sights seen during this trip. Whilst I generally try to spend more time seeing sights with my own eyes than I do taking photographs, it is almost impossible along this stretch of road. The road is only 120-odd kilometres long, yet it takes hours to complete the journey. The reason is because I (and everyone else) never travel more than 500 metres before stopping at the next viewpoint and gawping at its beauty. Depending on how many times I stop, I could be in Melbourne in a couple of hours, or I could be there next week.

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.

House and huts

I had imagined Bali to be an idyllic, small island which was underdeveloped and heaving with local culture. In reality, it is fairly large, hugely westernised, heaving with partying teenagers and the beaches are not quite the picturesque white sand and blue seas that my mind had pictured. But, I suppose that I did opt to stay near to Cuta, which is the Asian equivalent of Ibiza.
In recent years, Bali has been hit by two bombings, both targeted at tourists - particularly Australians. I made a visit to one of the memorials that had been built after the 2002 bombing. It listed around 200 fatalities and it was upsetting to read the names of young couples and brothers and sisters that had been innocently caught up. As I walked down the steps from the memorial, a local girl approached me and told me that she loved me. It had been over 5 minutes since I had been offered drugs, women or transport, but on the steps of a memorial seemed even less appropriate than the previous 200 times that I had been asked that day. Needless to say, her feelings for me went unrequited!
In order to better experience the culture of Cuta, a visit to a nightclub could not be ignored. These were as well set up as a club anywhere else in the world. There was the usual scene of drunk people, an abundance of drugs being pushed, along with the now not uncommon fare of local girls. Needless to say, I only partook in dancing and drinking (after all, it is easy to get dehydrated in these hot climates). I rarely get around to visiting nightclubs nowadays and whilst dancing to some of the house music. In case you are as unfamiliar as that music as I am, it is the type which has something of a repetitive beat and continues indefinitely. It was some way into the night when it finally occurred to me where the name 'house music' came from. The DJ puts on one record and then goes back to his house, puts on the kettle, watches some TV and perhaps has a bit of a snooze before returning back to the club 20 minutes later to change the record. That must be it!
After all of that exertion, I decided that it was time to head somewhere a little more peaceful. I took a small, fairly high powered speedboat and in less than two and a half hours, found myself in another world, on Gili Air. Gili Air is a small island, around a kilometre across and was much closer to what I had expected from Bali. Whilst it was still lacking in its cultural offering, it did provide peace and much better beaches. There is no motorised transport on the island and the transport is by donkey drawn cart. Hotels had small huts along the beach with open air showers and bathrooms. Even the water here was of the saltwater variety. Whilst tourism had hit, it seemed not to have impacted it too much.
The coastline is marked by coral, which made for excellent snorkelling. The array of colours of the fish was stunning and I managed to track down some 'puffer' fish which, as the name implies are puffed up, almost like a ball.
It was low season and there were barely 30 visitors to the entire island, yet there were, perhaps, 15 hotels and even more restaurants. The tourist trade in the area has been feeling the pinch as Australians (their primary visitors) have avoided Indonesia in the post Bali bombing environment. This meant that all offerings for drugs and tacky bracelets were focused on a much smaller crowd! The locals felt that speaking with an Aussie accent made them more understandable, greeting visitors with 'arwrite maite, ow you doin, no warries'. This sounded anything from incomprehensible to ridiculous and comical but, given that they were generally either trying to sell me a 'massage' or drugs, understanding was not top of my list of priorities.
Despite the 'friendliness' of the locals, Gili Air was a great place to kick back and relax for a couple of days. The sun shone, the waters were calm and reading and choosing food from a menu were the most stressful occasions of the daily routine.
Next week, the final leg of the journey begins. It is likely to involve a couple of days to get the bike released from customs in Darwin, followed by a 2000 kilometre ride out to the West coast. The time out taken in Bali prior to this was therefore far from unwelcome!

A fugitive in Singapore

Singapore is known for being fairly regimental in terms of what the law allows and more importantly, what it does not allow. Smoking and eating is not allowed pretty much anywhere. Durian, a fruit that is known for being smelly is forbidden on the train network and crossing a road either not at a crossing or when the crossing light is red are all fineable offences. Bring in spitting and eating chewing gum, (which I might add are absolutely necessary in an Asian country) and you realize that things could get expensive.

Getting a bike across the border from Malaysia to Singapore should be simple enough, however it involved crossing the border twice, a visit to the AA, half a dozen pieces of paper and more patience than I am usually credited with having. One of the hoops that I had to jump through was to buy a passcard for the toll roads. The only downside of the passcard system is that in order to pay, a small electronic box must be fitted to one's car or bike and these are not available to foreigners! I was advised to avoid the chargeable roads so as to avoid a fine equivalent to around £25 each time I passed a toll road monitor. I was soon to find that avoiding them was pretty much impossible as there is no warning as to which roads they are on and there is no option to turn off. I had my photo taken by around half a dozen toll cameras and then decided that things were starting to get expensive given that all that I was doing was riding 10 miles from the border to my hotel! The only option was to duck into a petrol station and wait until it got dark. As a motorcycle rider, it is generally advisable to travel during the daylight, but on this day, I was a fugitive and had to stay off of the roads until after 8pm when the toll system was switched off. Finding a hotel in the dark without a booking, with no map, at the right price with safe parking is no easy feat, but by 10pm, I was installed in an overpriced hotel in the wrong part of town with not terribly safe parking. It turned out to be fine, but I was scared to ride my bike in fear of the dreaded toll roads which I was unable to be charged for in any way other than by a fine! I travelled on the rail system for bulk of my time in Singapore and even managed to track down the officer in charge of the road toll system. After a brief sob story about my trip, the charity and how I was a poor, victimised foreigner, they agreed to 'knock off' the fines. Phew.

The next couple of days were spent arranging shipment of my bike to Darwin, Australia, which was pretty straightforward, but required plenty of running around to get stamps and carry around scraps of paper to here, there and everywhere.

I did manage to catch up with a couple of old friends, which was good, before booking a flight to Bali for a week for a well deserved holiday whilst my bike makes its way to Australia. It will be another traumatic week of beaches, sunbathing and eating, but somebody has to do it!

Kisses from KL

Landing in Kuala Lumpur (KL) airport as the sun rose, I was eager to find out when and if the bikes might actually turn up. It would be a couple of hours before any offices opened but the civilised airport with 'proper coffee', pastries and wifi was a welcome means of passing the time. When office hours finally did seem to be in sight, I made a call to the cargo offices, who duly explained that the bikes had been held up in Colombo, Sri Lanka (where they had been due to have had a connecting flight) due to problems with the dangerous goods paperwork. Things didn't look good and it looked like the problems from India were to take yet another final sting and a flight would have to be taken to Sri Lanka to sort out the current mess.
An hour or so later, a call finally revealed that the cargo officer had had a wander around the terminal and 'found' the bikes. To say that this was a relief would be something of an understatement.
Immediately racing around to the cargo terminal, a convoluted process to get the bikes released was anticipated. In practise, it couldn't have been easier. A bit of running around, a stamp here, a signature there and a little reconstruction to put the bikes back together and some vital fluids to make the bikes 'dangerous' again (i.e. fuel) and we were ready to go.
It was at this point that Malaysian hospitality started. The cargo officer enquired if we knew where we were going to and subsequently offered to drive us to our hotel with us to follow. Whilst we would have eventually found it, it did manage to save us well over an hour of getting lost.
Wandering around KL, everything was new and exciting. In reality, everything was merely clean and civilised with air conditioned shops, cars that didn't try to mow you down and a 20th century attitude to business. I was back in the Western world, but with a feel of the orient. Walking past people, I would often have 'kisses' blown at me. Coming from men, I was a little troubled by this until I worked out that that is the way that Malaysians attract your attention. Rather than calling out, whistling or honking their horns, they put their lips together and squelch a kissing sound! Not something that I can get used to without chuckling to myself.
KL turned out to have some pretty knowledgeable mechanics, one of whom managed to fix a problem that I didn't even know that I had (so, many thanks to Sunny from Sunny Cycle!). Keeping the technical stuff untechnical, Sunny cleaned out something in the engine that was clogged up from dirty fuel and now it feels like I have a new bike. Put that together with marvellous roads, sun and a fresh set of my favourite tyres (the last set lasted for 18,000 miles which is 3 times that which you could usually expect) and I was in motorcycling heaven.
Heading up through the winding roads of the Cameron Highlands (although I think that the 'wetlands' would be more apt) to visit the tea plantations, the temperature dropped to a pleasant 16 degrees. This is a stunning part of the country with some of the best roads that I have seen since China, almost 4 months earlier.
Probably the riding of the best road coincided with my birthday as we headed down to Palau Penang (Palau means island) which is joined to the mainland by something like a 4km long bridge. As I was unpacking my bike at the hotel, I heard the rumble of another 'big' bike. When I looked up, I was surprised to see another overlander. It had been over 4 months ago, in Kyrgystan that I had last seen another person venturing around the world on a motorcycle. Mick, a Scotlander has been all over Africa, North and South America and was on his way back home after almost 2 years.
It was in Penang that I was introduced to 'hashing'. At first, I was a little concerned by a sport with such a name until it was revealed that the only vice involved was drinking copious amounts. Hashing involves running around the countryside, searching for pieces of paper and getting very muddy and lost before returning back to a party at someone's house and enduring a unique ritual. This ritual involves being made to sit on a block of ice, being sung at and being forced to drink a can of beer whilst having icy cold water poured over your head. My life is now complete!
After the exhaustion of, well, pretty much nothing, it was time to hit the beaches of Langkawi, a 2 hour boat ride away. Here the beaches finally resembles the ideal. White, fine sand (no rocks, syringes or tat-sellers), warm blue seas and excellent food.
From here on, I suspect that idyllic beaches will feature more and more as I head through Indonesia and Australia. If you suffer from jealousy and aren't enjoying the winter, I suggest that you stop reading these trip updates or jump on a bike yourself and head on out here! That said, I am sure that there will be plenty more obstacles to be overcome on the way through Indonesia.