Travel Tales: Oz Outback

The first rain I saw in Australia came when I took the Yam XS850 triple out for the first time, exactly one month after I'd arrived in Melbourne. It drizzled in a bloody minded sort of way that said, ''Hah! So you thought you'd be better off in this part of the world, did you? Well, you're wrong!'' It continued to rain for the next four weeks, then even more in the week it took me to ride to Sydney. There was enough respite for me to look up some old mates, stop my rocker box gasket weeping and bend four valves while attempting to tension an already overstretched camchain.

I'd chosen the hunky Yam (you pay £1 per pound for those someone once told me) because I knew something of the mechanics of it after owning the 750 Custom version back home in Blighty, and because its touring features (shaft drive, huge petrol tank and comfortable riding position) made it perfect for the long distances I was planning to ride in Australia. Also, it came along at just the right time and price (about £800), and a small consideration was that its previous owner shared my christian name.

But now I cursed it and spent the next two weeks dismantling and reassembling the cylinder head in a car park, wrapping it in plastic and diving for cover every half hour as torrential rain showers washed by. It cost me about $300 to buy a head gasket and four new valves, get the local Yamaha dealer to install them, including an extortionate $20 for him to drill out the notoriously weak camchain adjuster and put in a bigger bolt.

The rain eased off enough to allow me a two day trek around the Blue Mountains and to replace a leaking clutch pushrod seal, but returned with a vengeance when I set off for the north. Not thinking that I could afford a bike in Oz, I had come ill prepared. My only riding gear was an old denim jacket, suede boots, skiing gloves, an open face helmet and bright yellow plastic waterproofs. My luggage was packed into a set of nylon panniers and medium sized back pack strapped to the seat, and I had a tent bungeed to the forks. There was an embarrassing incident one day out of Sydney when I pulled up at a roadhouse, lost my footing on the fine gravel and dropped the fully laden beast.... needing help to pick it back up again.

Soon after that I encountered my first dirt road, having started out one morning on a reasonable looking tarred detour which soon turned to gravel and weaved through the Great Dividing Range for 12 miles. It was a frightening experience on the 850 and I swore that it would be the last dirt I'd venture on to. How wrong I was.

The rain fell heavier and pissed me off so much that I spent two days drying out in a caravan near Brisbane, the sun only breaking through soon after I'd arrived at a backpackers hostel in Cairns. I wasn't to see a drop of rain for five months after that.

I had a good time in Cairns, met plenty of travellers, drank a lot of beer and worked quite a lot of hours. Then I saw a notice requesting workers for a gold mine and rode 150 miles out into the bush behind a Toyota Landcruiser on the worst dirt track imaginable. The road surface was constantly changing, sometimes as smooth and firm as tarmac, sometimes so rutted that I could have been riding a jack hammer, sometimes gravelly and sometimes inches deep in fine dust known as bull dust, which the heavy triple would wallow through with the front wheel whipping about like a frenzied snake. I even wedged her upright into a one foot deep gulley and had to kick the dirt away to roll her free.

By the time we arrived at the secluded camp I was covered from head to toe in red dust, sneezing dirt like a good 'un and in a state of numb shock. I stuck it out at the mine for four weeks, probably because I was too scared to ride back. But when the day came, I actually enjoyed the ride, the only tense moment being when a herd of wild horses galloped across my path.

I'd been in Queensland for three months. I had $1500, the bike was still behaving exceptionally well, although I was wishing I'd bought an XT500 instead, so I decided to strike out west. It took me a week to get to Darwin, one embarrassing moment being when I fell off in a huge pit of bull dust on the last three mile stretch of a 40 mile dirt road, just as three Aussie bikers were heading towards me on an assortment of trail iron.

Even as the laughing Aussies helped me to pick up the bike, a guy pulled up in a four wheel drive jeep to hand me my split rear light cover that had shaken loose back down the track. It was no consolation that the ground had indeed tried to swallow me up!

By now I was carrying two litres of water, a good precaution as I was leaving the populous east coast and heading for the desert. As roadhouses became more scarce I invested in another water container and an extra gallon can of petrol. The XS has a range of two hundred miles but the furthest between roadhouses was about 170 miles, so I never needed the fuel. By this time I was covering 400 miles a day but the bike seemed not to notice the heat and dust at all throughout my whole journey.

I changed the oil and replaced the rear tyre in Darwin, and took a detour through Kakadu National Park (more dirt road, this time fording rivers past signs warning of dangerous crocodiles) and arrived some weeks later in Broome, a quaint west coast town with the most beautiful beach I'd ever seen.

There I met an English couple on a GSX750 and a bargain was struck. I loaned them badly needed cash and they helped me push start my XS every morning as my battery was losing its charge overnight. All well and good, though my new comrades were cursing me the morning after we'd camped on a beach and they had to push start the XS on sand.

We arrived in Perth to find rain. Though destitute, I had to fork out $50 for a new battery before I could go job hunting, after which I paid $100 for my third rear tyre. We set up flat in Perth for two months before I rode out alone, once more, east, across the notorious Nullabor Plain to Adelaide (a distance equivalent to London to Moscow, incorporating one straight that is 100 miles long). I spent four days in the city of churches, catching up with a girl I'd met in Cairns and left for Melbourne just in time for Christmas.

While travelling I had camped every night, sometimes in private campsites but usually just off the road and out of sight, with my Walkman plugged into a socket that someone had rigged up from my bike battery while in Cairns. My last night in the tent was spent by a river that flowed under the main Highway 1.

Next morning, I rode for home along the most cliff hugging, exciting coast road in Australia, the Great Ocean Road. A fine way in which to end a year on the road. That XS had taken me 17000 hard miles with hardly a complaint and now she pulled through those tight hairpin bends and up those steep gradients with never a murmur.

I was proud of our achievement and, given the money, I would have got her transported back to England with me. As it was, I had to settle for $300 from a city bike dealer (well, her top end was very noisy, her fork seals blown, the standard three into one exhaust rotted and the clock showing 60,000) and leave her parked in a line of sorry looking bikes on a busy city pavement while I flew back to England, safe in the knowledge that if I found another big Yamaha triple I wouldn't be taking it on any dirt roads.

Ian Spinney