Australia VFR Ride Report (Long)

Photos at:

http://community.webshots.com/myphot...ecurity=NSbbWS

One day my good friend James Moore in Houston says; let’s go ride bikes in Australia. He used to live in Melbourne on a temporary assignment for Shell Oil Company and had ridden bikes in parts of Australia and New Zealand. OK, it sounded good to me. He had two weeks and I had whatever it took so we got tickets for two weeks.
I rented a VFR800 and he rented a Triumph 955 from www.bikescape.com.au in Sydney. This is a woman run business. Selena runs everything with a few helpers in the shop. She rides, she races she runs tours, whatever you want. The shop is on a main road, Parameta Road, in Sydney. We didn’t want any tour; we just wanted bikes with fresh tires as we planned to cover about 3500 miles. The bikes were ready with soft luggage at the appointed time. This is a small but very well run operation. The net rental on the bikes was about $1600 American. When you get there they hit your credit card for an additional $2500 Australian as a bond that got credited back at the end of the rental. Importantly, Selena sold us a book by a local who writes for an Australian bike magazine. His book has highlighted maps of the roads a corner carver might like and a write up on each road color and number coded to the maps. Despite James’ earlier detailed plans, I took one look at this book
and said we are riding as many of his routes as time permits.
James wanted to show me the Great Ocean Road west of Melbourne and he wanted to see Brisbane and the Gold Coast (Australia’s version of Miami Beach). I wanted to avoid the big cities on a bike like the plague. So we worked out some compromises.
The flight from Houston is long and never ending when you sit in economy. We changed planes in LA and arrived about 10 PM in Sydney. One drink in a local pub and we were both falling asleep. We picked the bikes up the next morning and headed west to the Blue Mountains. It was a Saturday and drizzly so no local Sydney squids were on our route toward Windsor and Lithgow. One thing about names in Australia is that there are a lot of aboriginal names that are hard to remember and even harder to pronounce. We stopped in Katoomba for an overlook of three rock formations. Despite the drizzle the place was crawling with Japanese tourists in motor coaches. What cracked me up was the presence of an Aboriginal man in native dress. It looked like he was wearing a big red diaper. I had to wonder if the locals shipped him in for the benefit of the tourists. He stood next to some trinkets but didn’t look really interested in actually selling them.
James was supposed to bring his digital camera but he forgot it. We decided we each would get a cheap digital at some town along the way.
As we left Lithgow the rain quit and the roads continued to twist to a river crossing called Wiseman’s Ferry. The ride across took all of two minutes. Here were fairly tight turns with almost no traffic through dense forests. Along the way one particular real estate agent had what seemed like every listing. Years of drought had led many farmers on that route to give up and sell, we later learned.
That night in some small town pizza joint we were thinking of the vegetarian pizza but had no idea what capsicum was. The waitress struggled to describe it and we took a chance. It turned out to be green Bell pepper. Next door to the motel was an RSL club. No idea what it means but every town of any size seemed to have one. They are a combination restaurant, bar and casino. This one was in Gosford. In the back and facing the motel parking lot they had an enclosed child play space. This was the first small town night of many in Australia.
Australians eat meat pies for breakfast. They make coffee one cup at a time and you have to know how to order. A latte is a flat white while black coffee is a long black. To go orders are called take away. The word beer has at least two syllables.
Driving is, of course, on the left. At the traffic circles known as roundabouts you look and yield to the right and enter to the left. They put signs at each one showing the circulation for those tourists from the drive on right part of the world. It is actually harder to be a pedestrian and look the right way than a rider. There are creature warning signs all over. The most common is a kangaroo which most locals refer to as “bloody stupid buggers.” I learned that there are three creatures in the kangaroo family. The smallest I saw on a jungle hike in Binna Birra National Park are but a foot high and are called pademelons. The next size up is wallabies which we spotted in Bunya National Park. They scoot fairly fast just hopping. I spotted one live kangaroo about 3 feet tall in Kosciusko National Park. They have a reddish coloring and can get over 6 feet tall. Another common warning is for wombats which are furry slow crawling creatures about a foot in diameter
and two feet long with a pointy snout and short little legs. I saw one live one by the side of the road. They are big enough you don’t want to think of hitting them on a bike. Back at the Binna Birra Lodge parking lot some fairly long lizard about 3 feet long ran across. The waitress in the lodge said they feed him near the kitchen.
So we meandered north through Armidale and east to Grafton on a gloriously empty and twisty road and spent the night close to the beach near the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast is a section of shore below Brisbane with high rises and it looks just like Miami Beach. In fact there is a town called Miami on the strip. We made a pass though Brisbane but I wanted out of there as it was hot and choked with cars downtown. In Australia the further north you go the hotter it gets. In the higher elevations the leaves were just turning yellow and red and falling in the road. We took a route from the book along the squid routes taken by Brisbane locals to Mt. Glorious and Mt. Nebo next to it. Here there are signs to indicate high motorcycle accident areas and they are in red. No squids that day as it was a weekday but the road was sick with turns up and down both mountains. Great scenic overlooks (lookouts in Australian) were there too.
We stopped going north in Maleney and after a nice lunch in that relatively prosperous town headed south in the sparsely populated portions of the interior to points south of Brisbane. After one day long drone we got into an area with more twists heading back toward Sydney. This time it was Sunday and the weather was perfect and all the squids were out on Putty Road which is a tangled twist of low speed blind turns on the Putty end and more sweepers on the Windsor end. From Windsor to Lithgow is a ridge road and it was chock full of squids passing the cars where possible and each other. It was a change of pace to ride with them into Lithgow.
Speaking of Ricky Racers, in many towns and built up areas there are speed cameras. Most of them come with signs warning you of their presence. Despite that, we read in one small town local paper that their signed speed camera netted over $800,000 Australian in a year and was the 12th largest moneymaker. While the car drivers are way more observant of bikers by US standards, they seem to not read signs about cameras really well. In two weeks we saw a total of two people pulled over and a total of fewer than 20 patrolling police cars. The speed cameras really work and they never want vacation or a pension.
Now it was on through the capital, Canberra, a newer city that is well laid out and located between Melbourne and Sydney for political reasons. We snapped a few shots and headed south to Cooma then west into Kosciusko National Park. Here there was a toll booth but if you are passing through the park and not stopping for the night and so inform the toll taker, you don’t pay. Kosciusko had huge forest fires that burned hundreds of thousands of acres in 2003. In some sections the bases of many trees were charred black. The road to the park goes past the Thredbo ski area. The day we rode it the weather was a little chilly due to the elevation. Days after we passed there it snowed buckets. That road twisted and ran up and down until it left the park about 60 miles later.
In the parking lot of the hotel for the night there was a 1951 Vincent with a tarp over it. I thought it was just one of those relics left out for years. I didn’t notice it had a British plate. The next morning while loading up we met the rider, a retired London motor officer that has owned it since 1961 and had shipped it to Australia and to the US on another trip. He kick started it for our benefit. It had Rickman hard luggage, very cool.
We did another loop in Kosciusko National Park and headed for the Great Alpine Road. On the way there we passed through Mount Beauty and took a 30 mile over the mountain shortcut to Bright, a fairly prosperous town with an actual ice cream store but no Starbucks. Sadly many medium to large cities are overrun with American fast food chains. This road to Bright had it all as did a 30 mile dead end road into Buffalo National Park. There are no buffalos in Australia and the bartender at the chalet at the top that was built in 1910 speculated that there was some big rock somewhere that looked like a buffalo and hence the name. Perhaps he was sampling some of the Victoria Bitter or Toohey’s New, local beers not imported to the US. Coming down that twisty road the next AM was rather cool and punctuated by a tree fallen across almost the whole road right around a blind turn around a rock. There’s a good reason not to overcook tight twisty roads. The Great Alpine Road
toward Omeo just climbed and climbed to a huge ski resort at the top. The VFR air sensor was reading 2 degrees Centigrade and the fog was thick and the wind was gusty. The ascent from the north was tighter than the descent on the Omeo end. After Omeo the road becomes a valley road but is still plenty twisty to close to the southern shore road, the Princess Highway. We took it for a while and looped north as suggested by the moto guide book for more twists on the way back to Cooma.
After that it was a long straight drone for a day and a half around Canberra and back to the rental shop in Sydney to make the departing flight. Ironically the speedometer quit on the VFR about 10 miles from the shop at 63,333 kilometers, four of a kind. The Triumph ate a headlight bulb and that was the sum of all bike issues. Selena told us at the shop that she and some friends were riding the ridge road to Lithgow the same day we were riding it and, sadly, there had been a fatal one bike accident that morning. Not too surprising when taking into account the sheer number of bikes and the pace being ridden. The total for the trip was about 3500 miles and we barely scraped the surface of seeing Australia. It is as big as the US but only has about 20 million people. One thing’s for sure, it is plenty far away. That is brought home after a good 18 or more hours flying economy and a layover in Los Angeles before a return to Houston.
Steve, now in Houston soon back in Haddonfield NJ

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Steve,
I'm envious - very very envious!
And am getting more so the further I get thru the
picture stash.

Thanks
Greg

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