Coming Home
by Al
pics by Al and Dan
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"It'll be slippery", he said.
It was maybe 0700 Monday. Dan and I had left Bairnsdale at 0600 and taken the scenic winding road to Buchan. I'd promised Dan I'd show him a new road I had discovered on the way down, and I wanted to check out the Barry Way from Buchan to Jindabyne.
"How pretty is this place!", I exclaimed as we filled our tanks. The servo owner overheard. "Yep", he said. "That's why I live here."
We'd inhaled the scenery on the way down the side of the valley into this little town nestled in the lush green hills, because the road was still wet from the overnight rains, and we were riding at a pace that gave us inhaling time.
The servo owner fired up his grill to make us some breakfast, and asked where we were going. "The Barry Way", I said.
That was when he did the air thing. "I emptied 22mm of water out of the rain gauge this morning", he said. "It'll be slippery."
We said we were OK with dirt roads. "Oh, you'll probably get through", he said. "But it will be slippery."
Some builders came in to get breakfast on their way to their first job. One of them offered to give me his ute if he could take take his cattle dog for a ride on my BMW. I gave him the fish eye. His boss told us it would be foggy after the rain, and to watch out for cars on blind corners.
We paid and went outside.
A silver haired Ulyssian pulled up on a KLR650. We chatted. He said he was going to do the Barry Way, too. His accent was maybe Lancashire. He said he was going to get something to eat and then head out of town. He said he was going to drop his tyre pressures for the dirt road. He said 22psi would be about right.
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Our Ulyssian fellow traveller. A sober man with an appreciation of the importance of tyre pressure. |
"Well", I said, "we'll be doing it at 42psi. On street bikes. Because that's what we do."
And we left.
Hard as Chinese trigonometry, us.
It was pretty damn' scenic. We noticed this because the road was still wet wet, and we had lots of time for scenery-inhaling which you don't get when you're going all rape-of-the-Sabines on a road.
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North of Buchan. Curves like Nigella, but thankfully silent, and not in your way when you just want to get a bloody beer from the fridge. |
The mist hung low. The road wound higher. There were long drops off the side, and no armco or fencing. There were large wet spots where trees overhung the road, but it was magnificent.
After 60 km or so, it turned to dirt.
It kept climbing.
The fog came down. Visibility dropped to less than ten metres. We had to keep wiping our visors to see even that far.
It got slippery.
We did OK, though. My bike is big and heavy, but it's long, so when it goes sideways it does it slowly. Dan's bike is short and light, but he is young as has quick reflexes. No cars came from the other direction. The wet dirt kept the dust down. And after a while the road started to slope downwards, and the fog lifted a bit. Then the curves opened out to gentle sweepers. The red dirt gave OK traction, and we started to make good time.
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The red dirt stuck to a Michelin Pilot Road/2 like a snake to wet grass, but we managed |
It didn't last long. The turns tightened up as the road led up another mountain.
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By the second range, the mist had lifted |
But, the red dirt remained, and it gave pretty good traction, considering.
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