Coming Home

Coming Home II...

A little later, the red dirt disappeared.

The white dirt gave pretty good traction, except where it didn't. And it was always a surprise. There was not-too-bad white dirt and there was slippery-as-buggery white dirt, and the two looked identical.

The white dirt gave pretty good traction...

I watched Dan pass me at one point, with the rear wheel of his GSX-R never within 20cm of a line back from his front wheel as it slid all over the road. Dan didn't seem perturbed by this. I was. I was tense, and spent a lot of time muscling the bike.

And then I came around a left hander on some of the Bad White Dirt, trying to pick a line between two longitudinal ruts in the narrow road, looked up for a moment, and there was a car. By the time I looked down, my front wheel had slid into one of the ruts, and the bike went down to the left.

A woman jumped out of the car. "Was that my fault?", she asked.

"No", I answered. "That was my fault."

Dan appeared from nowhere with a camera.

...except where it didn't.

I got my bike back on its wheels and found a spot a bit further along where I could put it on its side stand.

It looked OK, except that a turn indicator was hanging off it. It looked like it just popped in. I lined it up and gave it a smack with the heel of my hand. It popped in.

Our new mate Jeff turned up on his KLR650. He didn't say anything about smartarses who ride the Barry Way on streetbikes at 42psi. When he saw we were okay, he moved on.

As did we. There was a bridge over a creek at the bottom of the range. I stopped and took a picture of Dan riding over it.

Tomcat Creek, according to the map. We imagine it pisses everywhere and makes lots of noise at night.

Then another climb. A bad one. I started wondering whether to stop and do the tyre pressure thing, but Dan didn't hesitate, so I didn't. There was one line. The rest of the road was rutted from cars sliding down it with locked wheels. It was steep. Water ran down the ruts. The One Line was wet and slippery.

I knew that if I got any wheelspin on the way up I would stop, and I would have no chance of starting again without getting 290kg of bike and luggage back down to the bottom and having another run at it. I tried to baby it up in second, and just got to the top before the rear wheel slid sideways half a metre into one of the ruts. I gave the ground an almighty kick and kept the bike upright, and got it straight again in time to watch Dan perform an unintentional but lurid power slide in front of me.

Then it all came good.

We trickled along beside the Snowy River. We heard gunshots, and a helicopter. We stopped and watched. No-one appeared to be shooting at us, which was comforting. Maybe a movie shoot, I suggested. Maybe hunters culling feral animals, Dan surmised.

Then the dirt got hard packed and almost dry, and we could motor along at over 80 km/h. The turns were gentler, and we were climbing steadily. We stopped at the Wallace Craigie lookout. Our New Mate Jeff was there with his KLR.

Dan and Jeff drink in the view from the Wallace Craigie Lookout

"I could hear the pipe on that Gixxer for the last twenty minutes", he greeted us.

Dan and I stretched our legs. We all peed on a tree. Not the same tree.

Jeff said the tar was close. We bade him adieu, because I had 42 psi in my rear tyre, and I intended to use every pound of it the second I hit tar.

I did.

It was glorious. There were long open sweepers with good visibility and no traffic. Dan and I were revelling in it. Or I was, anyway. So I assumed from my occasional glances at the revelometer.

I made a last minute adjustment to my planned route, and turned east before Jindabyne. I lucked on some more lonely high speed tar. We slowed down to go through the one-pub town of Dalgety, then wound it back up again, passing through barren looking land with big boulders strewn all through the fields. Probably worth a fortune during the Pet Rock craze, but the fickle world of fashion has passed them by.

Then we stopped because Dan reckoned he didn't have enough gas to get to Cooma and we would have to detour out of our way to Bombala to get some.

It was only 20km, and Bombala welcomes motorcyclists. It says so on the sign.

Bombala welcomes motorcyclists, or at least it did back in the days of the BSA Bantam or whatever the hell that thing on the sign is.

We got gas. Dan found that the two main bolts that hold his Ventura rack on were missing, and his luggage was swaying alarmingly. The lady at Autopro let us rummage through her fasteners. I got some tools out. We fixed the rack. Dan gave the lady a dollar. It made us hungry.

The steak, beetroot and fetta salad. Bombala is truly blessed.

The Bombala RSL was over the road. We repaired thither. They had beer. It gladdened my heart. The restaurant was deserted, but when we entered a waitress appeared in the manner of one of those disconcerting women in 1970s sitcoms, or a NSW Highway Patrolman popping out from behind a bush with LIDAR.

They had a steak, beetroot and fetta salad. I ordered one, and got outside it, and had another beer to wash it down. Thrice gladdened thus, I absorbed Dan's philosophy.

Dan believes that dirt roads are the price you pay for finding lonely tar roads where you can have fun without interference. He also thinks that you find some pretty spots while traversing them, and these pretty spots ease a man's worried mind.

In this, Dan and I are as one. There may be more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy, but none of them involving important stuff like having fun on motorcycles.

The $12.50 investment in the steak, beetroot and fetta salad, combined with the $9.00 investment in beer, stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood, and so we left.

The ride to Cowra passed in a warm cocoon of beer buzz and plausible deniability, where I turned east to show Dan the road I had found on the way down to the Island.

I have to admit, it was pretty good, and having company adds to the experience. It is a road where if you screwed up and went over the side it would take a while to find your body, and it is far more relaxing to ride with someone whom you fondly believe would stop and call the emergency services if you screwed up, and lie to them about how fast you were going if they arrived with the police.

So we rode sixty kilometres or so of tar leaving Cowra on the Snowball road. With verve, and dash. And, at times, élan.

After sixty or so kilometres, the road turns to dirt. We stopped so I could get rid of some beer.