Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (2 page)

Dare is a really nice guy; I noticed that when he’s socialising he’s extremely good at including everyone, which is an endearing quality. He used to run a surf business called Mambo but sold that in the 1990s. One wall in the Deus showroom is devoted to a massive black-and-white photo of a guy on a motorbike with a side rack designed to carry a surfboard. Dare told us that a couple of years ago they built some bikes for a bunch of guys who wanted to cruise the coast with their boards without the hassle of a van. That was the perfect kind of challenge and something about the romance of bikes and boards caught the public’s imagination.

The literal translation of Deus Ex Machina is ‘God from the machine’. In books and movies it’s a plot device where something is introduced into the story to help a character overcome what otherwise would be an insoluble problem. That’s Dare all over: his life is about the fun of making the difficult doable, and a bike racked for a surfboard sums it up. His great hero is the Australian bike racer Herbie Jefferson, who was not only a racer but a big-wave rider. ‘It’s all the same juice,’ Herbie would say.

 

 

On the morning of 18 May we all woke up early, praying that a decent crowd of people would be there to see us off. At least this time I knew there would definitely be a few of us riding out together. We’d met Terry, Chris, Steve and Jack last year on
By Any Means
in a tiny town called Daly Waters. Old school mates who were now retired, they had been on a mammoth road trip and had talked fondly about a fifth member of their gang who should have been with them. His name was also Chris and he was suffering from leukaemia. At the time we met the guys, Chris was home in Canberra waiting for a bone-marrow transplant and I had spoken to him on the phone. Since then he had had the treatment and today I would finally get to meet him.

So that was five at least. Then there was my mate Wayne Gardner, the ex-racer who won the World 500 cc Championship on a Honda back in 1987. Wayne is a legend, an awesome rider from the days of two-strokes: no traction control and no engine braking. During his championship year he clocked up seven race wins. In 1982 he’d been TT world champion and in 1985 and 1986 he won the Suzuka 8 Hour. That made six, then; in addition to myself and Claudio. It would be fine.

But I still woke up feeling nervous as hell. We met downstairs and jumped in a taxi to take us back to Parramatta Road. Sitting beside me, Claudio was looking both pale and weary.

‘Clouds,’ I said. ‘This is the fifth project I’ve done in six years, you know that?’

He gave me a sort of sidelong glance, as he often does. ‘So what went wrong that you got me on board again?’

‘No one else wanted to do it.’

I was really glad he was with us. Knackered or not, you can rely on Claudio absolutely. He has an instinct for the shot, the camera is like an extension of his psyche. I remember him in the market town of Bati, Ethiopia, standing on top of a ruined building with the tripod before Ewan and I even realised he’d gone. That’s no reflection on anyone else - Mungo was terrific on the last trip - but this time I needed the experience Claudio brings just by us having worked together so often. And he’s a cult hero, of course, even if he isn’t aware of it.

I had spoken to Ewan a couple of days previously and he wished me luck with the trip. He’s based in LA at the moment so I’ve not seen so much of him lately, but we’re in touch and always talking about potential biking projects. He’s been a great friend and I never forget that if it wasn’t for him I probably wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing.

At around 10 a.m, with my nerves just about intact, we were on the bikes and riding through the streets of Sydney with the rain holding off and people waving as we passed. I really did have the butterflies now; I’d had them in England a year ago when we set off from Coventry and the same words rattled through my head. Let there be bikes, I thought. Please God, let there be bikes.

Bikes. My God, there were hundreds of them. It was Monday morning, with a bad weather forecast, and yet there must have been three or four hundred motorcyclists gathered at the Freshwater Reserve. I pulled into the car park and gave everyone a wave and a few people cheered. Moments later Claudio arrived with the camera rolling and, as he took his helmet off, a huge cheer went up. Instant recognition for the master of the little red bike; the man who’d survived the Road of Bones and Charley tailgating him in South Africa. Before he knew what was happening people were cramming around him, begging for his autograph.

I was delighted for him. Being the unassuming bloke he is, he was a little taken aback, but it brought home to me that it’s the camaraderie of what we do that people identify with. There had been three of us on the bikes for
Long Way Round
and
Long Way Down
, and without Claudio, Ewan and I would’ve been hopelessly lost.

It wasn’t just bikers there to see us off either; loads of people had come down who weren’t on bikes at all. I had photos taken, I signed books and DVDs - I even had babies thrust into my arms. Claudio was trying to film but he found himself swamped by fans he didn’t know he had and spent most of the time signing jackets, fuel tanks, body parts and anything else someone had a pen for.

Wayne Gardner was there, of course: he only lives down the road and was riding a Honda Fireblade. Then there were the guys from Daly Waters and finally I was able to shake hands with Chris.

The introductions completed, we got back on the bikes - all threee hundred-odd of us - and rode north from Manly to Fraser Beach. It was one great swarm of motorbikes and as soon as I’d topped the rise and glimpsed them all gathered in the car park, my fears had evaporated. The nerves had been replaced by sheer excitement. There were so many of us it took twenty minutes to get everyone out of the car park. It was just fantastic, better than I could ever have hoped for. There was one guy riding beside me on a yellow bike whose left hand didn’t work and he had it pressed into his pocket. He had thumb brakes and the clutch had been switched to the right handlebar and he rode along popping second-gear wheelies.

The cops in Australia can be a bit of a pain in the arse, though. No offence, boys, but you were all over us! We had to stop completely at one point because the convoy wasn’t orderly enough for their liking (they wanted us in two neat lines all the way). As Wayne said later, the ride was fun, if a little slow.

We made it to the beach finally, an hour and a half’s ride north of Sydney. Claudio, who was riding pillion with a local guy called Matt, managed to get lost - they stopped for fuel and lost touch with the rest of the bikes and then they went the wrong way. They eventually showed up with Claudio on the back trying to appear professional and Matt looking especially sheepish.

‘No, we weren’t lost,’ Claudio insisted. ‘We were just checking out a little of Australia.’

No wonder the poor guy got lost; he was still exhausted from the flight and had spent the morning on the back of a motorbike trying to film me waffling away as I rode through the streets of Sydney. Olly and I lived in Sydney for a while back in our twenties. We had a place in Five Ways, Paddington; Olly worked as a PA and a waitress while I was a barman as well as a labourer on the Harbour Bridge. They were great days with great memories and here I was again. For all my fears we had had the perfect start and when I spoke to Olly later I was full of enthusiasm about it all.

It did rain, though. It rained hard and it was dark when we got to Wingham, a small town close to Taree. It was only Dare and me now, with Robin filming from the back of Matt’s bike. Claudio had had it; eyes closing, he had curled up in the back of the support truck and fallen asleep.

 

 

The boys from Daly Waters met us at the pub. Steve and Chris, Jack and Terry and the other Chris, of course, whom I now got to speak to properly. He was an amazing guy, so breezy and cheerful - he put it down to the steroids. Seriously though, he told me that when I’d spoken to him on the phone he’d been anxious about finding a donor. Thankfully he did get the marrow that would keep him alive, from a thrity-eight-year-old woman in the UK. He was very grateful to her.

We stood outside the pub and drank beer. The first time I’d met these guys had been in that wonderful little blink-and-miss-it town of theirs between Darwin and Alice Springs. I’d been considering a ramshackle little shop with a helicopter buried in the roof when a bike pulled up and this older-looking bloke peered at me.

‘Charley,’ he said, ‘what’re you doing here? Loved the series, mate. Is Ewan with you?’

That was Steve McGrath and here we were almost a year later shooting the breeze again.

‘It’s great to see you guys,’ I said. ‘A nice little full circle story.’

‘Full circle’s good for me,’ Chris piped up. ‘It could’ve been a dead end.’

We fell about laughing.

‘I tell you,’ he went on, ‘when I got that call last year, I didn’t know what was going on. Chris said: “There’s someone wants to talk to you,” and then this little pommie voice comes on the line and I thought, Is it some bloody backpacker they’ve picked up?’ He grinned broadly. ‘It was a moment, a real little boost, the kind you need when you’re where I was back then.’ He raised his glass and we drank. ‘I tell you, I’m just glad to be alive. Every day’s a gift, mate; every healthy day.’

 

 

We slept the night in the Australia Inn at Wingham. I was really tired but I’d read in the paper that there had been riots in Lae, Papua New Guinea, which was a little unnerving. We would be travelling through Lae, and I had to think, What is it about us and riots? Last time it had been football fans in Istanbul, then Russians invading Georgia and China closing the Tibetan border. Oh well, we’d see how it was when we got there. In the meantime it had been an exhilarating first day and all I wanted now was a shower, some food and some sleep.

It was still dark outside when the sound of rain rattling off tin roofs woke me. I went to the window and stared into the gloom. There were a few lights glowing here and there but the glass was pretty opaque and the balcony slick with rain. My heart sank. This morning I was riding with Dare and the last thing we needed was this kind of weather. It was a bummer, but it was all part of the adventure I suppose, and it’s not as if I can’t ride in the rain. Last year it seemed like every time we got on a motorbike it was pouring with bloody rain. There were still a couple of hours before we were due to leave and, ever the optimist, I thought it might clear up.

It didn’t. It was still coming down when we said goodbye to the guys from Daly Waters, who were riding south to Canberra. It had been great to meet Chris at last. He told me he owed a lot to the Leukaemia Foundation and planned to go to the UK so he could look up the woman who had donated the bone marrow that saved his life. He said that if he made it he’d give me a call, but between you and me, I think he really wanted to meet my wife. I’m a nice guy apparently, but Chris reckoned that was down to Olly . . .

Dare and I jumped back on the bikes and this time he rode the flat tracker while I was on the rat-style Triumph Thruxton he’d been riding yesterday. It’s a café racer he put together and it has awesome power. I’d ridden it for a few miles last night and was really looking forward to a good day, even if the rain was bucketing down. I was wearing an open-face helmet though, and as we hit the highway the wind was rushing past my ears. Little did I know just how deaf I would be by the time we stopped again that evening.

Wingham was a nice place, if a little wet. It was incredibly green, with palms that were dripping water as we headed north. We were on good tarmac to begin with - two-lane blacktop - and the road was bordered by trees and fields, single-storey houses with red-tiled roofs dotted here and there. Then we hit some dirt, red cinder, which on the right bike would’ve been excellent, but on the rat-style I took it a little easy. After that it was tarmac again and seventy-odd clicks later we pulled into the driveway of Mark Johnson’s house in Wauchope, where a massive bull-nosed truck was waiting. It was gorgeous, a brilliant blue with chrome grille and bumper, twin chrome exhausts rising behind the doors. It reminded me of my favourite book when I was a kid. The book had no words, just pictures of a big Mack truck with pullout drawings of the engine and everything. I loved it.

But this wasn’t a Mack; it was a Diamond T
¹
that, until thirteen years ago, had been carrying cotton gins in Western Australia. Mark was a panel beater by trade, and came out to greet us wearing only a pair of shorts and bomber jacket against the rain. We shook hands and he told me the truck was owned by a friend of his and the two of them had spent a couple of years restoring it.

It was time to say goodbye to Dare and I was sad to see him go. He’s such a great guy and we’re like-minded. I tried to persuade him to join me and the family for a holiday when the trip was over. ‘I’ll see what I can do, Charley,’ he said. ‘But in the meantime thanks for letting me come along.’ He gestured to where Mark was already in the truck and pressing his fist to the horn. ‘You’d better go,’ he said. ‘Your chariot awaits.’