Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means (7 page)

Originally the plan had been for Claudio to ride on the back of David’s bike, but with all this rain the dirt roads would be like an oil slick and with two up it would be very awkward. We decided the best thing to do was rig up a helmet camera for Claudio to use on his own bike.

‘So when was the last time you rode on the dirt, Clouds?’ I asked him.

‘
Long Way Down
,’ he said. ‘Two years ago.’

‘And how were you on the mud? I can’t remember.’

‘I was shit, Charley. I kept falling off.’ He peered at me over the top of the camera. ‘Have you got any tips for me?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Hold on tight.’

 

 

We were planning to get as far north as Mossman by nightfall, where we would sleep over at my great friend Diane’s house. Diane is the mother of one of my oldest friends, Jason, who is godfather to my daughter Doone. I’d spoken to Diane on the phone and she had told me we were all welcome at the ‘Playhouse’, as she calls Karnak Farm. The Playhouse is a little home away from home - I’d been there many times before, the first time some twenty-four years previously. We had to make sure we made it for dinner - Diane was putting on a spread involving roast lamb and champagne. I assured her we would. Then, kitted up, at last I was on a motorbike.

‘We’re riding about twenty Ks on the coast road,’ David explained as we got the cameras sorted out and the bikes going. ‘After that we’ll cut inland and take the Black Mountain Road as far as Mount Molloy. It’s a forest road but it is public and people live up there, so make sure you stay on the left.’ He looked at his watch. ‘We ought to be in Molloy around twelve-thirty, maybe one o’clock, and there’s a neat little café called the Loco Lobo where they serve the biggest hamburgers I reckon you’ll have ever seen.’ He nodded to the two yellow Suzukis. ‘You’ve got brand-new rubber on those and with this rain the tarmac will be greasy. Watch the roundabouts, they can be treacherous.’

We headed up the coast to a sign for the Black Mountain Road. Then after crossing a soaking bridge at Duggan’s Creek we were on the dirt and I was up on the foot pegs. At last, some off-road riding. Don’t get me wrong, I love the tarmac and I love sports bikes, but the dirt . . . the dirt is fun, fun, fun.

Within minutes we were deep into the rainforest and the surface was alternating between mushy stuff, a little cindery clay and patches of hard baked dirt where the falling water had created just a few millimetres of mud. Those few millimetres were like sheet ice, and ahead of me on the orange KTM, David lost the back and was down.

‘Are you all right?’ I asked as Claudio and I pulled up.

‘No worries. I’m all good,’ he said, dusting himself down. He squinted at the bike. ‘First time I’ve done that in . . . must be two years.’

We crossed bridges, we rode through great forests of soaking trees and across the slippery clay. We rode high into the mountains where the views of the valleys were breathtaking. In the dips the road was flooded and in one spot we passed a ruined Mitsubishi van that someone had long since abandoned. It was way down deep in a forested gulch, and the water was so high that if I’d not been up on the foot pegs, it would’ve been over my knees. I loved it. I was relaxed again and excited. Maybe I’d finally woken up and taken a sniff of the coffee. I’m in my element on a bike, and with the bush so close to the road we really were in the middle of nowhere. This was croc country - swamp land and swollen creeks where trees were down and pockets of floating islands massed under fallen leaves.

Claudio and David decided to swap bikes. Maybe that was just a silly mistake, but I reckon it’s where I put the hex on. The KTM had already been down once and now Clouds was riding it - it was a recipe for disaster.

We were blatting along quite happily when the KTM started to cough and splutter as if it was running out of petrol. Then the thing just packed up completely. No matter what we tried we could not get it to go, and in the end David decided there was a problem with the vacuum pump that feeds the fuel to the carburettor.

‘It’s buggered,’ he said. ‘We can’t fix it here. You’d better give me a tow.’

I’d never towed a bike before and it was some forty kilometres back to the tarmac and on to Mount Molloy.

‘It’s easy,’ he told me. ‘You tie this end of the rope to the back of your bike and I pass the other end under the steering head.’ Sitting astride the KTM, he then wound the rope around the handlebars and held on to the loose end. ‘That way I can just let go,’ he said, ‘so if there’s any drama you don’t drag me and the bike down the road.’

It made sense and I suppose I should’ve known that. When we went downhill I didn’t use the brakes but behind me David did; that way the rope stayed taut, and with no further incident we made it for lunch at the Loco Lobo in Mount Molloy. David was right, the Mexican burgers were about two storeys high. Now we needed to figure out how to complete the last stage of today’s journey, with one bike down. Thankfully David’s brother-in-law was able to bring a spare bike. When we had finished eating, we left the KTM and Claudio rode with me while David flagged down the support truck and picked up his brother-in-law’s Suzuki once we reached Mossman. I’d already phoned Diane and explained we’d be a little late.

It had been a long and tiring day but a bloody good one and we had covered some miles in the best way possible. Now I was itching to see Diane, sip a little champagne and, as David said later, eat a meal fit for a king.

KARNAK FARM IS KNOWN as the Playhouse because Diane has a five-hundred-seat theatre in the grounds. It really is something, accessed by a beautiful wooden staircase - the stage is part of her garden and the backdrop is a lake. I remember years ago taking a strimmer to the weeds before the lake was sunk. Diane Cilento is semi-retired now, but in her day she was a very successful actress and back in 1963 she was nominated for an Oscar. She has never lost her love of the business, and she has all sorts of theatre groups performing at Karnak.

It’s a gorgeous property. The main house is built among palm trees with sculpted lawns that fall away in terraces. It’s a shame we could only stay for one night, but now we were heading for Cooktown where Claudio and I were hitching a lift with a boat surveyor in a light aircraft. Tonight we’d be staying at a famous old pub called the Lions Den, near the Aboriginal community of Wujal Wujal. We’d be riding all day, though not just on the dirt bikes David had provided. This afternoon I’d been asked to cast my eye over a battery-powered motorbike built by a company called Zero.

The Australian arm of Zero is based in Melbourne, but the bikes themselves come from the factory in Santa Cruz in California. Having already driven and been impressed by an electric car, I couldn’t wait to see what someone had done with an off-road motorbike.

This morning we had David’s mate Max with us. He’d recently taken over the Lions Den, and drove down to meet us in a ute with a KTM strapped in the back - his plan was to ride with us back up to his pub. It’s an icon of the Cape York Peninsula, having been established back in 1875 when tin was discovered and miners flocked from all over.

Max was a good rider, and as we left Karnak we both pulled a pair of pretty decent wheelies, then proceeded to spend much of the morning messing about. It was a brilliant ride; we were in the middle of the rainforest and yet at the same time we were right on the coast. We pulled over at a spot called Rocky Point. ‘It really is tropical,’ I said to David as I gazed beyond the palm trees to the beach.

‘Here it is, yeah,’ he agreed, ‘but not too far north it begins to dry out.’

It was wonderful country and they were wonderful roads too. We had a mix of narrow tarmac, good dirt and plenty of flooded creeks. The vegetation was soaking and there was a mist over the mountains, almost like steam, when the sun came out.

Australians are, by and large, a laid-back bunch. But as we’d found out with the overbearing police at our convoy in Sydney, Aussie officials can be really in your face - it is incongruous and doesn’t seem in keeping with the rest of the country. They are so hung up on health and safety. We’d experienced some of this on the last trip, when Russ was pulled over when we were hauling the motorbike sculpture in the back of a ute. They were pretty aggressive, but I tell you, they had nothing on the Bloomfield River ferrymen.

We rode hard and fast along a narrow track between fields of sugar cane. Max was still popping wheelies and sliding his bike here, there and everywhere, and I was showing off a little bit myself. I noticed a set of train tracks that the cane farmers used to load cut cane for the factory, and me being me, I thought it would be great fun to race my bike between them. So leaving the others on the tarmac, I rode down the grass berm and hopped my bike between the rails. I really went for it, standing on the pegs and winding on the power, and raced between the fields of sugar cane. After a few hundred yards, I decided to rejoin the others. I got the front wheel clear again, but the back wheel caught in the rails. The bike snapped sideways and my stomach caught on the handlebars before I was sent flying over the high side. I landed on my left shoulder and, Jesus, I had a vision of popping a collar bone just as I’d done before the Dakar. Tumbling over and over I came to a stop in the rows of sugar cane.

Thankfully it wasn’t my collar bone that was broken, but the Suzuki’s throttle return cable. Still pretty bad news though. On top of that I’d bent the bars and mashed up the back brake pedal. My shoulder was throbbing and I could already feel stiffness gathering down my left side. Inspecting my stomach, I discovered a serious graze, the skin around it beginning to yellow with bruising.

Max was watching me, Claudio had the camera and David surveyed the damage to the bike.

‘Are you OK?’ Clouds asked me.

‘Yes, it’s just a graze.’

‘You’re sure it’s nothing internal, Charley?’

‘No, I don’t think so.’ I was holding my stomach, trying to see how badly I’d carved it up. ‘That’s not fat by the way,’ I said, quickly. ‘It’s just swollen.’

I felt a right idiot. If you ride a dirt bike you’re going to fall off, that’s a given. But I had been messing about and showing off, and with the trip barely a week old, it was a dumb thing to do. On top of that I had damaged David’s bike for no good reason.

We patched up the bike and I rode on with my confidence a little rocked and feeling annoyed with myself for being so foolish. It didn’t get any better when a couple of hours later we arrived at the Bloomfield River car ferry. We wanted the truck to drive on first so we could film the bikes as we rode on. It wasn’t an outrageous request, but the crew were having none of it. They told us we couldn’t do that - the bikes had to go first, because those were the rules and rules were not to be broken. Up in his wheelhouse the driver had a loudspeaker and all the way over he kept chirping away at everyone.

‘Stay with your vehicle. Do not get out of your vehicle. Stay with your vehicle.’

Claudio walked a few yards from his bike to get a shot of the river and all I could hear was the whine of the fucking Tannoy. ‘Stay with your vehicle. You there: stay with your vehicle.’

I thought the whole thing was ridiculous. I mean, this wasn’t the
Titanic
, it was a tiny little car ferry and all we were doing was crossing a bloody river.

Then I crashed again. I couldn’t believe it - it’s years since I came off twice in the same day. I don’t know what happened really. I took a tight bend on some pretty glassy mud and the next thing I know I’m picking myself up, having lost the front this time. Of course the others got to me before I’d got the bike fully upright, so I couldn’t even get away with pretending it hadn’t happened. David slithered to a halt and cast an anxious glance across his machinery. ‘Charley,’ he said, ‘you keep on like this, mate, and you’ll own that bike before the day’s out.’

Eventually we made it to Wujal Wujal without any further incident and parked the bikes at the Lion’s Den. Max had bought the place just a few months previously and, together with his wife and two children, he was determined to make a success of it. It was a beautiful spot, close to Black Mountain, very tropical and very green. The pub itself backed on to farm land owned by an Aussie snake charmer called Jim. OK, not a charmer as such, but a guy with some land who liked snakes. The pub itself reminded me of the one in Daly Waters: inside it was covered in memorabilia, T-shirts, newspaper cuttings, bras and panties . . . Apparently it was a regular haunt for the 4×4 enthusiasts who took on the kinds of Cape York roads we’d just been riding.

The guys from Zero had got there ahead of us. They had two bikes which Phil (who ran the Melbourne-based operation) told me had come all the way from California.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘all for you, mate. Seeing as how you’re the icon of world motorcycling right now, we wanted your opinion.’