Stage reports

Stage 1 – Australia

Sydney to London on a moped. I wasn’t sure if it had ever been done before but the more I thought about it the more it sounded like a terrific idea. I was already in Australia, my visa was coming to an end and I already had the bike. I’d bought her off eBay for $1500, an old postman’s delivery hack nick named Dorris. Flat out she could do more than 80km/h and after just a week of ownership it was clear her bottom-end was already about to fall out.

Could I really ride her up to Darwin, through Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and on to England, home? How long would it take? How much would it cost? And how the hell was I going to make it the 4500 kilometres up to Darwin and across to East Timor in the fortnight immigration had just given me to get out? After two days to pack and plan, there was only one way to find out…

Blazing out of Sydney with the throttle wide open and Dorris loudly screaming, we had no clue what hurdles we would have to leap along the way. They would be high and frequent – visas, shipping, foreign tongues and exotic borders – that much was certain, and yet for the all this blind ambition and faith in something foolish, deep down we knew we could make it.

After nine months of failing to make jobs and relationships work in Sydney, this was our time, our one big moment in life to draw a line in the sand and scream fuck you. We will make a stand, succeed in this voyage of discovery and prove to ourselves and to all those who doubt us that we aren’t the absent-minded day-dreamers they think we are.

Was I out of my depth and ill-prepared? Of course I was. For footwear I had Converse, for storage a milk crate, for accommodation a tent, for finances my two good friends Mastercard and Visa. But I’m a firm believer that where there’s a will there’s alway, obsolutely, a way. Besides, we did have the prime minister of Australia’s signature on my helmet. I spotted him in a Sydney bookshop the day before we left and pounced before his security guard could shoot me. ‘Best of luck, Kevin Rudd, Prime Minister’. he wrote upside on the back. We were chuffed, even if I don’t vote Labour.

Telling the parents was the hardest part. I knew that if I told them before I left they’d try to change my mind, talk me round, make me see the false sense in a 29 year old jumping on a moped and riding Sydney to England with no money or mechanical idea. ‘Grow up, wise up, get a job’, they would say. I told them at the end of day three as I sat exhausted in McDonalds eating fries and a burger. It’d been one hell of a day.

In my haste I’d forgot to buy any tyre levers, so when I came out of a chemist with some cream for my sore backside I had no way of fixing the flat tyre that greeted me. Luckily a grisly old man, as thin as a rake and nervously twitchy, came to my rescue in a beaten up jalopy.

Dave was his name. Now a pensioner, he’d backpacked home from London to Sydney when his dreams of being a rock ’n roll legend had bit the dust back in the sixties. “Afghanistan was an amazing place back then,” he grizzled. “Then the fucking Russians ruined the place.” I bought Dave a crate of beer for his help then carried on north for twenty minutes until the tyre went flat again. Same wheel. Same nail.

No punctures the next day, instead Dorris’s bottom-end finally fell out. One thousand kilometres covered, another thirty thousand or so still to go. Fortunately I was in Brisbane when it happened and knew that if I could make it a few clicks north there was a bike specialist who could help.

When we arrived I asked Joe the owner if Dorris would make it to Darwin. He scratched his chin and said he thought she might. “What about England?” I continued. He stopped scratching his chin and looked at me funny. “Mate… there’s no chance”. I knew he was going to say that.

As the sun shone on my troubled mind, Joe graced me with three options. Rebuild the engine in five days; fit a new one by the end of tomorrow or trade Dorris in for a newer bike and ride away that night. With the clock ticking on my visa I didn’t have the time for Dorris to sit and be tickled with Joe’s spanners. There was a bike in the showroom, the same make and model as Dorris – a Honda CT110 – but this one was already set up for what I wanted to do.

She had a long range tank, side panniers and sheep skin seat… it was my God, my Mecca, my strawberry whip. On a scrap of paper I did false sums to convince myself I could afford it. In reality I couldn‘t, but what the hell, I’d got a boat to catch and an adventure to begin. So I bought it, christened it Dot, and got back on the road home… to England.

It was heart-breaking leaving Dorris behind. She was on her last legs, we both knew that. And yet to watch her disappear in my mirror as I sailed away on a replacement bike made me shudder. The bond was broken. her journey over. And yet for all that guilt I have to confess; life on the road was considerably smoother under Dot’s steam. My tent fitted on the handlebar rack, my clothes in one pannier, tools and spares in the other and all my electrical gear and paperwork in the aluminium box on the back. The long range tank also meant we could ride 400 milometres without a single stop. Dot was perfect. The oppostite then of the weather…

It was the wet season up north and storm warnings were lighting up every inch of the map. At a campsite on the east coast the owner knocked on my canvas door and broke the news. “The Barkly Highway is out, washed away, there’s no way around but to go back down to Adelaide and come up the centre.” For anyone not up to speed with their Australian geography, that’s a detour of around 4,000 kilometres. I was gutted, heart-broken. I was going to be foiled by a drop of water and a flaky road. Screw you Mother Nature.

But wait, there’s a glimmer of hope. If the rain stopped and the sun shone brightly, there was a small, tiny chance that the road could be okay to let light traffic through within the week. To continue in that direction was no doubt a gamble. If we headed north and the road didn’t open we would be stranded, land locked, with no way of getting to Darwin in time. If instead we took the detour south we might, if we slept for not a single night, just make it. But probably not. The coin landed. Heads. We’re going north.

For the next three days we rode from dawn ‘til dusk and covered a total of 1800 kilometres. This made my bum ache and Dot‘s rear tyre bald. Neither of us were designed for this, yet we pushed on giving it every last drop. There was no option. We had to make it. The road had to open. We had to keep on pushing. And so on we rode, not stopping for a photograph with the giant Banana or even for a peak at the girls on Bryon beach. Finally, at Rockhampton we stopped following the coast and headed west, inland, along vast empty highways topped by a huge dome of layered clouds – some light and fluffy, others crisp and dark – with not another soul in sight.

Eventually we’d reach an isolated town or village, hundreds of kilometres apart but a neighbourly knowledge of each other that made you think the two communities were right next door. Here real Australians lived. Not the show ponies from the coast who gel their hair and wax their board, but bread and butter folk who knew the difference between a shovel and a spade.

People like Brody and Sarah, a couple who offered me their sofa one rainy night in Mount Isa. Their flatmate cooked spaghetti and we sat and chatted over the first meal I’d eaten with a knife and fork in ten days. I’d lost weight and my face was burnt a bright crimson. Dot was doing just fine.

The next morning we woke to sensational news; the road to Darwin was ready to reopen. We hit the tarmac before breakfast and camped that night as close to the closure as we could get. Our neighbour for the evening was a violent drunken man who hated the English and played Simon and Garfunkel just a little too loud. The next morning his truck broke down just past the spot where the road had been repaired. We sailed past with a giant grin; that’s karma buddy. As for us, the race was now well and truly on.

If I stuck a hand-grenade up Dot’s exhaust pipe and glued my eyelids wide open we might just make the cargo boat that sailed out of Darwin the very same day my visa was up. Miss that one and we’d have to wait a week for the next. That wasn’t an option, so on we ploughed, through torrents of rain that would sit and wait in big black clouds on the horizon. My underpants were drenched, Dot’s sheepskin seat cover – nicknamed Beyonce – was sodden. And still the sky kept crying and the clock kept ticking.

Turning right at the Threeways Homestay, now 1000 kilometres south of Darwin, we had two just days to go. At the pace we’d been traveling it was still possible that we’d make it time. But there could be no more nightmares, no disasters or punctures, breakdowns or roads being closed. Fate would seal it.

Hours passed, the sun soared and then set. Giant road-trains a hundred foot long came bashing past and blew us to the weeds. We were both tired and exhausted, close to collapse.

Yet somehow, despite everything, we made it, the two of us racing in to the city late on Sunday night, her with a bald tyre and in desperate need of fluid, me in a frazzled-eyed state with buttocks I could barely sit on. There was no champagne or party girls, just quiet, sombre relief. We’d done it. Dot was on the boat, I was on the plane. Next stop, East Timor.

Stage 2 – Indonesia

Stage 2 – Indonesia

Twist my nipples and call me a sissy, but as the plane came in to land over East Timor I was petrified. I’d never been to Asia before and here I was, about to land in a country described by the man on the news as a war zone. Murders, political coups and UN intervention, it’d seen it all. Even my own government said not to go. And then here I was, in the middle of it all, little ol’ me, trying to figure out what the fuck I was doing there.

Sydney to London on a moped. That was it.

I sat in the arrivals lounge, swatting taxi touts off like flies until an aid worker from Australian took pity on me and gave me a lift to the only backpacker joint in the city. The Dili Smokehouse was on the main street; past the caged chickens and wooden shacks, beyond the grotty food stalls and teenagers sat on kerbsides selling sim cards and just around the corner from the dock where Dot would arrive in a week. I checked into the hostel and bolted the door. ‘I’m out of my depth here,’ I thought.

It didn’t help that I was taking larium, an anti-malaria drug with a cocktail of side effects, including paranoia. I felt nervous and edgy, a sense I was being watched. Strangers at the hostel asking too many questions were spies in my mind, those curious about the contents of my bags were thieves. It also didn’t help that I was reading a book about the murder and rape the Indonesians enjoyed during their occupation of East Timor that ended in ‘99. What if their spies are still here, watching me, waiting for me to cross the border to West Timor where they’re still in control. What will they do to me? More importantly, what will they do to Dot?

But as fear of Indonesia grew, so did my fondness for East Timor and its people. Here’s a nation battered and bruised, on its arse only two years ago and now, with a bit of international scaffolding, back on the mend. What a great time to see it, before the western tourists arrive expecting cheap sex and a ping pong show. The only thing that gets you now are the UN vehicles buzzing around with their sirens on. There must be hundreds of them, all bright-white four-wheel drivers going somewhere, doing something. But what that is nobody really knows. They pull out next year so we’ll see what happens. Probably the expensive restaurants will make less money and Toyota will do less trade but other than that you can’t see the place going belly-up.

Then Dot arrived and it was time to go. I could hear it; Indonesia calling us from just across the border. ‘Nathan and Dot, we’re going to slit your throats and feed you to the monkeys. Nathan, ride quickly….”

And we did, hitting the road to West Timor with a growing sense of fate and destiny. This was it. There’s no turning back. The beast was very different now. In Australia we’d enjoyed good roads, a shared language, food you could recognise and oil you could trust wouldn’t be fake. It was all kinda easy. Here in Asia, even on the short ride to the border, I had to negotiate pot-holes and pigs in the road, learn to communicate with locals I didn’t understand and find out what flies they put in the soup. I was wide-eyed and clueless. A boy out of his depth on an adventure he was far from prepared for. Then we reached the border and I nearly shit myself. This was it. We’re going through.

Customs and clearance was easier than I thought. I border hawk helped deal with the official and within an hour we were on our way, riding guns drawn like cowboys through an Indian canyon. My eyes were everywhere, alert, watching. I bought fuel out of a glass bottle by the roadside and listened to Dot fart as the water in it ruined the mix. Everywhere people shouted ‘hey mister… where do you go… where do you stay… married… how old? Five questions repeated again and again.

At the first town over the border – Atambua – I stopped the night in a cheap hotel. I’d not realised but the town was where the Indonesian backed militia had fled when the UN kicked them out of the East. You sensed that. The place didn’t put you at ease. I had a guy on a scooter follow me to the hotel and heckle me. In the morning he was waiting outside and followed me to the phone shop. He was a weasel, a shifty looking son of a bitch who I didn’t trust, ‘Are you following me?’ I asked. He shook his head but the damage was done. In my pants I’d already done another poo.

Faster than the speed of sound, we rode hard to the port town of Kupang where we hoped to get the hell out of there on a ferry. Only the last one to Flores had sailed just a few hours ago and there wasn’t another one due for a fortnight. Even the smaller local ferries that sink weren’t running because of the weather. To ride without guides or maps or any idea of what perils lie ahead was always the intention for this trip. To discover it all for myself was my mantra. Yet now, as it slowly sunk in that I was stuck here, paranoid in Kupang, I really began to wish I’d not been so stupid.

There were other problems too. I’ve not yet mentioned this in fear of necessary abuse, but in my ignorance – and against the advice of everyone – I’d only applied for a 30 day visa for Indonesia and not a 60. My reasoning was that it would give me a challenge, keep me focused and moving. This trip was never about sight-seeing, it was about the test of whether or not I could make it to England. Now though, with those days depleting as I sat on my arse in Kupang, a 30 day visa just wasn’t looking enough. Or was it? Only time would tell.

On day seven, as I was really beginning to panic, there was a break in the weather and the seas finally settled. A local vehicle ferry was able to sail so I jumped on that and enjoyed the 18 hour crossing to Flores listening to a woman ‘hock’ phlegm across the deck while a man with a dangerous face kept harassing me with stupid questions. He wanted to know everything and would stand and lean on Dot’s handlebars until I answered. Just being friendly? I don’t think so.

When the ferry finally docked in Flores we only had 23 days left to go. My destination – Medan in Sumatra – lay at the end of a 6000 kilometre road that was pot-holed, mountainous, and riddled with many more ferry crossings. So let’s go go go. Frantically, I crossed Flores in two days, Sumbawa in one and a half and then Lombok in three hours. The riding was endless, stopping only for fuel and shelter. But the longer and faster we rode the more we loved it. We were focused, unstoppable. Potholes were the only menace at night. That and the paranoia. Still scared I would set booby traps outside my hotel room in the evening so that if anyone touched Dot and disturbed the attached glass bottle I was ready to bash them with the hammer that lay on my pillow

Thankfully that all changed in Bali when I took my chances with malaria and ditched the drugs. From there I began to relax. Especially a town in the hills called Ubud. I stayed in a cottage by a rice field and sat in a cafe drinking ginger tea and counting my pennies for a few days. It was just what me and Dot needed before we head-butted the smog and the fumes of Java. After the mint Toblerone mountains of Flores and the all-day siesta of typical Indonesia life, Java is like being hit in the head with a shovel. Or in my case a bus.

It was the coming the other way, on the wrong side of the road, and I had no where to go. ‘It’s going to hit, it’s going to hit me, it’s going t…..’ BANG. The bus belted Dot on her right hip and walloped us into the side of the other bus that I was over-taking at the time. Like a pinball I ricocheted between the two, riding the bull at 50mph and emerging the other side with Dot’s pannier racks bent and battered. I didn’t stop and neither did they.

But karma caught up with me the next few days. I fell off three times, got stranded down a ditch and the was chased by the police for running a red light. “TOOOOT TOOOOT,” went the policeman’s whistle. I wondered what best to do. Stop or carry on? In the end it was Dot who made the call. ’Just ride man, just ride,’ she said. So we gunned it, flat out at 80km/h with us looking in the mirror every minute for the flashing blue light. But Dot was too fast. A lightening bolt, a pistol. We were free…. to be bludgeoned to death by the great tourist swindle where we pay thirty times more than the locals.

It was the same two-tiered pricing in the hotels that always had dirty sheets and a sense they were masquerading as brothels. That’s why I was glad when I felt confident enough to use my tent in Sumatra. Riding along I’d find a dirt track off the main road and ride along it until I was out of sight. Sometimes I’d cut down leaves and branches to camouflage Dot and not put up my tent ‘til it was truly dark. You could say I was doing it to save money, but really, deep down, this is what I preferred. Put the tent up, use a t-shirt as a pillow, sleep in my clothes with a weapon beside me and wake up and head off the first second of day break.

Shortly after I’d stop at a stall for a breakfast of fried rice and strong Indonesia coffee. Black and hot, just how Dot likes her men. The food wasn’t always so good, though. Across all of Indonesia, cheap stalls served a local dish called bakso. It looks a bit like meatball soup, only with chicken balls made from all the bits including the beak. Sometimes, if you were lucky, they’d also chop a stretched penis on top of the dish. I later found out it was intestine. Not the kindest ingredient in a county that expects you to wipe your hand with your arse.

But for me a toilet is a fitting description of Java; crowded, noisy and dirty with just one too many tourist scams to make you not want to stay. Unlike the much calmer Sumatra, the next and last of the Indonesian island where I was made honorary member of an Indonesian biker gang and given an escort with flashing lights, horns and everything. I felt a right tit and was glad to ride alone again. By now I’d covered 4,000 kilometres in two weeks and had just one more to navigate 2,000 kilometres of tarmac so terrible I’d scream at cows in the field to ‘fix your fucking roads.’

Just like Australia, this meant once again Dot would have to ride like the wind. Flat out, 75km/h, I even had to ignore the ticking noise coming from her engine and soothe her grumblings with promise of a doctor in Malaysia because I wasn‘t one. I was afraid that if I stopped they’d diagnose something disastrous and have me stop and rebuild. It was safer, I reasoned, to close my ears and carry on. Fools logic I know, but we had to be out the country before my visa expired, whether Dot was in one piece or two.

Only we failed. Sort of. Because we actually we made it with a day to go. The problem was the ferry wouldn’t take motorbikes and no one knew when the next cargo ship sailed. I spoke no Indonesian, no one understood, we rode back into town deflated, defeated and feeling very much alone. At the internet café the owner presented her daughter. “She make good wife,” the mother said. Sure, she was beautiful and made cracking tea, but I need a boat, not a bride. With new found information I rode back to the port and began to ask for a mysterious man called Mr Monte.

After an hour we’d still not found him so gave up and found some one else. He was a stout man, looking every inch like an Asian Forest Whittaker from The Last King of Scotland. He was like a raging storm bottled up in a man. Following him to a derelict warehouse somewhere on the dodgy side of the docks, he said he could take Dot across the pond for 1million RP. About sixty quid. Here that’s a lot, but I was desperate. I agreed, handed over Dot, the money, and then left with no receipt. “Not necessary,” he assured me.

Later that week, with Dot already on her way to Malaysia and me two days over my visa, I caught the passenger ferry, paid Indonesian Government PLC $30 for the extra days and kept my fingers crossed that Dot would be waiting for me when I got there. That she was, but I’d been conned. The guy in Medan was only an agent and the fee I’d paid him was just to line his own back pocket. On the Malaysian side I was asked to pay the ‘real’ fee, another million RP. I was fuming, livid, steaming, but what do you do? They’ve got your balls in their grip. The man laughed when I complained. I nearly shot him with rage.

But the next day I was calm. We’d made it.

STAGE THREE – Malaysia and Thailand

Truth be told I hated Indonesia as I came across it. I hated the roads for being terrible, the people for their trickery, the food for containing penis, the history for all the blood, the hotels for their dirty sheets and for the men in the streets who offered me their girlfriends for sex. In the 30 days I spent there I hated most things about the place.

And yet now, wandering around a typically calm Malaysian street, I missed the turbulence of that other place. It had a buzz, an energy, a cheekiness that this new land called Malaysia just doesn’t have. Sure, the place is nice and the streets are so neat and pretty, but where are the hooligans and clowns, where are the people that bring life to this brick and mortar? Did Indonesia steal them all?

I sensed the Malaysians, in being a former British colony, had clearly adopted our sullen way of life. They were hard-working no doubt, but they would seldom smile or make a fuss of you because they’d got other things to do; like working, which not all Indonesians seamed to do.

But I missed the men sat taunting you with ‘hey mister’ and ’where do you go?’ I missed too the bizarre conversations conducted in sign language with people about what you were saying didn’t have a clue. I missed having permanently to be alert and watchful. I missed the chaos, the buzz, the soul. Most of all, I missed the sense of adventure felt when crossing the place.

But on this trip I must look forward, not back. And what better remedy to this than finding myself in a dorm with a fabulous selection of beautiful travelling girls. This made Dot jealous and so the ticking I mentioned in the last report got worse. I asked around for a good mechanic and was guided by the local baker to a tiny workshop down a dark backstreet. The owner in his sixties had worked on Honda’s all his life. He looked at Dot and said he’d never seen such a thing. ‘From Sydney?’ he gasped, I think he was impressed. Then he whipped out his feeler gauge and spanners and made Dorothy sing as sweet as I ever did hear her.

He did other bits and bobs and for all that wouldn’t take a penny. I longed for the same deal from the man he said could fix my bent pannier rack after I hit those buses, but sadly not. He charged me, just a tenner, for a chop and a re-weld and a bag of ice-coffee while I waited. You can’t grumble.

The next day, Dot electric, I rode out of town, heading inland to a place where I was told they grow the most amazing tea. On the way up I stopped for a McDonalds. Fries and a burger, it tasted so good after all the Indonesian culinary muck I’d grown used to. From there it was up, up and away in to the mountains, climbing higher and higher, traffic in the sky, til we reached the point at which miracles grow.

Tea, fields of it, but strewth man, someone needs to teach these folk how to make it. Bag, boiling water, leave to mash, squeeze bag, remove, sugar, milk. Simple. Now Malaysia, you try it.

But for all this English whinging it was lovely to be out of the valleys and high up here where the air was bliss. Cool, crisp, fresh, requiring a cuddle at night and a blanket in the morning. I only intended staying a day, but met a gang of guys and gals and stayed for a week.

Everyday we’d wander through town, have a curry in the same Indian restaurant then walk home with a bag of marshmallows to toast on the hostel’s log fire. We’d sit up late talking, me at last peaceful now that the charge through Australia and Indonesia had come to an end.

After the Highlands I thought about many directions. North to some islands to further relax, south to Kuala Lumpar, or east to Singapore. But in the end it was the call of an old flame landing in Bangkok that drew me there. It’s an incredibly long story, one that would bore you and me to tears, but an important one, because if I hadn’t have met this stunning woman one fateful night at speed-dating in Sydney I wouldn’t be here now, on this bike, doing this, talking to you now. No, I would have flown back from Australia after my one year away and got on with my life oblivious to the many wondrous things people are prepared to do for love.

Like realising you’ve done the wrong thing, quitting jobs on a whim and arriving on that persons door-step having flown from the other side of the world to put things right. When I met her everything changed. Her presence in my life for the better in every single sense, the same, sadly, I don’t feel can be said about mine in hers. And that really hurts to say.

At midday, having said goodbye to the gang, I left Cameron Highlands for the border. Four hours later, 150 kilometres south of it, I got a puncture luckily at a service station. I mended that with a crowd of gormless onlookers and inflated the tyre. Ten minutes later, having balanced Dot on a rock, I stood proud, then watched it go flat again. I began ferociously on the second repair, this time fitting the cheap spare tyre from East Timor as well as a another fresh tube. This time it worked. Total air retention.

With all this oil and spanner action I was considering staying in Malaysia the night and crossing to Thailand in the morning, then some local businessman approached to tell me I must stay in his town, at some expensive hotel he knew. I might have listened had he not insisted how terrible East Timor was. I asked ‘have you been?’ He shook his head. ‘Then my friend, how could you possibly know.’

I was that pissed off by this smug idiot that I made mad haste in the driving rain to the border just to spite him. I arrived at 10pm, was over by half past and cruising into the first major Thai town, Hat Yai, just before midnight.

Instantly I realised this wasn’t such a wise move. Hat Yai is a brothel town, a seedy city, servicing the needs of truckers and other sinister men working the border. More than that it was the place of a recent terrorist explosion killing dozens. I’d not realised but the lower tip of Thailand is still in the grip of a religious war we never hear of in the West. Tired and watchful, I found a cheap hotel. Dirty and dingy, it was a grim hole like the city itself. I walked out under a full moon. It was midnight. I stopped at a stall for some food. Fried rice, it was nice. Fuck it, I’ll ride on.

An English owner of a corner shop drew me a map and I shot off north in the direction of Krabi, 350 kilometres away. There in time for breakfast, I reasoned as I squinted to see in Dot’s dim candle light. Lorries, zoooom, cars, zoooom, other motorbikes, zoooom. Everything else on the road blatting past as I waded slowly through the inky darkness. Just keep riding I said to myself, not safe to stop around these parts and camp. But in the end it had to be, at 3am tiredness savaged my eyes and twice I had to pull over and sleep on a bus bench. At 11am, almost 24 hours since leaving the tea town in the sky, I made it, bowling in to a cheap hotel in Krabi and collapsing on my bed. I was pooped.

In Krabi I stayed for a few days, breaking it up with a race back to the border for insurance I forgot to get, and a day-trip to Phucket where I slept on the beach with my hammer in hand to protect me against the frisky prowling lady-boys I’d been warned about. In the morning I woke with the realisation that while a sunny place, Phucket is also a sad one. Probably once beautiful and decent, this peninsular now attracts only the low-life and scum, local and foreign, both here to prey on each other.

The local wants the foreign man’s money, the foreigner wants the local man’s women. And you see them, in neon bars every night, granddad having his back rubbed by a girl as young as his granddaughter who is then taken home on the back of a rented scooter for a night of unsatisfactory sex. I shouldn’t judge, maybe that’ll be me in thirty years taking girls home on the back of Dot. I just hope not.

After a few more days it was time to leave, face my destiny; my girl had landed, it was make or break. When I turned up at the airport with Dot and a spare helmet she was not best pleased. Not after a long flight from Sydney. It meant Dot had to be abandoned at the airport while we took a taxi in to the city to see if Bangkok really was burning as the media had said. It was the time of the political protests and I‘d seen if for myself. Thousands of people, mobilised but benign, offering strangers a vodka and a smile the times I’d walked through. The problem only happened at the protest’s end when a few morons flamed a bus and gave the media their fabulously skewed story. What you didn’t see were the streets of people celebrating Thai New Year just a few blocks away. It gives me hope for what I have to face in Pakistan.

Thankfully that day is still is many moons away, with a flight over Burma to arrange and the crossing of India before we’re anywhere near that time and place. Now though, I’m on holiday with my gal. Newly convinced of Dot’s credentials, we ride two up to an island south east of Bangkok called Koh Chang. It was beautiful with us staying in a little bungalow right by the beach. A romantic time, a tough time. With all the same issues we’ve always had and now with new ones to boot. A relationship, sustained on a trip like this; it was never going to be easy but try, try, try. That’s the moto of this trip.

To give it everything, do everything you can to get what you want and never once let go. Trying; it’s such a beautifully simple concept without any confusion as to what is meant. And we’re all doing it, even if all you’re trying to do is nothing. And what I was trying to do right now was make both these terrifically important things in my life work right now. My trip, and my relationship. But I failed. Trying wasn’t enough. It needed something else, like commitment guaranteed at the other end of this long uncertain journey. I just couldn’t give it and feel a weaker man for that.

But this all has got me thinking these last few weeks. In life we have so many things to think about at any one time. Jobs, houses, girlfriends; we’re stretched in so many directions with each demanding of so much time and dedication leaving us not knowing quite how to give it. I’m useless at it. My mind gets muddled and I never know which problem to tackle first. It means none get solved, allowing the cycle to continue until I’m squat down on all fours, tormenting myself, naked, feeling very much that any minute my dumb head will explode.

Here, on this trip, I don’t have any of that. My plate is beautifully clean. Just a big slab of steak that I can slice with knife until it’s all in my belly. No garnish or side order to distract me. Just the adventure, the destination, the meat. No veg. And I love that. A single goal with everything I do serving the best interests of achieving my dream; England, on Dot. I never ask myself am I doing the right thing, going in the right direction, making the right decisions. I just ride. And ride. And ride. And ride.

Am I running away from it all? Yes, I suppose I am, from the problems and dilemmas that all of us face in life. But what a way to run, on the back of a beautiful machine called Dorothy with no other goal but west, in search of the setting sun. Only now we ride alone and with sadder faces. But still very much with hope in our hearts.

Next stop, Nepal.

STAGE FOUR – Nepal, India, Pakistan

If every story has a beginning and an end then me Dorothy are very much in the middle. We’ve set forth and ventured, flew our Australian nest and ridden like rampaging drifters through the badlands of East Timor, Indonesia and into the kinder, gentler bosom of Malaysia and Thailand. The first leg then is over, leaving Dorothy with an extra 15,000 kilometers on her clock and me with just a little more faith that one day we might just make it to England..

Now the next step, the bit in the middle; Pakistan, India and Nepal. Of course that’s not in the right order because we’re riding the other way, but it s the sequence, as I sit reminiscing now, that my preference remembers them. Pakistan was a blast, a real burst balloon of surprise as everything I thought I knew about the country was blown immediately to pieces and replaced by something much better. India was more predictable, being largely the place I expected and yet, in the same palm, more bonkers than I could possibly have imagined. That leaves just Nepal, a place that now barely registers as I spent so much of it on the bog.

You may or not remember but to get there from Thailand we had to fly. It’s Burma you see, they just won’t let you through. And so with me slumped in economy and Dot boxed in the hold we left Bangkok on a plane bound for Kathmandu. The sky that night was thunder. A menacing blue-black abyss, struck electric by lightening that gave me and my red lady the willies. I sat marveling at it all. Just thinking. Wondering. Who’s really in charge of all this. The lightening, the plane, the clouds, the ground, why does it all work and how does a metal tube made by a man named Boeing still stay in the sky? This planet of ours really baffles me. And for once, up in this electric sky, I realised that.

Then we landed, now in Kathmandu. It’s here that trekking groups prepare for Everest and local kids sniff glue. On the corner they’d stand fluttering like blades of grass in a breeze; stoned, high and red-eyed, trying to sell stuff to send you off the same way. It might just be me but Kathmandu – Nepal in general – just never seamed settled, the people always on edge, just waiting for another protest or riot in the street after the Maoists recently put on the government shoe. It’s certainly not how I imagined it. Of course the mountains were spectacular, the prices cheap, but the everyday people I kinda felt sorry for. They deserve more peace in their politics and fuel in their petrol pumps. I can’t see them getting either of it for a while.

Me though, I made friends with a few French folk and a Spaniard who flamed my interest in hiking and said wouldn’t it be cool to plod the Himalayas. I said yes and off we went, the four of us to the source of a meandering 14 day walk that would take us around a mountain the map calls Annapurna. How marvelous I thought. A new adventure, one giving Dorothy a well earned break and chance for me to use muscles other than the one in my right wrist. It sounded so easy, just a stroll.

But after two days I was completely buggered, leaving a note and an empty bed the next morning to say ‘sorry guys, I‘ve headed back.’ Surrendering; in the company of the French, I‘ll never live it down. But I realised in those two days that my challenge wasn‘t to climb a hill or ruin a perfectly good pair of Converse trainers in the process. No, it was to ride Dorothy home, across the other half of the world. I had no energy nor desire to embark on challenges secondary to that. The mountain could wait for another time. My place was back on the bike, heading west.

Only we didn’t get very far. Diarrohea in this part of the world is a common as a cold and for the next week it kept my bottom glued to the hotel loo. Fortunately it was one where you could sit not squat so at least my legs were allowed a full recovery and with nothing else to do I sat and read a book; Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, a document I liked very much until the bit about the author’s bike just being just an assembly of metal and bolts. I said this cannot be. My Dorothy is alive, like you and I. She has a soul, a mood, a manner. To compare her to a can opener is to ignore her very essence, to forget what it is that she’s achieving on this global adventure. When we met she was retired remember, her life’s work already completed. Now look at her; 3,000 metres up a mountain on an adventure around the world and still going strong. That, I believe, is where the author of this book got it wrong. Bike’s do breathe.

But in India she very nearly stopped.

If I’m honest, until now the trip had all been rather easy. Australia was a real blast with the dynamite of excitement propelling us all the way to Darwin with plenty of gun powder left to spare. Indonesia was a harder slog but also, with hindsight, an easy cruise. Malaysia and Thailand, with their super-highways and welcome arms, were an even easier breeze. But heading south, to India was a whole different chunk of cheese. I’d heard the warnings about suicidal traffic and all the filth and squalor but nothing, not a bean of information, can prepare you for that first time you ooze through a city trying not to kill or be killed. People, goats, donkeys, bikes and monster trucks… everywhere, not an inch uncovered. And then there’s the heat.

As I arrived in the holy city of Varanasi the mercury was already boiling at 46. And that, to someone leaving all their fluids in a Nepalese toilet bowl, wasn’t much fun. Nor was the hassle from people trying to sell you all sorts of things. Postcards, tea, drugs, clothes… wood to help the bodies burn down by the river, boat cruises along it to watch the face of the deceased melt more closely. Everything here was for sale, 24 hours a day, seven sodding days of the week. I had a massage from one man who said he‘d do it for 20 rupees. When he finished he demanded 250. I said ‘fuck you’ and flicked him the 20. I’m not normally like that, but it was these tricks and treachery that would make my blood boil from the day I arrived to the day I left almost two months later.

I never intended on staying that long, just a few weeks to pick up visas then on through Pakistan, Iran and into Turkey. That’s when the Iranian post-election riots kicked off and everything changed. Somehow the blame for it all was pointed at Britain, with the Iranian embassy in Delhi confirming our worst fears; ‘There will be no visa for Americans, Canadians, Australians or… British,’ commanded the man at the desk. The Americans and British were refused for political reasons, the Canadians for nothing other than being America’s neighbour, while the Australians, including Dot, were temporarily excluded for beating Indian students up in Melbourne. Apparently.

Either way it meant we were stuck. The only slim chance we had to pass through Iran now was to enter Pakistan and give it one last shot at the Iranian embassy in Islamabad. They may have had a different view to their colleagues in Delhi and wave us both through, but it was huge gamble. If they’d said no, me and Dorothy would have been stuck in Pakistan, no visa to carry on nor any choice but to go back. And with the Taliban still taking ground in the north and bombs going off in the south, Pakistan really wasn’t the place to linger.

For a few days I hung around Delhi eating KFC soft-serve cones while deciding what to do. There was no other option; we had to come up with plan Two.

Posting my predicament online came up with all sorts of alternatives, some sane some stupid. Some recommended I get a boat from Pakistan all the way to Egypt, others suggested we fly from Delhi to either Turkey to the west or Kyrgyzstan to the north and carry on from there. Another popular suggestion was to ride the Karakorum Highway from Pakistan into China, but with expensive guides and paperwork needed to take Dorothy that way it was a difficult choice to justify. One man had a solution to this. He said I should try and smuggle Dorothy over the border by hiring the Han Solo I’d find drinking down the Indian arm of Mos Isley. He didn’t say if I should also hire his Chewbacca, but hell, why not?

It sounded quite romantic, me and Dorothy crawling barb-wired borders below the strafe of Chinese search lights, but to do that would take bollocks far bigger than mine, and with little time to fertilise them, I bit the bullet, made a phonecall home and borrowed the $2,200 I’d been quoted for a seven day guided trip though China. I know that’s a fat stash of cash and yes, flying to Turkey or sailing to Egypt would have been cheaper, but this is an overland trip, this is Sydney to England by moped, and while over Burma we didn’t have a choice, now we do. And if a Chinese guide through to Central Asia is the only way of keeping Dorothy’s wheels on the ground then so be it. Either way, we now had Plan Two.

Waiting for the paperwork to come through I thought it wise to altitude test Dorothy along the Menali to Leh highway; the second highest paved road in the world at 5,235metres. Motorcycles suffer at high altitude, just like humans, you see, and with us having to cross equally high Himalayan peaks in Pakistan I thought no way in the world do I want to be discovering Dorothys vertigo as a Taliban truck fires bullets at my back.

Rocks, sand, dirt, cliffs, waterfalls and streams, the battered road to Leh had it all. To cross most of it I had no choice but to wring Dot’s neck in first gear at 20km/h. Sometimes, when it was really steep, she just collapsed and died in my arms. A couple of minutes later I’d fire her back up and put her through it all again. At one point I even thought about turning back until a man on an Enfield called me gay.

I just wish I’d been wearing socks. I suppose it’s obvious really, but at this altitude the weather is bitter evil, with snow along the road and icy waterfalls you have no choice but to wade through. Of course Converse aren’t the shoe of choice for such an adventure and so a puncture at 5pm somewhere around 5,000metres made me swiftly realise that for Pakistan I need to be better prepared. After considering tenting in an abandoned roofless shed without any sleeping bags, me and my temporary German riding buddy Sascha finally fitted a new tube and we were on our way, rolling in to a campsite well into darkness. It was my lesson learnt; pack socks next time. And a sleeping bag just in case.

Looking back it’s fair to say I didn’t always like India. At times in fact I hated it. Yet I have to balance that with the realisation that here is a country with barely any government control or coordination. In many senses it’s a shambles; the roads, the social welfare, the sanitation. And yet, even without these pillars of society we take for granted in the west, the place does not fall apart. In fact it shows just how successfully people can live when they’re left alone by the state. So I will try and leave India with positive memories, and to do that I have to ignore the man I saw drive over a dog’s leg without a blink and think more about the ten year old boy, already speaking five languages and more intelligent than I, who tried to sell me postcards in Varanasi. That boy deserves better, from his community and from his government. One day me and Dorothy hopes he gets it.

But for now, we have a date with Pakistan.

Rolling up to the border I really wished I was religious, at least then I’d have someone to say a little prayer to; someone on my shoulder to stop me feeling so exposed. Instead it was just me and Dorothy, alone, with only our daft talk of angels to keep us on track. I don‘t mind confessing that we were scared. I‘d sent my internet login codes to a friend just in case we didn‘t make it, I‘d wrote a rather apocalyptic group email to everyone else and was genuinely fearing that this was mine and Dot‘s last ride, especially given the Frenchman yet to reappear having been kidnapped here last month.

But perception, it’s a dangerous thing, because with my own eyes I realised Pakistan is a great place. I arrived safely in Lahore with the help of several road-side spectators who guided me the right way having first warmed my belly with a nice cup of tea. One man even combed my hair while I drank. But of course Pakistani hospitality isn’t all like that, with some villages, especially in the north, quite open in their loathing of outsiders. One man almost smashed the Coke bottle through his own counter in an attempt to demonstrate just how unwelcome I was in his shop. But you can deal with that because at least you know where you stand. No one’s pretending. And in that sense there’s a real integrity about the place. A spade’s a spade, not whatever the tourist wants to call it so long as he’s paying. After the mendacity of parts of India is was rather refreshing … even if I do think the Manali to Leh highway is a far more spectacular road than Pakistan’s KKH.

For me though Nepal, India and Pakistan were the countries that the trip really came alive. It was a hard slog, one with difficult decisions to be made and all sorts of scoundrels that stood in the way. But it also included the moment when we stood back and went ’holy fuck’, we’re really doing this, we’re really riding this show all the way to England. And that made me and Dorothy proud. For while we still have many miles to journey, we also have many more to look back on and say what a blast, what a ball. We set off from Sydney with nothing; no plan, no clue, no idea, and here we are, having stitched enough of our random rags together to somehow make it this far. I’d call it quite incredible, I think we’ve earned that right.

Next stop China. Hope to see you there.