Just a quick crossing before getting started
….Glen can’t help himself.
Breeza Plains towards Hann and Morehead Rivers are eerie
…dead-flat, bare…only some lonely termite-hills stick out.
By now, we ride where ever we find some smoother stuff….the oncoming lane, trenches on either side, sometimes even on top of the berms at the extreme outer edges
. Rather dodge the rocks and sticks than thumping through the pulverising corrugations.
Occasionally one of those sticks shows some life….and Glen nails a snake, both of them fleeing in different directions.
Another local…and not really in a hurry
Time for a break… and some of those, by now, bruised-black carrots that are bouncing around one of the launcher-tubes.
Could be Morehead River, not sure….who cares; it’s a pretty place with good camp-sites nearby.
Hide ‘n Seek…
Back on the road and near Low Lake
disaster strikes:
FNFAST IS FNDEAD !!!!!!
Died as is did before…. but this time the engine doesn’t turn over, the kicker’s stuck solid… trying to rock the bike back/ forth in gear just shows a locked-up rear wheel scraping a groove into the dust…
….and over 40km to go to Musgrave, the next available port-of-call.
43k’s of badly corrugated crap, deep sand, bulldust-holes, ruts, dry river-crossings and all sorts of stuff…SHIT!!
Even if all would be fine it’d be a 1.5hr ride for us…
Ever towed a bike with a bike?
A fully loaded bike with another fully loaded bike?
A fully loaded dinky toy towed by another jam-packed 110cc/ 7.5hp dinky-toy with an auto-gearbox?
In terrain like that?
2 bikes strung together with a piece of 3/8 (9mm) washing line?
For 40k’s ++ ?
Lemme tell ya….you don’t just SHIT yourself every inch of the way…you just DISSOLVE!!
Glen was even worse off
, bobbing around like a cork on a string, trying to follow the front track while dodging corrugations, holding onto the rope wrapped around the handlebar and clamped down with his right hand on the twist grip so he could hopefully let go when things went totally out of control.
After 38k’s I was done for…sweating like a pig, Plain Jane was close to seizing up under the strain, clutch slipping badly as the oil was boiling, Glen couldn’t hang onto the rope any longer and had somewhat shrunk to half his size with plain fear and horror…
A longish break sucking the hydra-packs into a crinkled vacuum, then Rohan took over
Along the way…
Finally Musgrave Roadhouse peeled itself out of the dust and first things first:
Then onto
FNDEAD…..FNTERMINAL!!
The end to Glen’s Cape-Dreams after only 4 days on the road…stranded at Musgrave.
The isolators on the fence posts are from the old Telegraph line…solar panels to the right….products of 2 different centuries of technology
Just HAD to leave a sticker here
…
Stunningly we watch as a farmer from near Leongatha/ Victoria pull up at the pumps…on an old Trumpy Trident 900, bald tyres and all.
Turns out, he hasn’t even got a tyre-patch kit on him and NO clue of how to fix anything on the bike if necessary, and that up here?
Jeezaz, some folks are game….
Time to get the sweat and stench of fear off us…
…before it’s back to the fridge of the roadhouse next door for some bouncing of ideas…and bouncing of coldies, of course!
At least we’re near telephones and supplies, Glen organizes the transport of FNDEAD via the RACQ Gold Membership, faxes fly back and forth between some anonymous emergency call centre and the small shop at Musgrave.
If the RACQ had any brains at all and look past their “procedures”, they’d have made Glen an offer to buy the bike on the spot, then pay the Musgrave operators $100 to take it to the tip on the next run….rather than paying a tow-truck from Coen (110k’s of dirt to the north) to pick up the bike to transport the next 450km to Cairns, then pay “Bikes Only” to transport the wreck to Brisbane, all up easily 3 times the value of the thing…
Yet another BIG THANK YOU goes to the crew at Musgrave, fantastic folks !!
With transport of the bike back to Brisbane organised, we keep mulling over possible options…
And in the end, there just might be
a shimmer of hope to get things back onto the rails again,
if…if…if…
The mail-plane comes once a week, mostly for a fly-over and drop of mail, and that day’s
TOMORROW!!
If Glen could get a seat on the plane back to Cairns… he could rustle Goodie’s bike, the RR-V6, out of it’s slumber at the storage place, get her afloat with fresh oil and run north as hard as possible on the main road, trying to catch up.
Public phones in some places and the ‘track-telegraph’ would get us into contact somehow…the way things work, and work well, up here...
More calls to the small airline operating the mail-plane…answering machines only.
Heath at the freight-storage is chirpy as usual and opens the warehouse at 5.00 anyway …it now all hinges on getting into contact with the plane operators… which won’t be before tomorrow morning….HOPEFULLY!!
Some Musgrave MONSTER-BURGERS, a few more stubbies… the light fades quickly behind the scrawny cows grazing on the runway….