The Map, as of yet

Thankfully, with a bit of swiping from the lovely folks at Lonely Planet, here's the map so far.

If you want to add your name to the email list, you'll get an email when I update. I promise on Stan Lee's grave that I won't give your email out. Excelsior!

Yes, as much as I poke fun of my "heavy drinking", this has been a mostly, and quite sadly, alcohol free trip. I just can't afford to drink. My biggest expense is fuel, then oil as I change it every 1,000 miles, then way down on the list is food. Shipping my bike will be a lot. About $1,000 USD from Melbourne to Christchurch including fees, NZ registration and insurance. I think I'll run out of money in NZ and I'll live off credit cards while I find a job in Japan or Korea teaching English.

But at least I can Australia to the list of countries I've ridden drunk in. That makes two.

The toy run I went on in Port Hedland was basically a pub crawl. I wasn't drunk -- I was sticking to beer -- but the cut-off in OZ is .05% which gets you a warning in the US, I think. I had enough VBs though to switch back to looking right, not left, when leaving a parking lot. I didn't see the car that almost hit me, but 3 other guys on motorcycles said they thought I was going to be hit for sure. Then Porky, or maybe it was Chook, bought me another beer. Porky was very good to me out in the Pilbarra.

My fault. I should've only been drinking Everclear or Bacardi 151 so I would've been invincible again. No, no, I'm kidding -- it wasn't a drunken biker thing.

Okay, here's the map. The parts in red are the unpaved roads. About 80k (50 miles) around Cooktown and a bit more going from Esperance to the Nullabor (Latin for no trees, land of a 90 mile straight road). That last section was the part that got my adrenaline flowing, but I'll wait until I catch up on posts for that story.

I never thought I'd say something like, "I'm just glad to be alive and to celebrate life" either. And I suppose a head wacking ago, I wouldn't have. No wait, I was blowing that off again until I had the seizure from the 4 hemotomas from the noggin' wackin'. I'm a slow learner and it took several "well, that should've killed me" experiences until I figured you really need to get off your ass instead of planning on getting off your ass. I'd always wanted to see the world but stuff that I want to do, I shut up about. I feel I'll jinx it if I talk about it. Until I read someone's story about how it was a good idea, when you want to go round the world, to tell people about it. That way it makes it way harder to back out of it. So I did, and I'm making the attempt.

I've got friends with cancer. A friend who had his nuts chopped off from cancer. A friend's dad who's dying of a brain tumor. I've met people with cancer on this trip on the East and West Coasts. A bald architect's wife who I hope is doing okay. I stayed Christmas at a house where the mom of 5 kids died of cancer -- which isn't the traditional Aussie way of celebrating Easter. Their grandmother is bald from the chemo/radiation treatment that she's going through. I've been trying to write in my head a long "People Who Died" post but it's proven to be a pain in the ass. Or in Australia, a bloody pain in the fuckin' ass. Or in England, a sticky wicket.

Anyway, I've mostly stuck to the road that circles Australia. I've read that they finished paving it all right before the Sydney Olympics. Some parts are 4 lanes in both directions, some parts are 1 single lane that the traffic shares.

(this entry is closed for commenting)

Posted by DaveSmith at January 6, 2005 02:03 AM