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Post-script to the Final Ride: A Long Way 'Home', and Settling into Pepper-Packin'

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  Hello, Sorry for the delay, the long-suffering keyboard has finally give up the ghost... I am typing with an onscreen one.  The word 'onscreen' just then took approx 1 minute to write. Anyway, this is the post-final-ride final ride.  The one that takes us up to where we will be living and working for the next 6 months.  We left Phil and Karolina after a week in Surfers Paradise, with the tanned surf boys running about barefoot and the skimpily clad promoter-girls in bikinis and gold platforms.   We meandered along an alternative route back up north to Ayr on some very good dirt tracks.     They were places where even the 8-year olds wore cowboy hats, where the service station women stop just short of actually growling at you, and where homesteads were called things like 'Why Not'.  (As far as I was concerned there were some very good answers to that. They included '1. snakes', '2. wretched desert', '3. total lack of drink...
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The Final Ride: Outback Worries and Conspiring Elves

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On a rainy, rainy day I watched a leather-skinned old Aussie fellow hitch his denim shorts back up over his buttocks. He was stumbling about in an enormous cowboy hat outside his trailer. We were at the Darwin BP garage. It was starting to rain. It didn’t matter. Spirits were undrenchable.  We had manoeuvred our lazy bums back onto the bike and were on our way again. We sped through the storm, got as soaked as an Australian on ANZAC day, and left the rain clouds behind. The rocks turned red again, the sky turned blue, and the gearbox seal started leaking oil. At Adelaide River the oil left a worrying slick. We rode on. At Pine Creek we found some folks. They told us the gearbox seal was leaking oil. We smiled serenely, and rode on. At Larrimah an Italian in a pink shirt suggested it was a problem with the chain. We muttered. And rode on. Then we found the Pink Panther. The Pink Panther is a strange old ramshackle trailer park motel, complete with a miniature croc...
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Pimps, prostitutes,orangutans and volcanoes

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After the surreal Kuala Lumpur experience, we discovered our original plan was somewhat bereft of reality.  As in, it wasn’t going to happen. We had decided to head further south to hop across to Sumatra at Melaka.  We hadn’t, however, taken into account that there was in fact no way of getting the bike there.   This meant we were in for a longish trek north again, back the way we’d come, to cross from Penang to Medan, northern Sumatra.    An uneventful motorway day saw us rock up in Georgetown, Penang, and hoof it to the ferry office to ask about tickets the next day.  They gaped at us when they saw the bike, and once again, we wished we had planned ahead slightly.  There is no car ferry.  There are smelly little passenger ferries, and for transportation, there are ‘onion boats’.   We scarpered, and, once ensconced in a rip-off hotel room that smelt of sewers, wandered around the backstreets, peeking into the ancient Chinese shop ho...
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