travellingbennetts

This is the travel blog of Duncan & Cindy Bennett to keep family, friends and interested others up to date on our adventures!  Thanks for reading.

Often motorcycle blogs have a good “About” section, which has information on the authors and their background, their motorcycle(s), and general stuff to let readers know that even though they may appear as minor deities to readers of their posts, they are in fact very human.

Looking for nearly the first time ever at our “About” page above (which actually gets a large number of disappointed views, as measured by zero comments), I noticed that it consists of 25 words and an ampersand, with a rather distant and unflattering photo of Cindy and I standing in front of the spectacular Treasury at Petra in Jordan in 2013. If we were applying for deification, I doubt this would get us through to a first round interview with a low level Angelic functionary. I guess the original blog intent was to post all our travels as this photo comes from a bicycling holiday, on this one we learned the hard way that when you are riding along the Dead Sea literally everywhere in the world is uphill. Having thus discovered the value of attaching a motor to the bicycle, almost all of our holidays since have involved this refined form of transport, and the blog has exclusively become about motorcycling adventures. Admittedly some people may want to read all about an inattentive concierge issue on a Captain’s Choice private jet tour along the Silk Road, but for some reason motorcycling adventures are generally more interesting, certainly to write and hopefully to read.

So; About. Allow me to retreat two generations – this must be the source of the ADVM sequence in the DNA, and an example of truly serious adventure motorcycling. The following photo is of my mother’s father a.k.a. my grandfather, circa 1925, age 19, riding what I secretly hoped was a Triumph but think is a BSA around France before he emigrated as a ₤10 Pom from Salisbury to southern NSW in Australia at age 21.

Charge forward a whole generation, and my mother Barbara was clearly a carrier of the ADVM strand while growing up on a rice, wheat, cattle, and oranges farm just outside Leeton NSW. Her cousin Donald had an AJS, and what nurturing adult wouldn’t allow a pre-teen girl unfettered access to ride it? Ride it Barb did, at least until she stalled it turning around out on the main road and had to push it about a kilometre back up the driveway.

My sisters and I didn’t have a two-wheeled upbringing, it was on a Honda three-wheeler with those balloon tyres – ideal for riding over muddy paddocks and for a total lack of control in virtually all circumstances, even stopped on a pile of bubble wrap. Probably why they have disappeared completely and are only remembered by retired emergency ward nurses. I will never forget my father riding up a rice paddy wall and going gently over backward and rolling the 150kg trike to the side to stop it landing on him, it somehow looked normal and worthy of a good laugh.

Cindy did have a two wheeled upbringing on the family farm in south east Queensland, near Eumundi. Her father Les was a Sapper based in Darwin in WW2, was there during the Japanese bombings in February 1942, and had ridden a motorcycle from Darwin to Katherine over what must have been fairly adventurous roads. Farm bikes back at home were de rigour, as were horses, cars, utes, bicycles and ride-on lawnmowers. Cindy’s first true adventure motorcycling experience was at age 11 or 12, wearing just an orange crocheted bikini and riding a 50cc minibike over a jump, she applied front brake injudiciously, came off, and slid front first across the gravel. All quickly healed up after liberal application of metho (methylated spirits) by her mother, but it makes her broken leg in Ethiopia in 2017 seem pedestrian as she doesn’t have any scars from that. A series of motorbikes followed, including a 175cc Yamaha, but she preferred riding a friend’s Ag bike which was more adventure motorcycle-like, easier to kick-start, and less prone to flight.

The Northern Territory was where things started to get serious for me. Work at the Warrego Mine in 1990 as the Mill Foreman included a Honda CT200 Ag bike, ideal for cruising around the site and it even had a rack at the front to hold the hard hat when it was parked out the front of the Warrego Sports and Amenities Club. We had to get our NT learner’s permit before we could ride (L plate entirely optional – everyone knew who I was), and the Mill Superintendent committed to developing our “off-road” skills, including making us ride over a 10” poly pipe without taking our feet off the pegs and then slowing and turning before plunging over the side of the tailings dam wall. A geologist friend had a Honda XR350R which ran inconveniently on super petrol, but he said it was mine to use when he was on holidays. My first true “adventure motorcycling” experience was riding out into the desert on a warm day with no water, and about 10km out of town running over a length of loose fencing wire which was picked up in the knobby rear tyre and wrapped tight around the axle on both sides of the wheel, causing an epic unexpected lock-up and skid and nearly cutting through the tyre. The tiny little stock tool kit on Honda XR’s came to the fore that day, I managed to unwind the wire and return to Warrego parched and a lot wiser – to this day I still carry lots of tools.

Our collective official motorcycle licencing is worth a mention, my test in 1990 involved riding my work bike 100m up the road and over a cattle grid, doing a U-turn, and riding back. This only gave me a 250cc or less licence, but when we got to Tasmania in 2001 the girl in the Licencing Centre got confused and just issued me with an unrestricted licence. Cindy did her licence test at Mt Isa in Queensland on a 1987 Honda CBR1000F sports bike, the test involved riding as fast as possible out toward Cloncurry on the highway, going over a cattle grid to demonstrate the same mysterious skill as per the Northern Territory, doing a U-turn, and riding back. Unfortunately, she dropped the bike while doing the U-turn. Fortunately, her police officer assessor laughed, picked the bike up for her and she rode back to the police station where he wrote out her unrestricted licence – Queensland didn’t have 250cc restricted licences back then.

With kids on board there was an abeyance in adventure motorcycling for a few years until we moved to Norseman, Western Australia. Norseman was (and still is) a small town on the edge of the Nullarbor plain, and just over our back fence was an endless wilderness extending for thousands of kilometres, perfect for adventure motorcycling. I started seriously looking for a motorcycle, including a memorable test ride of a Suzuki dirt bike that was so tall that I could not touch the ground and had to kick start it while it was on the side stand, and kick the stand up as I rode off and kick it down again when I stopped. A lot of kicking and room for error. One day while driving through Kalgoorlie/Boulder on a weekend shopping trip, we spotted a 1989 Honda XR250R for sale out the front of a business – the last of the rear drum brake model XRs. Inside, we met the bloke who owned it and the deal was done, I owned my first motorcycle.

There was a motorcycle adventure magazine called Sidetrack which started about the same time I bought the XR, this became my bible with inspirational stories on crazy stuff like riding a postie bike along the rail track from Adelaide to Perth, and had ads for important things like large fuel tanks which I soon purchased to get the range of the XR up to over 300km. A large number of 1:25000 maps were purchased covering most of the area around Norseman, heaps of practice was had doing bike maintenance, a “cover all bases” toolkit was assembled, lots of fun was had hooning around the Norseman motocross track, and on the weekends and odd day off I would go exploring. Looking for fresh water sources in an area of huge salt lakes and red dirt was the normal plan, while avoiding camels particularly during the mating season when the males become very aggressive. Generally the riding was easy particularly on such a light bike, but I learned that even 125kg is very heavy when it has broken through the crust of a salt lake. This was a traumatising experience and it took a huge effort to recover the bike with the help of a friend and led to the development of my only Adventure Riding Rule: Never Ride on Salt Lakes. Luckily the magnesium alloy drum brake housing protected the rest of the bike, over two nights lying in the hypersaline water it had nearly disappeared while everything else remained in perfect condition. After 4 years of riding fun in Norseman we moved to Townsville, and the adventure motorcycling stopped when the XR was sold, it would be 15 years before motorcycling re-surfaced in Brisbane.

In 2013 Cindy’s sister Kim, my brother-in-law Mathew and our friend and neighbour Tim were all getting into riding for various reasons relating to their specific mid-life crisis circumstances, and Cindy suggested we needed to be part of the “pining for our youth” team. We decided road riding was the go because that was what be-gutted mid-life crisis riders do, and so signed up for a refresher on some Honda 250cc road bikes. With the trainer emphasising as we left the session that he unfortunately couldn’t stop us riding no matter how rubbish we were because we already had licences, we were ready to go. Cindy’s first action was to buy a Honda CB125E in white, a perfect unit to learn that motorcycles which can only go 80kmh off a cliff with a following gale-force wind are not that great to ride especially in traffic on the freeway. I was particularly taken with Kim’s and our neighbour Tim’s Honda VTR250’s; looked cool, light, handled well, and could go fast enough when required. When Tim decided to upgrade to a Triumph Street Triple, I took the VTR off his hands as Cindy’s next bike, only to find she’d sold the CB125E, ignored my gift, and gone out and bought a BMW G650GS. Now we were getting closer to becoming adventure motorcyclists, or at least Cindy was because I was left to commute and take the 250VTR on “weekend warrior” rides.

I headed even further away from adventure motorcycling when I once again followed neighbour Tim’s motorcycle path and bought a 2010 Triumph Street Triple in burnt orange in late 2013. It was a fabulous bike and still holds the record for the fastest I’ve ever ridden, reaching an instant and permanent licence cancelling speed of 190kmh, fortunately the circumstances were never publicly aired before a magistrate.

The genetically pre-ordained and therefore inevitable return to adventure motorcycling for me and Cindy was the result of deciding we needed to do an overseas tour, and Chile was selected with tour operator Compass Expeditions for January 2015. The motorcycle offered was the BMW F700GS, quite like Cindy’s but totally different to the Street Triple, and way heavier than the old XR250 in the ‘90’s. The description of the tour suggested we might be riding on some dirt roads, which caused significant fear of embarrassing failure, known by the psychology fraternity as boofheadophobia. Fortunately, Compass had a partnership with Off-Road Skills led by Dakar legend Simon Pavey, and just before the Chile trip they were running a course in central Victoria. Off we went, hiring suitable GS bikes in Melbourne and riding up to meet everyone else at the Mansfield venue. The course was a great introduction to the sport, but the fact that Cindy was the only finisher from three female starters (1 retired frightened, 1 badly hurt) also drove home that it was a very risky pursuit even if wearing more than just an orange crocheted bikini.

The nine days riding in Chile was a game changer, the ability to combine exposure to the elements and scenery we’d had on the bicycle riding tours with the speed to get past foul week old road kill quickly hooked us in. I was looking to change out the Street Triple, and a test ride of a 2015 Triumph Tiger 800 XCx was the final step into becoming a permanent adventure rider. When the purchase was made of “The Precious” in March 2015, it was not long before Cindy followed colour suit and we were riding down to Port Macquarie in NSW to pick up “Blue Betty”, a brand-new BMW 700GS.

The rest is history; we had found our way to having proper adventure motorcycles and our travels have so far taken us on long trips around the eastern side of Australia including Tasmania, and into far west Queensland, the length of Africa, and the USA and Canada including our fantastic Alaska trip in June 2019. And it isn’t over yet.