The Longest Friday

There’s always that chance for things to take a turn for the worse.  So many things can go wrong the minute you step out your comfort zone, if you really tally up all the things that can go “pear shaped” the minute you step beyond your doorstep,.. it’s amazing one can muster the courage even to get out of bed,..not to mention driving a vehicle or …heaven forbid.. pulling the throttle on a motorcycle.

Ironicly, that’s probably what lures some of us out of bed each morning…the novelty of  a new day and the unpredictable nature of what may lay ahead.

Imagine the cruel monotony of a world made predictable, a world with out risk or reward…bound to endless regularity.

If I knew for sure that I’d succeed in riding my motorcycle around the world..I’d probably have chosen a different endeavor.  It was the big “what if “ that attracted me to the Adventure touring….what if you crossed into Mexico..what it you continued south, what if you broke down, what if you crashed, what if you changed as a person returned a stranger, what if you got lost, what if you failed, what if you found a way to mitigate, adapt to or overcome these risks…and in the process learning and having the adventure/experience and education of a lifetime.  The motorcycle,…like the world,.. is unpredictable, risky and rewarding beyond measure.  Its the imperfect  mud flinging chariot to whisk you through a full-on adventure…a life worth getting out of bed for.

But I digress, …sooo there I was laying on my back in the sand and spinifex 294 kilometers from the nearest paved road.  I sat up and began to check myself out for injuries….then realized my bike was laid over on the side of the track… roaring away with the back wheel spinning in air….something must have jammed the throttle open as it crashed into the sand bank.   I launched myself for the bike and switched off the ignition. I was no longer concerned about myself,.. as the bike was my ticket out of the desert.

This was not my usual low speed dirt get off.  Judging by the air mileage points I’d accrued while flying from said bike to said spinifex bush,..I likely had come off at full speed and accrued more than just cosmetic damage on the bike.  As it was laying on a bit of a decline, I had to dig a slot out behind each wheel, so as I lifted the bike,…the wheels would slide in and assist in getting her vertical. I heaved her up and set her on the kick stand.

With the bike upright, I stepped back and had look at the culprit of this mess (I’ve admonished all responsibility).  It was a termite mound.

Those of you who’ve never seen these before,…and have had the good fortune not to crash into them..I’ll explain.  Although they look cool, they are a bikers nightmare….read the OZ forums on advrider.  I snagged a 14 inch(dia) mound with my pannier,..its like hitting a tree stump.  The termite mound material is akin to concrete.(.and has historicly been used as such for building purposes up until the early 1900s in Western Australia.)

I know these are threat to me as a biker,…and I was careful not to ride to close to the big ones….but I never saw this one coming.  The termite mound,…engaged in evil conspiracy with the spinifix,.. was perfectly disguised in the brush

…as I came flying down the track with my pannier dragging among the scrub on the side of the track…waaaak! I smacked hard into the mound with one pannier and it put me into the .08 second rodeo.

Hoping for the best I began to pat the bike down searching for signs of damage…panniers and rack took bit of a bending(aka modern art) but still completely functional-surprising given the impact(despite impact,..Locky’s panniers carried 42 liters of fuel and all equipment with out breaking)..front fender and instrument panel seemed askew…probably bent front frame piece…some cracked plastic..no big deal..i was just thinking I’d gotten away with out major issues when my hand traced across a wet patch under the shocks.   “Oh shit!”  With mounting concern I traced the ribbon of leaking oil to the region behind the oil cooler.

If the situation allows…its always nice to take a few minutes to freak out…you know,..just go a head and panic for a minute.  Things didn’t look good,..and I was in a potentially bad situation. But then after about two minutes I came to grip with the fact that I was on my own for this one and I’d have to lock down and sort out a way to either fix it and extract the broken bike from the desert,..or at the very least extract myself, lest I succumb to the heat and the flies and waste away to become nutrients for a massive spinifex bush.     There is always the SPOT beacon,..but you don’t press that unless you’re bitten by a Taipan while simultaneously being pulled into a billabong by a 10meter croc- things weren’t hadn’t reached that degree of suck yet.

Before I start pulling things apart and get’n to “fixing”, I took a minute to realize my situation and come up with a couple plans.  Although I was over 290 kilometers from Halls Creek,.. there was an aboriginal community 124 km back down the track, although a bit flooded in parts,..only about a 1/3 of that route was real desert CSR track.  It wasn’t something I’d like to walk,…but given the recent rains, old CSR wells and occasional native soaks,..I was confidant I could make it out on foot if I traveled at night when it was cool.  More reasonably– there was also a convoy of two 4wheel drive trucks I’d passed that morning… likely heading this way…in a pinch I could stash the bike..and hitch out…then return with parts.  … but I was getting ahead of myself..might as well turn the engine over and see how she sounds.

She fired up with a bit of hesitation…reminding me that I was an abusive undeserving rider.  She sounded pretty good,.. although as I pulled on the throttle a stream of oil squirted along the instrument side of the beak.  I was hoping beyond hope that is was just a damaged hose.  It was time to start breaking her down to have a look.  I pulled out my tarp…super handy in a situation like this, and laid her out for parts.  I threw on my hat to ward off the sun and flies…pulled a long drink out of my camel back hose…then started removing the beak(upper fender).

Strangely enough,…my oil cooler was punctured not from the front where I’d expect the damage to be,..but from behind.  Wouldn’t it have been funny if I’d invested money in an oil cooler guard…which sits in front…just to have my cooler blown out from behind….you’ve got to see the comedy in that…almost makes me wish I had one.   At any rate,…the main bracket holding the instruments had fractured on impact and a piece of the plastic moved forward penetrated the oil cooler. (I think this plastic bracket may have been fractured from the highway accident back in September..oops)

http://www.vimeo.com/12195027

I sawed off the invading plastics,..then loosened one side of the oil cooler so I could swing it out and work on it.  I’d never done this before….so it took me a lot longer than I’ll publicly admit.  This type of repair is not fun…fun is working in the shade of a garage with a cold beverage on hand, good tunes and a total absence of flies.  Its actually kinda scarry,..what if it doesn’t come back together right, what if I break something on accident…and the what if I’m only making the situation worse?

It was at this point of desperate repair that the two 4wheel drive trucks arrived on scene.

Unfortunately they didn’t stock pile BMW parts in their tool kit,..how careless!  …but never the less I was glad to have the company.  As I understand it, they were retired farmers out to knock out the biggest 4wheel drive challenge in OZ.  Despite the circumstances,..we had some good laughs…some joke about honey and lesbians that would only ever be funny at that time in place in the Great Sandy Desert.  They let me top up my water containers off their tanks,,,..made some good recommendations and offered to stick around to help.  These were good folks,,,the kind you’d expect to run across out here (not the “Wolf Creek” type,..of which I’d passed that morning( the crater,..not Ivan)).  In reality,..things weren’t to bad,..there’s not a lot they could do for me by sticking around and I was confidant I could extract myself regardless of how the repairs went,..so I didn’t keep them up.

The convoy rolled away in the dust with one of the guys yelling leaning out the window and yelling back that they’d have a cold one waiting for me if I made it to well 49.  It then got very quiet and lonely on the CSR.

I slathered a load of cold weld goop all over the busted end of the oil cooler and then proceeded to hook it all back up again. It took me a long time to get everything back together,…once a frame is bent,..nothing wants to line up.  I’d be trying to line up 3 separate parts…then squeeze in a screw…but my oily hands would slip off the allen key,..and it would fall into the sand..having to be cleaned..and the process starts all over again.  Eventually it all came back together…but the sun was sinking fast and the riding day was over.  I got the bike off the road and set camp.

That was an emotionally difficult evening.  I knew that I’d likely blown what would have been a golden opportunity to run the CSR.  The weather window was perfect.  Recent rains had packed down the sand,..creating uniquely good sand riding conditions.  I had the fuel, food, maps, coordinates…and was rolling along brilliantly ahead of schedule(granted I was not even close to the hardest sections of the CSR).  Not to mention the planning, time and collateral that I had invested in this.  (I drove nearly 3,000 miles just to get on this track…that’s 5 days of tarmac riding and hefty fuel bill ranging upwards of $1.70 a liter….I may not be laughing..but you might as well!)  So a great start to an epic expedition went to shit over termite mound.

It wasn’t over yet..at least I thought, as I lounged back on my bike…feet propped up on the handlebars…gazing up at the stars…I had some Copeland…”Fanfare for the Commen Man” playing in my MP3player and I thought,,,just maybe that cold weld will work…maybe I can push on in the morning….might as well have a go and see if she holds.  I’d like to think that the promise of a cold beer at well 49 did not influence my decision making process.

I awoke with a heavy heart and an aching body,..knowing things weren’t to good, but I was still going to give it a shot.   Breakfast was quick..since I no longer had a pot to cook in(my mess kit was on the front on my pannier…taking the blunt of the termite vs pannier demolition exposition

…it was all cold meals from here on out.)

The bike fired up, and I was off on the sandy track.  If there is one thing to say about these fat BMW boxer engines,…is that the engines are rock solid,…you can sure put them through hell and back and they keep going…Over 58,000 miles of abuse..and she’s still roaring away.

Now that I’d been through the school of hard termit mounds,..I  slowed my pace..which made for tough going…you can ride over sand or through it, depending on your speed,..and riding fast and over it is a whole lot less work.   But for fear of hidden termite mounds and a massive amount of brush overhanging the trail,..I had to slow down and fight the sand in the process.  All my external food pockets on the front side of the panniers were ripped off by the sticks hanging on to the trail.  Sure,..its a 4wheel drive track wide enough for a truck,..but its only possible to ride in the ruts…which sticks you on either side of the trail dragging your panniers and handlebars through the brush overhanging the track.

I pushed until just shy of well 49,

you can just make out my bike in the center of the above photo

where I dismounted, pried the plastics away and had good look at the oil cooler.  Oil was everywhere…even threatening to drip down on the  forks and onto the brake calipers.

It was a sad call to make…but it was time to pull the plug.  The odds were really stacking up against me …..i could feel a bad situation of cumbulus numbis proportion…mounting in my horizon.  (literally speaking,..there were some big storm clouds brewing between me and my escape route,..if the all ready wet track near Billiluna took a flashflood, I could potentially be stuck.    (below are some pics from the csr section near Lake Gregory…. it was almost enough to turn me around on first stretch out of Billiluna, but there’s always a side track, snorkel through, or circumscribing bush bashing option..which got me out of the wet on the way out.)

Maybe if I was with a buddy,..and had spare oil, and perhaps a bottle of Beam ..maybe then I’d consider pushing on,..but in my current situation..it was time to turn around and give it up for another day.

Even though it was heart breaking to turn back, I was consumed with the task of extracting myself before I ran out of oil….and not wiping out on another termite mound of course. I would also be racing storm before it submerged the track.

It was good riding,..the small dunes were a blast to bump over..and I knew the track from the ride out so I could enjoy a little more of the surroundings as opposed to just focusing on the track.

All the salt lakes were full, lots of grassy meadows opened up before me…the spinifix was sprouting new green shoots turning the desert into a rolling green prairie. Its amazing what happens when water touches the sand.

I stopped a few times to pull out the tripod and have some fun with the camera.

I may have bungled the whole CSR endeavor,..but I was still doing something right…because I was still out riding beautiful country and lov’n life.    An hour out of halls Creek I stopped to catch the sunset.   I pulled off the track and drove down a dried lakebed for kilometer,..turned off the  engine.  The heavy rumble of the boxer engines which I had been blasting my ears all day was instantly exchanged for the soft tones of crickets and varios birds.

It was another epic sunset in the outback.

I couldnt say what bone life’s gonna throw me when I wake up in the morning,…and I guess I like it that way. (accept maybe if I could know that I’d wake up tomorrow with a new oil cooler at the foot of my sleeping bag…that would be all right!)