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  The Yamaha TT600 is pure enduro, a big bore single-cylinder thumper of a motorcycle with a deep, almost primeval sound that says power and strength. No terrain can beat this bike, even when loaded with nearly a hundred kilograms of luggage, tools and spares. And all this can easily be removed and then, at just over 120 kilograms, the bike is light enough to be ferried across a river on a canoe or lifted onto the back of a truck.

  When I collected the TT in Darwin, it started with the first kick. While this is expected for a new motorcycle, it was quite an achievement for me, as I stood at a slight 165 centimetres and when I sat on the bike there was a good amount of space between the ground and my feet. I could only kick-start it by standing on the foot pegs, the bike on its side-stand. Realistically, I should have chosen the TT350 model. It was lower and lighter, so it would have been easier to ride, and it was still almost as powerful as the TT600. But I didn’t question my choice, because the TT600 felt right, just like the idea to travel across Africa did.

  I solved the problem of the TT’s height by trimming more than half of the foam from the seat. When riding on long stretches of tarmac, to prevent ‘numb bum’, I would sit on an air-inflated wine-cask bladder placed under a piece of thick, woolly sheepskin. With the press of a finger, the bladder could be easily deflated when I needed to stop and touch the ground on tippy toes.

  Next was the dilemma of how I would carry my mountain of gear. But this, too, was easily overcome, as right there on the Yamaha shop floor was a set of suitcase-shaped thick leather pannier bags and a heavy steel frame. With some minor modifications they would fit the TT. They cost $500 and belonged to a Swiss motorcyclist who’d ended his ride around Australia just days before.

  This was the first of many coincidences that unfolded soon after the idea of my ride had burst into my life. In the beginning I shrugged these off as just good luck, but as each day passed, little, almost indiscernible, things happened at every turn. I was on the cusp of a new life and tingling with expectation, and in this heightened state of awareness I began to notice these subtle hints of synchronicity.

  A few weeks after I purchased the TT, a motorcycle traveller knocked on my door. It was a hot, humid afternoon when he arrived dusty, sweaty and pink-faced from riding on the dirt roads through Kakadu. He was a short man – shorter than me – and about thirty, I guessed. When some local townspeople visiting Darwin came across him, they told him he simply must visit me.

  ‘Hello. I am Rolf. I come from Germany. Your friends tell me you want to travel Africa by motorcycle. It is very tough,’ he said with a stern gaze through little round glasses, his head tilted upwards.

  So size doesn’t matter when it comes to motorcycle travel, I thought as I smiled down at him.

  Rolf told me he had ridden from North to South Africa and was now riding through outback Australia on his Yamaha XT600 Tenere.

  When I showed him the TT with its leather panniers, he said, ‘These will not do. No, no, the thieves will steal all your belongings. No, you must have metal panniers. Much stronger,’ he insisted, emphasising that great planning and specialised equipment was required to undertake such an expedition. ‘And this motorrad. With all your things, it is much too heavy. What you do when you fall? You will not lift it.’

  But I would no more trade the TT for something more suitable than if I were a mother and it was my child.

  ‘Yes, on your trial run, you will see this bike will not do,’ Rolf added, shaking his head with disapproval over my poor choice.

  ‘Trial run?’ I stammered. I’d never considered doing a trial run but it made sense and I made a mental note to include this in my planning. A one-week ride to Uluru, the ancient monolith rising up out of Australia’s red centre, would be perfect.

  But I never did that trial run. With all the planning, I just forgot about it.

  ‘The roads in Africa have much bumps. You must wear a kidney belt to stop the vibration damaging the little tube attached to your kidneys. This belt holds everything in place and protects your back and insides when you have a fall,’ he said, holding up a wide black belt with Velcro straps. ‘This is very important. You will be many hours every day on your bike.’

  ‘Yes. Thank you,’ I said, and dutifully added kidney belt to the list in my ‘Africa planning’ notebook.

  Rolf ’s arrival may have seemed more of a hindrance than a help, and not that unlikely an occurence. After all, I lived on the fringe of Kakadu, a must-see on any trip around Australia. But I viewed his visit as another sign. It was 1992 and well before access to instant information via the internet. Until the moment when Rolf appeared on my doorstep, all I knew of motorcycle travel was what I’d read in Ted Simon’s classic motorcycle travel book Jupiter’s Travels. (A mine worker had given me a dog-eared copy of Ted’s book when word of my ride spread.) Like a sponge, I soaked up Rolf ’s travel advice: some I took on board, some I discarded.

  ‘Do not trust the Africans. To them you are “business”,’ he said when he moved on from Jabiru a few days later. But as I stood watching him ride away, I felt no truth in his parting words.

  Nevertheless, most of Rolf’s advice did seem invaluable and I began making a long list of all the motorcycle spares, camping equipment, first-aid supplies, documents, vaccinations and visas I would need. I fitted a twenty-one-litre Acerbis plastic petrol tank to the TT to give me a range of 400 kilometres plus fifty on reserve. I bolted a set of metal Barkbusters hand guards to the handlebars to protect my hands, clutch and brake levers. I designed modifications for my motorcycle: a front rack, a toolbox and a solid steel barrier to protect the engine from falls. I then headed to the mine’s welding workshop with my designs and made a cash deal with a welder on nightshift.

  As much as those early days of planning were driven by my obsession with the ride, I was not immune to niggling doubts. What if your bike breaks down? What will you do if you’re attacked? You can’t go alone. What about a travelling companion? All of these questions were put to me once word of my plans spread amongst friends and colleagues. And as the chorus of doubters grew louder, so too did my own misgivings. Riding a motorcycle through Africa alone meant confronting a plethora of possible dangers, and there were also practicalities to consider. The inside of a motorcycle engine remained a complete mystery to me, and mechanical breakdowns worried me more than the remote possibility of rape, mugging or murder. Fear set in and now I not only wanted a travelling companion, I wanted one who could fix motorcycles.

  When Rolf and I had discussed my lack of mechanical aptitude and the pros and cons of travelling companions, he had assured me I was still better off on my own. ‘Do not worry about your bike. It is new. It will not break down if you change the oil and do your maintenance,’ he said. ‘There are so many people travelling Africa by motorbike and they will help you. Some you may travel with for a time, but you will find travelling alone is very good,’ he added.

  But despite Rolf ’s assurances, it was with great relief that, two months before departure, I found a travelling companion.

  Dan worked as an operator at the mine and had grown up riding and repairing dirt bikes. He was tall and gangly with shoulder-length, sandy-brown hair that hung over his face, which he’d flip back with a toss of his head to reveal an easy hey man, be cool smile. Dan had been at that Sunday afternoon barbecue and had said, ‘Hey, that’s a beaut idea.’ He, too, was in his late twenties, but looked more at home on a surfboard than travelling Africa by motorcycle. While we mixed in the same group of friends, we’d only ever exchanged a few words. But I reasoned our common desire to explore and experience Africa was all that was needed to make our travelling partnership work.

  Dan’s motorcycle was a Honda XR600 – the main off-road competitor of the Yamaha TT600. It meant we could not share spare parts, and it also proved to be a dark omen symbolising the incompatibilities between us that soon began to emerge. We spoke little during the weeks leading up to our departure, but Dan agreed, in his casual,
laidback way, with my rough plan, mapped out over many months working nightshift. The ride would take a year or two: neither of us was on a time limit. First we’d ride down to Perth, from where we’d take a cargo ship to Durban. We would ride around South Africa and then head north into Zimbabwe and quickly cross Mozambique, which had only recently emerged from a sixteen-year civil war, to Malawi. In Tanzania and Kenya we’d visit the game parks and maybe climb a mountain or two. After that, the idea was to ride west into Uganda and Zaire (renamed the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 1997), then up through West Africa and into North Africa to Morocco. We were both undecided about the ride home, but by then my funds would be low and I planned to head to London and get a job to finance the second leg of my world motorcycle odyssey.

  *

  On Sunday, 7 February 1993, the morning after our farewell party at the local pub, Dan and I rode away from our friends, our lives and our well-paid jobs for our first stop, Perth. By chance, it was a year almost to the day since I’d blurted out the idea of doing this ride. As rain fell over Kakadu, I gripped the TT’s handlebars and tensed my body against the impact of a heavy wet-season downpour.

  My motorcycle was dangerously overloaded. Most of the equipment stuffed into the two leather panniers and Gearsack bag on the seat behind me was for the TT and for camping. But I’d also packed a lot of unnecessary equipment, things that were classified as ‘might need’. These impractical things included a heavy cotton string hammock, and scuba fins, mask and snorkel for the coral reefs fringing the glorious golden sand beaches along Africa’s east coast. I also carried Lonely Planet’s Africa guidebook – a weighty tome affectionately known amongst travellers in Africa as the ‘Bible’ – and several novels, including Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which seemed an appropriate read for the start of this ride.

  In the early days of planning I had sent off requests for sponsorship to Yamaha, Tsubaki and Mobil. My letter to Mobil was an afterthought, prompted by a conversation with the driver of a Mobil fuel truck on a delivery to the mine. He’d taken more than a passing interest in the map of Africa spread out on a benchtop in the security gatehouse where I was working nightshift. (A few months earlier the mine had retrenched nearly half its workforce and my job as radiation safety technician had been amalgamated with that of security guard.)

  ‘You should get Mobil to sponsor you. They’re all over the world,’ he said.

  So I wrote to the Mobil office in Darwin and promptly received a letter of introduction. My priceless letter advised: Heather Ellis is a motorcycle enthusiast travelling the world, and as part of her expedition is trialling exclusively Mobil lubricants, but particularly Mobil 1. Heather would appreciate any form of assistance that can be provided.

  I also wrote to Japanese chain manufacturer Tsubaki and they supplied me with four motorcycle chains. I gave two to Dan and I carried two myself, which weighed heavily in my panniers. Yamaha also responded to my request for spare parts. It was a heavy load to lug through Africa, but at the time I was sure I’d need most of it. To honour this sponsorship, I dutifully plastered the TT with sponsors’ stickers and promised to write magazine articles and contact local media.

  I packed the bare minimum of clothes, most of which I wore at any one time. My riding outfit consisted of my lace-up steel-capped work boots, black jeans, a Gore-Tex motorcycle jacket and a short-sleeved denim shirt. The rest of my wardrobe, along with underwear and socks, comprised a polar-fleece jacket, a long-sleeved shirt, black leggings (which doubled as thermals), a swimsuit, a sarong, thongs, canvas shoes and a sun hat. I packed wet weather pants, a sleeping bag, a Thermarest mattress, a water filter, a small cooking pot, and lots of little plastic containers filled with sugar, tea, coffee, milk powder, spices and salt. My first-aid kit was packed with medicines to treat common infections, bandages in case of injury and ointments to treat festering wounds.

  I did not pack condoms. Somewhat naively, I figured I’d avoid any risk of catching HIV by remaining celibate in Africa. In the months leading up to departure, however, as if to rid my body of any residual cravings, I took several casual lovers. I was possessed by a physical, almost primal, urge for sex. With no misguided thoughts of romantic love, I indulged in liberating sex like nothing I’d ever experienced. The kind of sex filled with passion and lust and waves of orgasmic pleasure; this was sex for sex’s sake. My promiscuity was very out of character, as I’d remained mostly single for the past six years, with just the occasional boyfriend. Even though we’d all been scared by the ‘Grim Reaper’, an HIV/AIDS awareness campaign that burst onto Australian television screens in 1987, there was no talk of safe sex with these partners. We all thought that in our isolation we were protected from the outside world. Besides, in our small-town ignorance, we all thought that HIV happened only to gays and drug users, not heterosexuals having a bit of orgasmic fun.

  But mining towns, filled with single people who holiday in South-East Asia and transient workers from everywhere, are far from safe from sexually transmitted diseases. When rumour spread that one of us had tested positive to HIV, panic gripped the town. The person diagnosed left within days and we all lined up to be tested. Given the all clear, I vowed never again to have unprotected sex. But the vows were short-lived and the Grim Reaper was soon a distant memory.

  With the wet-season downpour behind us, I settled into Day One of the ride and, for the first time, I started to notice things – the sort of things that are obvious when riding a motorcycle. I breathed in the smell of recently rained-on earth mixed with the scented leaves of eucalyptus. Even over the rhythmic thump of the bike’s engine, I could hear the constant shrill of a billion cicadas. Spear grass grew tall and I rode down a tunnel of iridescent green. The road opened to floodplains, lush with the thick growth of wild grasses, only to close in again to dense woodland where shrubs hugged the smooth tarmac. The TT purred like it would go forever and I relaxed into the feeling of riding on a road that only went forward. It was the freedom of a journey by motorcycle. It was the freedom to live with no time limits, no commitments and no responsibilities, other than to the road ahead and what I would find there.

  *

  We were two weeks into our pseudo trial-run before Africa, and 1000 kilometres from Perth, when we pulled up late one afternoon at a scenic lookout. It was barely a low hill but its summit offered an endless view over a rocky desert dotted with grey salt-bush. Not even the persistent little black flies seeking my salty wetness could distract me for those first few moments.

  ‘Massive, isn’t it?’ I said to Dan as I gazed across an endless desert that stretched beyond the horizon, thousands of miles across Australia.

  Dan stood in silence several metres away, his back slightly turned as if to tell the world we were complete strangers. Things had gotten steadily worse between us since leaving Kakadu, to the point that we now only spoke in clipped sentences and mumbled grunts. Sometimes we camped, and in those long uncomfortable hours before sleep, Dan busied himself collecting wood for a fire while plugged into his Walkman and I sat with the TT as if it were my only friend in all the world, checking it for loose nuts and bolts and any emerging problems. To cut down on weight, we had agreed to carry only one tent. While it was large enough to give us space to sleep, Dan at one end and I pressed up against the other, the space was not enough to deflect the tension. So mostly we stayed at backpacker hostels, sharing eight-bed dorms with others. With long-legged Scandinavians and big-breasted Poms around, I understood that Dan didn’t want me to cramp his style and I kept my distance. But I felt as though this avoidance just looked odd to the backpackers, and it made me feel even lonelier.

  ‘We’re different people. We don’t click. That’s just the way it is,’ Dan said when I reached out to him over breakfast at a hostel one morning, in a futile attempt to put an end to the tension between us.

  ‘But we’re travelling together,’ I pleaded as he pushed back his chair with a loud scrape on the timber floor, leav
ing me alone with my tea and toast.

  Where had the high gone? Where was that reassuring force that had sustained me throughout the year of planning?

  I knew my fears were pathetic and filled with self-doubt borne from Dan’s persistent disregard of me. I’d never been treated this way by anyone and felt confused as to the cause. Was it my fault? There was no reason to blame myself, but I did, and the more I tried to make things right – to make our travelling partnership work – the more Dan retreated from me.

  As I looked out at the desert, Dan’s words played over and over in my head: We don’t click. That’s just the way it is. I realised suddenly how right he was and how blind I’d been not to see it. I recalled my relief when he said he’d do this ride with me. But I knew now I had ignored the warning signs out of my own buried insecurities because deep down I was afraid to travel alone. Dan never looked me in the eye when we spoke and I had always felt an uncomfortable energy between us, as though we were two magnets with like poles facing, naturally repelling each other. We were simply not of the same tribe. We had no spirit of kinship with which to grow and learn from the experiences and discoveries that we’d find in Africa. This realisation both shocked and liberated me because I understood I was not the problem. I realised then that I had no choice but to stop pushing for a resolution. Instead, I’d let things be, and go back to what I’d done over the past year: take one step at a time and let things fall naturally into place. Maybe, I thought, as our journey progressed Dan and I would find a faint level of compatibility – but I knew this was wishful thinking born out of my own fears.

  ‘We’ve got to get moving,’ Dan said as he waved angrily at the flies. I turned away from the view of the desert and got back on the TT to follow his trail of dust to the highway and the turn-off to Monkey Mia.

  Dan was still seething from the argument we’d had earlier when we pulled up for fuel at a roadhouse. He had wanted to reach Perth quickly by riding on the highway and saving his motorcycle and his money for Africa. I, however, could not curtail my enthusiasm to explore and had insisted we take a detour to visit Monkey Mia and its dolphins. Dan had finally relented. This 300-kilometre round-trip detour allowed our paths to cross with two seasoned motorcycle travellers, a couple from Denmark about the same age as us. He rode a Honda XR600 (the same bike as Dan); she a Yamaha XT400. He had shaggy brown hair and a bristly face with a permanent grin that comes from knowing life is to be lived as one great adventure. She was lean with platinum blonde hair plaited like rope, and walked with the strength and confidence of a woman who had conquered her fears. We shook hands as though we were long-lost friends – such is the understanding, the camaraderie, that comes with motorcycles, and even more so amongst motorcycle travellers.