Running low on fuel….

Forty degrees Celcius in the sun, and I realized that I was probably not going to make it to the next gas station if I kept going to the latest gorge.

So I turned around and headed for Derby, on the west of the Gibb River Road.

Slowing right down, and with pumped up hard tires, I crept along, eyeing the rapidly falling levels in the translucent 45 litre tanks.

Finally I made it – and promptly deposited 46.5 litres in those 45l tanks. I even had a litre or two to spare.

Sadly though that 46.5 litres got me just 600km, a pretty appalling economy rate, even on the sand and dirt roads.

I will check the air filters, most likely a bit more air will help things a bit, but that’s a huge issue for the longer trips on the KTM.

Bad Aussie Food

Halls Creek, a cross road between the Tanami Track, and the main route East, and base for a few mines, along with gateway to the Bungle Bungles.
This is the $22 breakfast at the local hotel, the second best of 2 in town. Along with the instant coffee, the reconstituted and cold scrambled eggs, atrophied cold tomatoes, greasy cold bacon and dubious bread it was a pretty dismal experience.

Breakfast a few days later was 2 snickers bars, a 2 hour hike/gorge swim and a cold can of corn. Much better!

Luxury at Mornington

So I’m cruising up and down the Gibb River Road, which goes through the Kimberlies (and has no cell/3g coverage).
Along the way on this trip I have varied between free camping in the desert, camp site or a motel/resort.
Right now I am in Mornington Wilderness Camp, which is primarily a chunk of land owned by a private non profit, AWC. They buy land, de-stock it and introduce good fire management.
At this site they also have tented cabins, and after 2 nights camping I felt like a change. Great timing- an early rain storm came in just as I walked into the tent, making me feel pretty happy.

The camp has a team of scientists along with operations and accomodation teams. Sadly the research team’s server had gone kaput, with 46gb of data at risk. Happily my brother, who turned up the next morning, worked with the team to save the data, and right now we are about to eat a BBQ with a load of meat supplied by the grateful locals, along with a bag of goodies complete with hand drawn thank you note. That’s artist Katie in the picture, and we are drinking some of those goodies.

It was great to peek behind the scenes here- an astonishing team of people working in important scientific & environmental areas and for an impressive and rapidly growing organisation. Many thanks to Richard, Sarah, David, Katie and everyone else here. And thanks also for the wifi!

Let me pay my bill Telstra

Dumb: not letting me set up auto pay by credit card when I got my iPhone

Moronic: being unable to pay my Telstra bill using the iPhone

Archaic and lacking in security: paying using DTMF tones via mobile phone.

Still – Telstra staff (handpicked?) in Perth store where I got the phone were excellent.

Top 10 things to change at eBay

I’d love to get into the numbers in the recent changes to eBay, but it is too hard on this iPhone.

But regardless, here are my top 10 suggestions for change at eBay:

1: allow google checkout and integrate it. It will provide a clean payment system (unlike paypal) and will force paypal to get better.

2: Simplify and reduce all fees-the penny pinching has killed the market and is driving people to amazon and elewhere.

3: cut the marketing budget by 90% – we all know where eBay is, so take a short term revenue hit but increase profits

4: reduce staff by 50%, especially marketing, product management and even development…

5: Stop feature creep and keep it simple, light and fast.

6: keep copying trade me’s stuff from new Zealand.

7: charge for Skype use, but trivial amounts and only for conference calls

8: increase customer service quality and staff quantity – put those marketing mbas in there perhaps.

9: Sell paypal. Someone else will make it work and grow, even if you can’t.

10: allow sellers to give negative feedback to non performing buyers-it is a basic building block of community policing.

Is there a chance of any of these happening?

Travelling with the iphone for a week

First some rants;
“nz” gets auto changed into “ms”, and the auto replacement function does not learn from its’ mistakes.

Safari keeps crashing, with increasing regularity

YouTube videos simply do not work anymore

I can’t flip photos in wordpress

Mail does not flip horizontally, making it really hard to read HTML emails that assume a decent screen size

You can’t force an “unflip” of safari (which is sensor driven depending on the phone orientation), say for reading while you are lying on your side.

The keyboard sucks, particularly as essentially all apps have it in the smaller vertical mode.

Single mode browsing is so 1995.

Overall thoughts:
Usefull for keeping up with top 10% of things online, useless for proper browsing (tabs, multiple pages at once, video, speed etc.)

Useful for reacting to short emails, useless for decent work

Useful for quick and dirty photo blogging, useless for the research and work required for a decent blog entry

Useful for travel when you want to go super light, useless for overseas travel and those roaming data rates

A lot if that stuff will get solved with time, and meanwhile the iPhone still feels like something way beyond the norm.
Meanwhile my language has changed for these posts – it is just too hard to write well on this silly keypad.

Up the Tanami road

It’s the main drag from alice springs to the northwest, so I was expecting the Tanami Road to be pretty good. It was, but vast tracts were still unacceptabe for locals.
I cruise at 100-110km, regardless of terrain. The worst roads are deep sand and sandy corrugations, and there was a bit of the first but plenty of the second. The bike/tire/road combination I have is still smoothest at that speed- rather like going through deep powder when skiing, or water skiing. It’s about getting up on top of the surface and gliding.

However that requires decent suspension, tires & tubes, while the whole vehicle vibrates, so everything needs to be bolted on well.

If the vehicle is unstable at speed, then the only other option is to slow right down. This creates even more vibrations, and judging by the trail of debris I see, things often fall off other traffic.

So the Aboriginals that live in the country can’t afford decent cars, the distances are far, average speeds as low (cruise at 60) and fuel is expensive. But I repeat myself. There was a bit of road improvement happening-far better than on the great eastern road sandpit.

Meanwhile I am glad I spent the time prepping the bike, and I am glad to have obtained new tires in Alice. Another motorcyclist I met in Alice actualy turned back after starting the Tanami, but I met yet another chap today who was coping splendidly. Actually he had met the guy with the fired up KTM below, and the story was again confirmed that I am riding a bike that is likely to catch fire if I crash badly.

Pictures are of a termite mound, remnants of a strange ceremony, the end of the road, the half road near the start of the 1060kms and a very good bit later on. Oh – and it seems that most of the scrawling on the WA sign is from Kiwis.

To Alice Springs

As mentioned I ran into tire trouble near Ayers rock- in fact 8km from the Yulara resort. The rear tire went flat, but thanks to local bus driver Tony Fox (and some patient passengers, 2 of whom I met today) the luggage was taken to the resort, and I pumped the tire up and staggered in, and took the wheel into the resort mechanics to change tubes. The tire did come off the rim, but wasn’t damaged too much – at least it got me, with replaced tube, to Alice.

So here in Alice I got the bike serviced, and both tires replaced, today at the local KTM shop. They lent me the demo 690 enduro which I took down a few tracks (I want one.)

They also showed me the last picture, which is the remains of a KTM 950 Adv with the Safari tanks (i.e. Exactly like my bike) which hit a rock or tree stump, punctured or split the tank (I’ve heard different versions of the story) and set the bike alight when the fuel ignited. That’s not a lot left over.

I’ll be watching out very closely for tree stumps. And rocks.

Drinking in outback australia

The laws about alcohol are pretty interesting in rural, or, Aboriginal, Australia. This sign is on a road into Alice Springs, and the penalties for drinking in public are displayed.. Tipping out – sure. A fine (and that’s a lot of money if you are unemployed) – well sure.
But a court order to stop drinking???

Insane. Might as well order unmarried people to stop having sex, overweight people to stop eating junk food, every driver to stop speeding on occasion and smokers to stop smoking.

It is not going to happen.

The more I see of rural Australia, the more I believe that this is a poverty gap situation more than anything else. Poverty, isolation and despair drives the alcohol and behavioral problems. The Aboriginals have it hard, with mryiads of tribes and languages, ‘assisted’ by often misguided handouts and advice (e.g. Don’t hunt and gather but take this money and buy bad food and sit around.)
Meanwhile some communities seem to have a positive mindset,, while others are terrible.
My two cents? Help the ones that want to be helped, and let the others see the results. ‘Help’ means roads, cell phone coverage, subsidized healthy food and anything to help communities create jobs.
And stop the stupid laws that fail to treat symptoms. The ‘grog run’ is alive and well in rural Australia, regardless of the law, alcohol and petrol (for sniffing) are getting through.

Not Ayers rock

Sure the locals stilll seem to call the big rock ‘Ayer’s rock’ rather than ‘Uluru’, but nothing excuses me mistaking this for the big rock. It was sunset as I approached the national park and it does look stunning though.
The actual rock is much larger, though not as pretty, at least after sunset and when you have a rear tire off the rim….

Australia fix your roads

On the one hand it’s great for people like me that there are vast roads of days of sand and corrugations. It was tough at first but ultimately I was skimming through the sand pit that is the NT part of the great central road. Some of the road has not been graded for months, while other parts on the WA side were excellent. Parts- WA had its share of sandy corrugated crap as well.

Fun for me, but spare a thought for the number of aboriginal comunities that live along that road, and many other roads like it. They are cut off from the rest of the world, days away from cities, with expensive fuel and food and no access to markets or jobs.

Australa’s first people deserve more than a rusty Commodore and the dole.

Fix the roads.

The money is there, but so are the excuses. What I experienced was inexcusable, so start at one end and get it done regardless.

To Leonora and my first skimpy

From Kalgoorlie to Leonora was kangaroo country – with dead roos every 150 meters on average for much of the ride. I am not kidding.
So playing safe I stopped well before dark, which is when the roos come out to play (and lose badly) ‘chicken’ with the four trailer roadtrains.
Once here I dropped the boxes and blasted around some local tracks. If you find yourself in a Aussie mining town then get a bike and discover adventure wonderland – there are tracks everywhere.
For dinner there was a choice of two hotels, and I was advised to go to the better one. Even that, it appeared, was a skimpy bar….. The food was nice though I bugged out after a couple of drinks, and meeting some really cool folk.
Tomorrow is all West, next stop Uluru, with some chillt desert evening(s) before then.

Off on the trip

Well I’m finally off on my ride around at least a bit of Australia. Pix are from Fremantle, where I got a last coffee, and the bike in Kalgoorlie, where I did manage another last decent coffee with Lacey who was sickly, so I dragged her out for food.

Borders – if it’s hard even for locals then how do you get through?

I’m a fan of open borders, and it is far too hard these days to move between countries. What’s really scary are these cases of US citizens, highlighted by a diarist in Daily Kos, who were detained by US immigration in some pretty horrible circumstances.

It seems mostly to be people that are incapable of defending themselves due to mental health or other issues, and along with that those who are not rich enough to get a decent lawyer on the case.

In an organisaton as large as the US immigration and custms services and dealing with the number of people that they do, mistakes do happen. These should have been fixed more rapidly, but the scary thing about all immigration agencies at borders is that their power is essentially absolute – they can do anything to you, and your own country’s diplomatic protection doesn’t go that far.

For me the strategy that works is honesty and great documentation, and the tactic that works is immeasureable patience and calmness when crossing borders, particularly land borders. I’ve crossed into over 70 countries on land, many multiple times, and those two techniques are the ones that get me through with least pain.

Several times I’ve had documentation or circumstances that has been less than adequate, and aside from one case where the country essentially placed me into a catch 22 situation, I have been upfront with the people on the border. (That country wouldn’t let me legally extend my bike’s permission, and wouldn’t even allow me to truck the bike to the border). I’m also honest when answering questions – unless they are about how much money I have on me and where it is stored :-).

The patience is assisted by a good book, sunhat/raingear, plenty of water, food and most of all, no timetable to keep. The longest wait I’ve had was 2 days – and that was due to out of date paperwork on my part. I’ve had more than one 1-day wait, though in all cases I was able to stay in a town rather than camp at the border. Other than that the longer crossings take a few hours to get me, my bike and goods through customs, road transport and immigration on both sides of the border.