Riding adventure bikes can be a 50/50 split sometimes. When you’re breaking new ground and you reach an intersection, good times or bad times could be just a coin toss away. Heads we go left; tails we go right. This time I tossed the coin and came up trumps.
A right turn it was and less than a kilometre later, the Darcinator and I crested a hill and … boom! A lush green adventureland stretched out before us as far as the eye could see, with a thin chocolate line disappearing into the distance.
“You’ve done it, Clubby!” Darcy boomed as he roared up beside me. “It’s just like riding in Mongolia — unreal!”
Yeah, the editor at large was just a little excited, but justifiably so. We were outside the historic village of Burra near the southern foothills of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia, and the coin toss had put us onto a little-used stock route that sliced, diced and wound its way through amazingly green paddocks. It was late in the day, the skies were golden and we had hit an ADV riding jackpot.
And just to top it off, we had a pair of brand spanking new Triumph Tiger 1200 Rally Explorers beneath us and an open itinerary to ride them all the way to Sydney over the next few days. Life is good? You bet!
GO WEST
If you want to learn what a bike is really like, do a big trip on it, right? Absolutely. So when Triumph Australia offered us a couple of new Tiger 1200 Rally Explorers to review for AAB and MAD TV, we just had to go big, and we mean real big, with them. Thus Darcy and I hatched a plan to fly into Melbourne, climb aboard the big cats at Triumph HQ and promptly ride them back home to Sydney.
But not by a direct route. No way. We wanted a fair old lap on the British ADV beasts, so we hatched a scheme to make an almost 4000km loop
