60 Hours, Two Bikes And One Buffoon

This entry is part 17 of 21 in the series Adventure Rider Issue #13

The chance to ride Tasmania’s toughest track seemed too good to miss. Nick Fletcher gave it a shot.

Most of us simply can’t take five weeks off work to ride around Australia.

For many, a three-day weekend is a luxury. Rupert – aka The Buffoon, see issue #09 – and I typically keep our rides down to a few days, principally because beyond four days he becomes unbearable.

So the suggestion of a dirty weekend to ride the ‘hardest track in Tasmania’ appeared unusually attractive.

A quick search of ferry prices demonstrated the power of a monopoly, with a fare structure that wanted $1000 and the life of a cherished child in return for shipping a bike and a rider from Melbourne to Tasmania.

Consequently the plan was quietly shelved until many months later when I got the call from Rupert.

“Hey,” he blurted, “I’ve found a deal. Our bikes and us on the ferry, plus two nights’ accommodation for $800. It’s a bargain!”

“Great stuff, Rupert!” I beamed. “Get it booked and we can sort the details out later.”

It wasn’t until sometime later that I asked the obvious question:“Where’s the accommodation?”

Rupert shot back, “On the ferry.”

“What do you mean on the ferry?”

I asked, suspicious.

“They’re going to give us a cabin for two nights,” was the Buffoon’s deadpan response.

“So basically you’ve got us a return overnight ferry ticket with our own cabin?” was my irritated response.

“No,” he admitted. “We’re sharing the cabin with two other people. Fingers crossed for Danni and Kylie!”

‘Danni and Kylie’ turned out to be John and Steve. One was a founding member of the Velocette Motorcycle Owners Club and the other the Bendigo senior snoring champion for 19 years running.

Public warning

The Spirit Of Tasmania was always going to be the most testing part of the trip.

Rupert in an enclosed environment is really an exercise in tolerance.

Furthermore, I’d had a catastrophic planning failure and ended up trying to conduct a high-powered work teleconference while Rupert was feeding me VBs and feigning intercourse with a pot plant.

Fortunately I managed to keep Rupert away from impressing the 14 year olds in the disco by supplying him with more beer. I should add that I was funding this entire exercise, as Rupert had conveniently forgotten to bring any money (to be fair he did pay me back, carefully annotating the transaction in my bank account as ‘butt-plug refund’).

After 12 pots of VB each, a steak, a bottle of wine and a formal warning from the purser we retired to bed where Rupert attempted to drown out the snoring with his flatulence.

God’s own track

It was an early start in Devonport, and tradition required us to fritter this away with a leisurely breakfast at the nearest café. A number of the Velocette owners joined us, their bikes leaving an even larger oil slick than Rupert’s Japanese Lady’s Bike, an ageing TTR250.

We then had a brief road ride heading south-west through beautiful rolling hills gradually gaining altitude.

The deeper inland we went the colder it got, and by 10.00am we had to stop in Waratah just to warm up. Fortunately, the only café in town turned out to be the only Op Shop as well, and I was able to secure a pair of $2.00 woollen mittens to put over my winter bike gloves.

Pushing further west we transitioned on to well-made, sandy roads and passed the hideous Kara mine – essentially a mining-industry sponsored advertisement for The Greens political party.

Gradually the forest closed in and we reached the Pieman River, the crossing of which required the use of the second-most expensive ferry in Australia.

No turning back

We were aiming for ‘the hardest track in Tasmania’. Through the power of the interweb I’d established that the little known Climies Track runs between Granville Harbour and Trial Harbour, that it had a statistically significant fatality rate and that it would likely give us ample opportunity to test the effectiveness of our ambulance cover.

To get to it we pushed further west on increasingly smaller and smaller roads.

In a classic Nick/The Buffoon moment we blindly followed the GPS across a farmer’s field, through a small wood and even under a barbed-wire fence.

We quickly got ourselves into a position where we couldn’t backtrack because we would have some serious explaining to do to an irate farmer.

After some additional floundering, including manoeuvring bikes over and around locked gates, we eventually dropped down an old farm track towards the coast.

Bank error

We arrived on a track that could only have been created if God were a dirtbiker. I couldn’t be more serious in saying that. If you only ride one track in Tasmania it has to be this one.

It started with mind-blowing views of rugged, wind-blown surf. We even watched a Taswegian spearfisherman pull out five huge crays over 15 minutes. We then set off on a wonderful twisty, sandy track with no one else in sight.

The track became more broken, steeper and wilder by the kilometre. Indeed, it was probably one good storm away from being unrideable. There were creeks without bridges, huge washouts and ascents that looked like something out of Erzberg.

All the time we looked out on scenery that was as if it’d been Photoshopped.

We soon reached the memorial to the three quad bikers who were washed to their death in 2006. The bridge had long ago fallen into the creek and all that was left was a crossing far above the beach with the river plunging down a steep rockfall to the sea.

The crossing looked innocuous, but the river was deeper, faster-flowing and more difficult than it first appeared. It wasn’t hard to imagine how, on another day, with a bit more water, you could get yourself into real trouble. As it was, a surprised local on a well-ridden WR250F got to witness me dropping the bike trying to get it up the hill on the other side of the crossing. He seemed somewhere between amused and perplexed at Rupert and I trying to ride his local extreme enduro circuit with full panniers and no talent.

Off track

The highlight of Rupert’s ride was a short bridge crossing that had been reduced to a single plank. Rupert, being a man of little imagination, confidently rode the Plank Of Doom. I didn’t, and ended up swimming in a stinking creek.

Retribution was soon to visit Rupert when, minutes later, the Japanese Lady’s Bike stopped dead in the middle of a saddle-deep bog crossing. A joint recovery effort was launched, and the blue turdpile was manhandled to the far bank, where five minutes of kicking had the unkillable machine coughing back into life again.

After an hour-and-a-half and 24km we had dispatched the track.

Illicit camping

We had a very late lunch in Zeehan, stocked up on whiskey and steak and headed to the beach in search of somewhere to hide out for the night. Our philosophy is that the only thing better than a free campsite is an illegal one.

We arrived to find the tide out, and that gave us a chance to tear up and down a truly stunning deserted beach. As an Englishman I could only giggle uncontrollably and think that at some point someone was going to ban this sort of nonsense.

Unfortunately, Rupert’s Japanese Lady’s Bike again stopped dead, this time in the face of a rising tide in very soft, very wet, sand.

This was clearly a bike-threatening situation and one that required urgent action on my behalf. Within seconds I had deployed my camera and had some lovely black-and-white silhouette shots of Rupert and his bike sinking slowly into the sand.

Much to my dismay he managed to get his blue shitheap restarted before he was claimed by the tide.

It wasn’t until that night we figured out Rupert’s bike mechanic hadn’t properly tightened the battery earth lead during one of its many garage visits.

Back to work

We found a secluded campsite in the bush behind the beach, and the evening was spent eating steak, finishing the whiskey and enjoying the sight of Rupert’s underwear hanging from the foliage (I couldn’t disagree with his assertion that it needed ‘airing’).

Another early start the following morning saw us tearing back to Devonport, this time by way of Queenstown, Derwent Bridge and the edges of the Walls Of Jerusalem National Park. This took us across more spectacular Tasmanian scenery, and despite this being April there was still snow on the ground and it was still bloody freezing.

We arrived at the port in time to pressure wash the sand off the bikes before joining the ferry for another night of VB, red wine and tomfoolery.

After four hours’ sleep we were back in Melbourne with 750km and the hardest track in Tasmania under our belts. I headed straight into the office for a quick wash in time to greet the first of my colleagues arriving for work. “Get up to much at the weekend, Nick?” he asked.

“Just a couple of beers with a friend,” I answered, smiling.

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