Plenty Highway = dust, adrenalin, flies, pure crazy...

Hello from the centre of Australia - what an adventure to get here! We had planned every detail of the trip from Mt Isa to Alice Springs, rang every cattle station and road house we would pass to get updates on the road conditions, carried extra fuel, water and food and thought we were all set to go... But to anyone reading this considering going on the Plenty Highway - it is bloody difficult and SOOO much harder and remote than you could ever imagine!

We started out from Mt Isa and went to a place called Urandangi where we were welcomed by the locals, drank a few beers with them, watched 'deal or no deal' on tv and gained some advice from two guys that had just travelled our road. This town itself was pretty crazy, it is a long way from anywhere with nothing for the locals to do except drink...

Next morning we headed out towards the Plenty Highway - a few less slips than the day before as Tille mastered picking which was harder or softer and thus slippery ground and working out how to ride in sand with a bike, girlfriend and gear that in total weight 440kg. This is where the 5kg limit on my clothes and toiletries really came into play!

This day was a tough day riding, but we started to relax into it a little and as the day neared an end we started to look for a place to camp off this side of the road. On one hand it is beautiful scenary with absolute silence that you can enjoy, but at the same time it is very scary being so ar from anything! Just as we calmed ourselves about sleeping off the road, our petrol light came on - about 100km early! We spent that night (our 2 year anniversay mind you!) stressing about not being able to get to the next cattle station where we would camp for night 2... Moral here is that when working that hard, motoribikes can use double their normal fuel consumption!

Thankfully we had hired a satellite phone and on calling the station in the morning a lovely lady called sarah announced that 'shit happens' and started driving to meet us. Not only did she bring 15 litres of petrol, but cold cans of coke and homebaked apple muffins - the land is harsh but the locals are definitely not! She assured us it wasn't far to their station and we said our goodbye..

We continued on our way - Tille now really becoming a pro in the sand, corrugations and bull dust fields (these are hideous - large holes in the ground full of slippery fine, red sand - sometimes as about 50m long and the width of the whole road) when the bike decided to stop all together! Keeping calm we checked out the fuses and battery and then a man came along who had gear to check the battery and announced it was flat, tried to jump start us but she was really dead... So - thanks to the sat phone again we rang the RAA who organised for someone to get us. The woman on the phone had huge trouble getting her head around the fact that we were 380km out of Alice Springs and that there was no closer town... Should add that the fact someone came along to help was a miracle, sometimes it is a day between cars on this road!

Some 6 hours later we were watching down a dark road, commenting on how nice the moon was and trying not to fear the sound of cattle hooves in the dark all around us when finally the tow truck appeared over the hill like something from a crazy film... SO thankful that Micheal had come to save us from the peace and serenity of the outback, we loaded the bike on the back of the truck (this took some time, hard to tie a bike onto a flat backed truck!) and jumped in.

Little did we know the adventure was just beginning - Micheal had been driving for 12 hours when he got to us and was a little tired, he spent the trip back nodding off and leaving us to yell to keep him awake and keep talking to him in an effort to keep us on the road. I could write for hours about this man, smoking over an open diesel fuel tank, his days of youth and drinking in hindley street, driving at 80km/hr on a bonkers road, swerving to miss kangaroos and then 130km on the bitumen home... but all I should say is just imagine the type of person that drives tow trucks on hideous roads for a living, thinking nothing of a nearly 800km round trip!

At 3.30am we rolled (flew) into Alice and were left with our dead bike at a hotel (thank you RAA premium) where we drank a beer and had the best shower ever..

The bike is now fixed, she had a dead battery because the mechanics in Adelaide put some crappy battery in her that she should never have had, nice...

Tomorrow we head south - the adrenalin, adventure and cost of getting towed and then fixing the bike has done us in and Western Australia will just have to wait for next time.. Must say, it will be nice to see the SA border once we've been to Kings Canyon and Uluru...

Do we regret it? .................................Not for a second...