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[ ]The Trouble With Summer By David Williams
He mailed me back, "Phil, about those shits, try two tablespoons of Gravox, it may not cure them but it should thicken things up. Failing that, I'm doing a ride out to Ravenshoe with some real mad pricks, its gunna be a hoot. Good luck in your search for a cure and cheers big ears." Bugger the Gravox, I ran straight out the door and jumped on the first flying kangaroo heading north. Flying to a far away destination to ride motorbikes might sound a bit indulgent but if you keep an eye out for specials, you could be looking at ninety bucks each way from some eastern capitals. Besides, I love airports; there's beautiful people, ugly people, heaps of Japanese and sometimes dairy farmers in their very best King Gees. Sorry, sometimes when I get a bit excited, things start rhyming. The wet season had just begun in Cairns and the plane went into a series of swaps as it ploughed through the storm clouds on the landing approach. A mother behind me was reassuring her daughter that it was all OK. I gripped the arm rests and hoped like hell she was right Dave met me at the airport and put me up at his place which was mighty Christian of him and the next day we loaded up the Fair Dinkum Hiace and headed west for Ravenshoe on the far side of the Atherton Tablelands. About ten K's from town we drove past Windy Hill Wind Farm and no, it's not a drying out clinic for bean eaters. Around a dozen wind generators stand starkly on a lush green hill. They'd have to be around five stories high and their three fingered turbines sliced through the thick table land fog with a hiss I could hear from the car window. I put my eyes back on the road before they made me giddy. Dave explained how Ravenshoe was once a big logging town but it was all shut down some time ago. "What do they do now?" I asked "Grow dope" We weren't actually going on a tour, but more a survey ride and the real mad pricks were a couple of locals who were going to show us around. Graeme Kelly was a fit looking truckie on a blue 450 but it was Mitch who had me worried. His blue 400 had the look of a mount that had been flogged mercilessly and to make matters worse, he had a day job as a bloody shark fisherman. Dave unloaded a friendly little TTR 250, which I thought was for me. It wasn't to be though and despite my protests I ended up on a Fair Dinkum fire breathing WR 450. After spending the last half decade on DR 650's, I couldn't get over how skinny it was. It was skinny as a sliprail, it was skinny as a cat, it was skinny as a model in a funny little hat… er, ahem. The real mad pricks led the show out, travelling faster than a cat with it's tail stuck in a milking machine fan belt, (not that I'd know what that looks like), Dave followed at a similar pace leaving me to shake my head and do my best to keep them in sight. Every creek, gully and crevice was running a banker as we headed out through Glen Gordon Station. The upper Herberton River blocked our path, running wide, brown and fast but Graeme found a crossing upstream then led us on to some amazing rock formations with early aboriginal art. A lot of the track was little more than a cattle pad and I got the feeling that not too many people came this way. Further down the river we checked out a deserted tin dredge the size of a six story building before pulling into the polling booths at Innot Hot Springs for the state election. If you want to have a say in life you must enroll to vote, anyone who doesn't is a pointless flamin' goat. Dave has put a fair bit of work into the suspension on the 450 but I was finding it a bit daunting as we rode the rocky trail over Mount Misery. The fellas were getting away on me though so I crossed myself and opened it up on a long rocky uphill. The revs continued to build way past the point where I thought the redline should have been but suddenly it all came together and the Yamaha literally floated over the rubble. This was a bike hand built to go fast but my chances of staying upright for much longer at these speeds were slim, verging on anorexic. Thankfully I impacted the front tube and the show ground to a halt before it all ended in tears. We pulled into the pretty little town of Irvinbank for lunch where a flooded creek had cut the place in half. Dave explained how this was once a booming mining town but now it was all shut down. "What do they do now?" I asked. "Grow dope." The Copper from Herberton pulled up and the real mad pricks began to mutter as their bikes were suffering a distinct lack of indicators. Cut me legs off and call me shorty if he wasn't a good bloke though and within minutes he had me dry heaving my toasted sandwich with some of the gory things he'd done in the line of duty. The derelict Vulcan mineshaft, apparently the deepest in Australia, is just out of town and peering cautiously over it's edge gave me a bad case of headspins. From here we headed for Watsonville then onto a washed out snotty mongrel of a track that ran beneath the powerlines. This was truly wild country and as we paused on a ridgetop beneath the crackling power lines I pondered how they'd managed to even carry the materials out here, let alone build these huge steel structures. Graeme explained how it had all been done with choppers and six wheel drive trucks. We pulled out onto the twisty granite Silver Valley Road and dodged the roos back to Graeme's place for a beer. The rain began to bucket and as his veranda was the only shelter around, we shared it with a couple of horses, some poddy calves and a chook. It was getting late so Dave and I headed into the Ravenshoe Pub for a countery and a bit of a yarn. He's fitted a fair bit into his life; after a quick stint in the army he tried aerial shooting, drilling blast holes and driving haul out trucks in the mines and even worked in the baggage section for Ansett beside the drug sniffing dogs. Now there's a job, (the dogs that is). He finally settled down running bike tours out of Cairns and while it was slow at first, things are really starting to take off for him. Yamaha has helped greatly here with support after Stephen Gall and Lyndon Heffernan went on a ride with Dave and after speaking to the boys in blue with some kind words he hasn't looked back. The next day we were joined by Mitch's brother Cam, the maddest prick of all. Overnight rain had raised the creeks even higher and we were taking Red Road to Coombooloomba Dam on the greasiest clay known to man. I wasn't worried though because today I was on the little TTR. It was like climbing aboard an old friend and the broad comfy seat sat beneath my buttocks rather than between them. We started the day in thick timber with plenty of trees down and Mitch and Cam were going for gold, sometimes on the front wheel, sometimes on the back, but never on both. Coombooloomba Dam is around fifteen kilometres long and supplies hydro-electricity for most of North Queensland. Despite all the flooding, the wet season had only just begun and it was still pretty empty. The rain just kept on falling until finally the TTR spat me off on a greasy off camber and sent me sliding down the hill on my back. For the first ten metres I thought "This is pretty fun, weee!" After a few more I'd had enough and threw out the anchors but this slippery dip wasn't letting me off till the bottom. I'd put a few scuff marks in the plastics but Dave's got a pretty good policy on breakages and put these down as fair wear and tear. From here we took the H road onto an old enduro track in the wild high country of Glen Gordon Station. Mitch and Cam spotted a pig and gave chase and within fifty metres the thick scrub had swallowed them. "They find their way back?" asked Dave. Graeme nodded and we pushed on. The ground was hard to read; would there be traction or would it be grease? By this stage I had eyes like a barn owl and my heart was pumping out a techno beat that would have filled a dance floor. Back at Graeme's we loaded up the bikes, had an obligatory fourex and bailed as I had a plane to catch. While there was some pretty good scenery on this trip, it was more of a challenge than some of the Fair Dinkum tours to the north and as Dave explained, it's a ride for riders rather than tourists. Dave is running an add in this issue which may lead the more cynical reader to the conclusion that I've made him look good because he's an advertiser… not so. Dave is a top operator with a well maintained fleet of Yamaha bikes. As a bush mechanic, he's right up there with that long lanky mongrel from Dalby and he has the people skills to make everyone feel welcome, from an ex enduro gun on a legends ride, through to a backpacker on a learners permit who wants to ride formed roads and maybe see a kangaroo. Why not check his web site and see what Gally has to say about him. I'd recommend him one hundred percent, in fact, if you're itching for a ride so bad it's like you've got some nits, a weekend ride with Dave is one Fair Dinkum cure for shits! 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