Dear motorcyclists, long-range travelers and enduro bikies!
After reading some of your articles about your motorcycle adventures around the world, I’m happy to tell you that it is, also for me, time to get up and start a 3 month trip with my Enduro or long-range motorbike.

My dream comes now true and I will travel with my motorbike through southern Australia starting early 2012.
Australia (lat. Terra Australis). Once across the fifth mainland – starting from the south-eastern Melbourne in Victoria, passing by the Uluru in the heart of Australia as well as the sunburned outback, continuing to the west coast and Perth in Western Australia. A mainland, nearly 23 times bigger than the landmass of Germany but inhabited by only a quarter of the population of Germany. A land where about 80% of the population live in a maximum distance of 60km from the sea and where on a double land mass of Denmark only 86 permanent residents are living, and that even more only in the colder wintertime.

A land that should combine the advantages of Europe with the adventure of Africa.

For that journey, I have 3 months available where I will probably drive about 16,000 kilometers.

I have prepared a Blog, in which you can accompany myself (if you like), see my travel success as well as the experiences I will gain during that trip.

My Blog contains two sections:

- one is the information part, which is located on the top of the page.
Here you can find some, hopefully useful, general information about the trip preparations like, shipment of the bike, preparation and modifications of my motorcycle and its equipment, the storage and pannier system as well as my camping stuff.

- Further, you will find the blog itself with all the articles, a history about older articles, some links to useful pages and of course some pictures.
May be there is one of you mates who is interested in following Terra Australis – An adventure with a motorbike - ? I would really like it ;-)
If so, you can find my blog under Terra Australis | - Ein Abenteuer mit dem Motorrad -.

Unfortunately, this blog is currently only available in German. I am planning to implement the Google-translator soon. This useful and easy to use tool should simply and quickly translate German into another languages (that you have chosen). Unfortunately, I have at the moment some problems in implemeting the google tool. I would really appreciate if anyone could provide help ;-).

If you would like to be informed about new articles immediately when they were published, then you can enter your e-mail address in the newsletter on the right part of the page. You only need to enter your e-mail address in the field of the newsletter „Folgt dem Travel-Bug“, afterwards confirm your email address in the email that you will receive from Wordpress (if you do not got the Email within 1hour please have a look in your spam filter of your email provider to adapt the settings) and you will be a part of the Terra-Australis-family.

In case you should have questions, comments, travel-tips, I would appreciate it if you would drop me a message. Please send it to travel_bug(at)me.com or just post it here in the forum.
My apologies in advance that replies may take longer than usually (you will surely understand that there may not be regular internet access when traveling through the outback).
And now, go and have fun with me on Terra Australis, the unknown land in the south.

Take care
fellow-traveller alias Carsten

Safe traveling in my home country. When do you leave?

Will you take your own motorbike (with Carnet) or will you buy one in Australia?

I hope you know to take extra fuel and water in remote places and that you notify appropriate authorities of your intentions especially if you leave main roads and highways in the outback.

It's a big country/continent and as you rightly pointed out there are a lot of uninhabited regions meaning no help or support if you break-down.

NB. It will be very very hot in the outback until about May, so be prepared for +40 degrees.

__________________
TurboCharger + Francois (our BMW R1200gs) '07
www.riding2up.net, blog.riding2up.net

Keep an eye on weather reports, its the wet season in the North of the country and roads can become impassable very quickly - usualy up to mid February. The south of the country should be fine; just watch out for the wild criters on the road

Enjoy your ride

Hi Mates,

thank you for the posts.
I’ll start the journey, hopefully, on 3rd on January 2012. This time point depends mainly whether I will have big problems at the customs or with quarantine or not. I hope that I’m well prepared and avoid any problems with the temporary import of my enduro bike under the Carnet. As you can read, I took my own motorbike to Australia (by the way, it is currently in Freemantle and should arrive on 15th of Dec. in Melbourne. So if anybody is, on that date, around in the port of Melbourne, I would really appreciate if you could shoot a picture of the container ship "TEGESOS" – LooooL. This would guarantee you a , of course - free of charge ;-)))).

Regarding extra fuel:
I have a fuel tank with 43L capacity, this should be sufficient enough for min. 450km and therefore for most cases. For rides in remote areas or for safety reasons, I‘ve considered two extra fuel canisters with a capacity of three Liter each.

Regarding water:
For rides through the hot outback, I’ll have three bags filled with five Liter of water each. Furthermore, I will carry three additional Liters on my back.

Yep, it will be hot in the outback. However, if it is toooo uncomfortable – I will change my route and will head to “colder” areas ;-)

Please Note: You can find now a link to the - Google Direct Translation - tool. Consequently, the blog is now “available and readable” in English. Although the translation is sometimes word by word and makes accordingly no sense, it is readable (in most cases).




Cheers
Carsten

Nice bike