For 6-8 weeks bike rental can be quite hard on the wallet. I note you are not keen on buy back and I can understand as it may be a little difficult to organise from a distance. A bit of personal experience - I was motoring around New Zealand and decided to enquire about motorcycle rental. I went to one place that did servicing for a couple of bike rental firms (North Island). They were good people and their advice to me was "call me two or three weeks ahead of your trip and we can discuss the second hand bikes we have in stock. Tell me the distance you will travel and I will work out the cost of the bike and the repurchase price. On the figures he gave me the cost was about half the rentsl cost.

I recently shipped my bike to NZ to ride around for a while and met up with an English chap who bought a 700cc Kawasaki (fairly new) and had a contract with the dealer for repurchase (he organised this from the UK). The figure quoted worked out to be a little over half the rental rate. I contacted him after we both went back to out respective countries and he had no issues with the buy back. Dealer was keen to see he had not dropped the bike and so gave the agreed price no questions. (Keep in mind if you hire a bike and drop it the cost is also about $2500NZ).

Now for Aus. Phone calls are not expensive (certainly not with a Canadian VOX phone card from my experience) so it may be worthwhile just working out your entry city and looking for dealers of the brand you are interested in and cold calling.

I tried to get a bike in Vancouver to ride to the HU meeting in BC in August last year. Hire bikes were hard to get (all booked out) and the dealer suggested a buy/repurchase is worth looking at. The time I had was short and accommodation was almost all booked out at that time and so I did not go ahead.

My thoughts

All the best