Well, I’ve been back in Brisbane for about a week now. The first thing I needed to do when I got into town was to get my bike cleaned up. When I was at the Tamworth Motorcycle Museum, I met Mark, and he and his wife Michelle let me stay at their place for a couple days and use their garage and pressure washer.


If there’s one thing I don’t like about motorcycles, it’s cleaning them. And this time around, it was a lot more boring than the two days of cleaning that happened in Dili…First off, in Dili, my buddy Ben and I were cleaning our bikes together…having someone to drink beer and talk shit with throughout the process made it a heck of a lot more enjoyable. Another thing that helped the process in Dili was that you could find a guy washing motorbikes for $1.50 or so, and he at least got a lot of the big cleaning taken care of before we went over all the little details.
Oh well, I’m sure those couple boring days will be totally worth it when I get into New Zealand.

While I was in the middle of the cleaning process, I also installed some new footpegs. IMS Products developed these new pegs specific for big adventure bikes and sent me a pair to try out.

Installing them was as simple as can be, but unfortunately, I won’t get a chance to try them out until I get to NZ. I’ll report back once I get a few miles on them…I think they’re going to be great on rough dirt roads, when lots of standing up is necessary.
As you can see, they’re a TON bigger than the stock pegs.

So, I got the bike all cleaned up and dropped off down at the wharf. The boat should leave on the 21st, and it’s first going through Sydney and Melbourne, then it’ll unload in Auckland on the 29th. Quite a few people have requested info on how the whole Australia/NZ shipping route works out…I’ll have a post up on it (costs, contacts, processes, etc) once the whole thing is finished up and I have the bike back in Auckland.

I had a few more days to hang out in Brisbane, which was spent walking around the city…

 

going to a show…

getting creeped out by statues…

and selling cheese and yogurt at the local farmer’s market…

And tomorrow, I’m off to Auckland…I’ll have about a week to explore the city and make a rough plan for my route through the north island before my bike shows up.