[Original post by Elliot Mogerman – Transferred from yahoogroups.com]
Riding north to port Douglas we encountered many types of different environments within a short amount of time. This northeastern territory is a third tropical rainforest, third desert, third beach front and half man bear pig. It was a beautiful ride with great picturesque views. The ride smelled like fruit in the morning with all the crops of pineapple, bananas, mangos, etc. Today, we saw and dodged hundreds of kangaroos from small quick ones, to slow ones larger than us. There was a wild board snacking on a carcass in the middle of the road. Mike decapitated a bird on the freeway and it exploded into a circle of feathers. The temp was around 107 and humid as hell. At the end of the day we found a campsight and Mike said he was glad not to be dodging roos anymore. Then when we pulled into the campsight there were tons of kangaroos we had to ride through until we found our spot. I am finding it increasingly difficult to work out at night in the heat and humidity after dripping sweat all day. In the tents at night, it is so hot, no wind or breezes, and we are just sweating all night and day non stop. On our way to Alice Springs, in the middle of the country, the temperature went from 116 to 65 in a few hours. It was a long day riding through swarms or locusts and grasshoppers. We camped in a site next to aboriginal people’s homes. They were up all night, drunk, yelling at each other like a cops show on tv. Then playing their music all night long, it was hard to sleep soundly. Lots of flocks of birds while we ride. There was one group of bright green smaller birds that looked very cool.
We stayed at a best western in alice springs and met the owners. We had some dinner and drinks with them and a few miners in the city. The next day we took a bus tour to Ayers rock, or known as Uluru. This is the largest rock formation in Aussie. The aboriginals have a zillion children’s stories about the rock that are super funny. We had dinner, drank Champaign and watched the sunset. They provided a dinner that was fairly good and best thing was we didn’t have to ride back and forth to the rock. Tomorrow we head to Darwin up north. My eye is a little red today and hopefully just has a lot of dust in it.