And so Geoff and Colin arrive back home to the sirens of the motorcycle police flanked by a band of bikers from the Quay Vipers Club and to the strains of Waltzing Matilda playing under the shade of the Adelaide inflatable finish line. A fitting end to a scorching adventure marked in true style by our friends from Adelaide Insurance Services. You can check out the speechifying here and stayed tuned for the book and the dvd coming out later this year, because you really haven’t heard the half of what went on -- sign up for more updates by entering your email address on the homepage (if you haven’t already done so) and thanks so much for following Adelaide to Adelaide -- the first of the Adelaide Adventures…A big thanks to all our sponsors and to everyone who helped us along the way.

The Adelaide Adventures Team.

It had, I thought that evening as we sat down in a pub in Clare to bangers and mash washed down with pints of foaming ale, been the strangest of adventures.

The previous ones, from Delhi to Belfast on an Enfield, Chicago to Los Angeles on Route 66 riding a Harley, and Chile to Alaska on a Triumph, had all involved a destination, but this time the destination had been exactly where we had started.

On the previous ones, too, I had written and filed a story and pictures every single day, whereas this time it had been a mere once a week to the Mirror and the Irish Times.

But to replace that pressure had been the pressure of filming, blogging, juggling a diminishing budget and dealing with the logistics and management of a larger team than before, including all the personality problems that involved. Like when we all had to sit down and have a good talk about staying positive.

Or when Paul the cameraman had arrived for the second half of the trip and found it almost impossible to cope with the demands of filming and driving all day in intense heat and humidity, yet gone on to overcome them in admirable fashion.

Or, indeed, coping with my own problems from being so far away from home for so long, struggling to keep my temper and patience at times, and struggling even harder with the daily battle we all face, that act of will to keep hope one step ahead of despair.

At lunchtime the next day, we finally rolled past the Adelaide city limits, and parked in exactly the same spot outside the same apartments we had left from.

There was even the same girl on reception, to add to the surreal sense that it had all been a dream.

Except for the fact that all afternoon I wandered around with my mouth open at sights I had not seen for the past three months.

Delicatessens! Day spas! Fashion shops! People wearing suits! Restaurants! And not just restaurants, but Thai, Mexican, Indian, Tibetan, Kashmiri and Nepalese ones.

At a place called Kimba in South Australia, we halted to take a picture of a giant galah, but then we managed to get Geoff out of shot so we could get a photo of the big parrot.
Our next break was at Iron Knob, as we just couldn’t resist.
It is the birthplace of the Aussie steel industry, as the knob itself was almost pure iron ore.
As mature adventurers, we felt beholden to crack some puerile knob jokes, many featuring rust, before decamping for a last blast to Port Augusta.
This was meant to be our last night in the bush, for tomorrow, it was Adelaide and the end of our long run.
As it turned out we had one more final night out in the country, as with the chaos caused by the Icelandic volcano eruption, we hadn’t yet heard from our airline and so had no date to fly.
Rather than rush into Adelaide we detoured to the Clare Valley, a famous wine growing region.
The explorer Horrocks is buried there and as Geoff was tickled by his tale, we stopped at his grave and monument so he could pay tribute.
Clare town is right next to the Armagh valley settlement, so we felt right at home, and it seemed fitting that we spent our last day roaming around familiar place names.
Spotting an Irish tricolour flying at a small country pub, we decided to investigate and learned that the Irish had come here in force over the past 200 years, and become heavily involved in the wine business. The barman displayed one bottle from the vineyard of a local maker called James Barry.
‘$270’ he said casually.
‘What $2.70? said Hill, still reeling from his experience at the Voyager winery in WA.
‘No, $270, though you can get some for around $190.’
Geoff picked himself up off the floor and acted like a carpenter, that is, he made a bolt for the door.
I put the bottle down very carefully and, as they say in the journalism trade, made our excuses and left.
The next day, we were suddenly in Adelaide.
It was something of a culture shock, as one minute we were sailing through rolling sheep and wheat country and the next caught up in heavy traffic heading into the city on a three-lane freeway.
The Adelaide Adventure was over. We pulled in elated, but at the same time deflated and with those mixed feelings chewing around inside us, congratulated each other on making it all the way around.

At Nundroo, after the featureless plains of the Nullarbor, came the first signs of civilisation: wheat fields, little windmills pumping water from the soaks below, then farms and houses. Well, only one, to be honest, but you have to start somewhere.

Suddenly, late in the golden afternoon, we crested a rise to be smacked in the face by a cool sea breeze, and 20 minutes later had descended to the coast at Ceduna, the first town we had seen in the five days it had taken us to cross the Nullarbor.

Edward John Eyre, the first man to cross this desolate plain in 1840 and 1841 from east to west, had taken five months in a trek which saw the deaths of three of his party and left Eyre and his native tracker Wylie cresting a similar rise at the other side of the Nullarbor to see the little settlement of Albany, where they had long been given up for dead.

As they stood looking down at the houses of the town in howling wind and rain, Eyre wept as he looked back on the horrendous crossing, and wrote later in his diary: “The contrast between the circumstances under which I had commenced and terminated my labours stood in strong relief before me.

“The gay and gallant cavalcade that accompanied me on my way at starting, the goodly array of horses and drays, with all their well-ordered appointments and equipment, were conjured up in all their circumstances of pride and pleasure; and I could not restrain a tear as I called to mind the…sad disasters that had broken up my party, and left myself and Wylie the two sole wanderers remaining at the close of an undertaking entered upon under such hopeful auspices.”

Compared to Eyre, and even Winifred, our troubles had been paltry, but he was not the explorer I wanted to pay homage to before we arrived in Adelaide.

No, that was John Ainswsorth Horrocks, whose grave lies in Penwortham, a smattering of houses huddled around a church for comfort..

On the way there is Wirrulla, which was preceded for miles by signs saying Wirrulla: The Town With a Secret.

“Here, what’s Wirrulla’s secret?” I said to a large and cheery woman emerging from the grocery store with a melon and a leg of pig.

“If I told you, it wouldn’t be a secret, would it?” she grinned, getting into a dusty white ute and driving off.

The next morning, after a night at the venerable Flinders Hotel in Port Agusta, we rode south, frozen solid by the rain and wind of the approaching winter.

On our left rose the sullen lump of Mount Remarkable, presumably named with the same sense of irony with which redheads in Australia are invariably called Blue. Alongside the road, meanwhile, ran a pipeline which I naturally assumed was transporting pies from the great pie mines of central Australia, but which sadly turned out to contain only gas.

On the stroke of noon, we dismounted in Penwortham, walked up a grassy path past the little church, and found ourselves standing before the grave of Horrocks, who set forth from these parts in July 1846 to find good pastoral land.

From the very start, his expedition was prescient proof of W C Fields’ later adage that you should never work with children or animals.

Particularly animals: first the goats took great delight in leaping on the tent and eating it. Then Harry, a psychotic camel who was the first of his species to be used on an Australian expedition, tried to eat one of the goats, bit Garlick the tent-keeper, who was presumably wandering around redundant since he had no tent to keep, and chewed to bits the precious bags of flour.

As if that wasn’t enough, one evening as Horrocks was dismounting, Harry lurched to one side and discharged Horrocks’ gun, which was rather unfortunately pointing at Horrocks at the time.

Harry was subsequently shot, although it took two bullets to kill him and he bit a stockman on the head before succumbing, Horrocks died of his wounds two weeks later, and 164 years later, we stood in mute homage before the plain grey cross and matching slab which marks the last resting place of the only explorer in history to be shot by his own camel.

I had half hoped that alongside it would be a grassy hump marking the spot where Harry had been buried standing up next to his arch enemy, bit it was not to be, so we got back on the bikes and rode the few miles into Clare, a pleasant little town where the contrasts of Australia yet again surprised me.

Half an hour north of here, we had been riding through endless grassy plains with no sign of life in any direction, and yet here we were ensconced in a little pub, with rooms upstairs, a roaring fire against the late autumn chill, and a bottle of Black Bush beckoning from behind the bar.

Truly, this country is a land of wilderness interrupted by tiny outposts of civilisation, and after so much of the former, today we were most glad of the latter.

The longest stretch of straight road in the world finishes at a roadhouse at a place called Caiguna where the locals seemed friendly and there was an extensive menu on offer 24 hours a day.
We decided to call it quits there and took a room at the adjoining hotel.
After Geoff finally managed to get the right key – and discovered he’d accidentally purloined the key to his room in Norseman, we settled into our room.
It is the second key Geoff has managed to nick so far, leading us to suspect he may be a closet – or front door – kleptomaniac.
There was not much to do but work, but the footy was on the telly, we had beer and hamburgers, so survival was assured.
It turned out the footy wasn’t on – curses, but the burgers were good, so we settled for watching From Russia With Love, or at least half of it before we all passed out.
Apparently then I took Geoff on in a snoring competition, driving Paul to distraction and forcing him to abandon his bed in the middle of the night for the quiet of Matilda, so we don’t know who came out on top as there was no independent judge.
Next morning we had a chat with a young biker on a Kawasaki Ninja who had stayed with his mate a couple of doors down.
They lived just down the road at Cocklebiddy, and came up for the night to drink beer and see their girlfriends who worked at the roadhouse.
They were having beer for breakfast, before they headed off down the road, the mate driving and his pal screaming off on the Ninja wearing just jeans, trainers and a singlet, making my skin creep at the thought of what would happen if he fell off.
We passed them a while later in a layby, having yet another beer, as it seems the drink-driving stigma hasn’t permeated this far into the desert as yet.
Then they roared past us, the bike doing around 200kms with the mate in the car just behind going a lttle slower. We passed them once more standing on the side of a dam, beers in hand, waving. Guess that’s what counts as a big weekend out in Cocklebiddy.
We stopped there to fuel up, and headed on once more.
Along the road I noticed a strange phenomenon – various articles of attire hanging from dead trees.
One was covered in hats, another in what were once t-shirts but were now rags, yet another in what appeared to be women’s underwear. Yet another mystery of the Nullarbor.
As we were once more on unfenced roads, we passed signs warning of camels, cattle, ‘roos and emus, but nary a one appeared, which was a bit disappointing as we would have quite liked to see some camels.
Australia now has more wild camels than anywhere else in the world, the descendants of those released or which escaped from explorers and camel drivers working on the railroad and telegraph. Some are now sold back to the Middle East for racing as the ones here are thought to be the best quality in the world, having been toughened by years in the bush and virtually disease free.
All of a sudden we came upon the Madura Pass, where the flat plain suddenly drops away towards the Great Australian Bight, offering an astounding view of the plain from above. It looks like the Serengeti, minus the herds of wildebeest.
At Madura roadhouse a Toyota people carrier stood abandoned, its front end destroyed after hitting a kangaroo, showing just how much damage the animals can do if you hit one.
We had our usual pie for lunch, $4.20 and quite tasty, followed by a totally surreal and slightly worrying argument over who sang a certain ‘80s power ballad playing over the PA, which we then dragged the locals into.
Leaving with our manly biker credentials in tatters, we roared off, trying to recoup some street cred.
Our stop for tonight was Eucla, where the east-west telegraph was joined back in 1877.
Eucla was once closer to the coast but the town was abandoned and built four kilometres further inland after the coastal sand dunes buried it. Only the old telegraph station emerges periodically from the sand, standing forlornly in the dunes with only the wild camels and passing tourists for company.
So far, I was a little disappointed in the Nullarbor, as it was nothing like it had been when I last passed through here. Back then it was nothing but arid desert, hardly a bush or tree, looking like the surface of Mars, with rocks the only thing to look at. After all the recent rain it was now green, and trees, though small, were plentiful.
While it certainly made for an easier trip with more to look at, I couldn’t help feeling a little cheated that the mighty Nullarbor we had been almost dreading was proving to be a bit of a doddle. There are also many more roadhouses and fuel stops than there used to be, lessening the sense of challenge and conquest. Still, all things must change and it seems even the desert can be tamed

The Nullarbor Desert creeps up on you.

From Albany through Esperance and on to Norseman, the landscape changes from forest and vine to woodland and scrub, then to wheat fields so vast that after five of them I stopped saying: “Wow, that would make a good spot for a flying club”.

They are punctuated from time to time by farm entrances invariably marked by a pair of white tractor tyres or wagon wheels buried in the earth, below a sign saying Green Acres: Bob and Gayle Hunnicutt and Sons, or somesuch, and from time to time also by circular salt flats glittering in the sun.

I got off the bike and walked out to the middle of one, marvelling that until 80 years this land had been a dustbowl covered in these flats, until the Government rescued it from the dead, planting salt-friendly mulga trees to bind the soil, then gum, until at least it could be turned into wheat farms so productive that they not only supply all of Australia’s daily bread, but keep Asia topped up with its daily noodle as well.

Down a long road lined with plain trees which could have doubled for an avenue in Provence, we rolled into Norseman, named after the horse whose hoof turned up a nugget and sparked a gold rush, and before long were ensconced in the Railway Hotel, a magnificent art-deco gem which at the height of the gold rush would have charged a week’s wages for a room.

Today, it was owned by a Perth environmental scientist called Therese Wade, who had come out here to study the temperate forests, fallen in love with the building instead, bought it with her brother and was now painstakingly restoring it to its former glory with the help of a heap of optimism and a baffled Alsatian called Audrey.

Even better, it had become a magnet for adventurers, in the past month alone attracting two brothers walking across the country, and a microlight pilot who in attempting to fly the same route had come a cropper while trying to land on the salt flats.

We threw our bags in our rooms and went out to play golf for the afternoon on the world’s longest course: the Nullarbor Links, dreamed up by local businessman Alf Caputo and stretching for 800 miles across the desert, with one hole at each participating town or roadhouse along the way.

“Be careful of your balls, gentlemen,” said Evelyn at the tourist office when we picked up our clubs. “There’s a crow at one of the holes, and a dingo at another, who keep running off with them.”

Colin, being an anarchist by nature, had decided to spurn clubs and use a boomerang with a golf ball gaffer-taped to it; only to regret his decision when his gimcrack device turned out to have a range of about 30 yards, as a result of which I thrashed him at the first hole by a resounding nine  shots to 15.

Still, at least we both beat the hole’s par five by a healthy margin.

Frenchman’s Bay on the south west coast of Australia, like Esperance and the Archipelago of the Recherche east of there, is named after the Frenchmen and their ships whose presence in the area in the late 18^th and early 19^th Centuries forced the nervous British to hastily colonize the southwest in a bid to keep their hands on it.

One of those Frenchmen, funny enough, was the man who lost the arms of the Venus de Milo.

When Jules Dumont D’Urville bought the statue from a Greek peasant in 1810, she was in full possession of the limbs in question, only for them to be snapped off in the ensuing tussle over ownership between French and Turkish soldiers.

Where they ended up remains a mystery, but D’Urville ended up in these parts six years later and went on to explore much of the southern hemisphere, only to perish in a train crash in Versailles in 1842.

As for the Albany station, it has gone from being an Auschwitz for whales to a museum where you can follow the grim process of turning several hundred tons of live mammal with a heart the size of a car into several thousand dollars worth of blubber, oil, ivory, corsets, horsewhips, umbrella struts, animal feed and fertiliser.

Not to mention the aforementioned well-known perfume, Barf for Women. Because you’re worth it.

It was so gruesome that I had to ride like the clappers to the nearest new age shop, buy a CD of whales farting, and listen to it for an hour in a darkened room before I could face a beer. That’s how bad it was.

Anyway, I needed the beer, for we had been pampered too long by the soft life of the southwest, and were just about to make up for it by tackling the last and most horrendous stretch of Australia yet: the Nullarbor Desert.

Leaving Margaret River with sadness, we struck out for Pemberton and more amazing scenery among the giant karri trees, which rear hundreds of feet into the air.

Geoff and I stopped in the forest where the light filtering through the trees was amazing. We stood and listened to the silence which was almost total apart from the occasional bird announcing its presence, and then we ruined it all by acting the maggot by taking pictures of us hugging the monsters.

We passed through a hamlet called Karridale, where for some reason it appeared to still be Christmas, with life-size Santas decorating people’s driveways and tinsel draped over roadsigns.

One wag had named their house ‘Karri On’ but it seems the forests are still under some threat as we passed a makeshift camp of environmental protesters, known locally as ‘Greenies’ who were trying to stop part of the area being logged.

Halting in a little picturesque town called Nannup, we met a group of bikers from Albany out for a run.

They told us about some good rides and we swapped yarns about being out on the road before we headed back into the forests planning to stop for the night in a logging town called Pemberton.

Yet another old biker sitting at a café warned us about the giant ‘roos that also inhabit the forests.

‘There was one on my front lawn this morning, he was about six feet tall and he just looked back at me as if to say ‘Yeah – you want something?’. He didn’t even move so I just picked up my paper and left him to it.

‘Me and a mate saw one once that was even bigger than that – it was about six and a half feet. They are forest kangaroos and also live in the swamps, but move around to where there is fresh growth. They have a domed head so they can crash through the bush and you don’t want to run into one of those on the road.’

Pemberton turned out to be a charming little place, quiet now the Anzac Day holiday was over and Aussies batten down the hatches for the winter, as it is the last break until a long weekend in June and signals the real end to summer and its frivolities.

It had an almost alpine feel, and we scored a great little house which is let out by the local youth hostel to travellers as the main backpackers is reserved for workers doing their three months agricultural employment as part of the government requirement to gain their resident visas.

We had the place to ourselves apart from Mike, a gardener from Perth who was on a three-week solo walking holiday through the forests.

Originally from London, he’d lived in WA since his late teens and had now been an Aussie for around 30 years.

“I went back once, as you are always curious about how it has changed and have fond memories, but when I got there it was dirty and overcrowded and a real rat race.

‘I’d never go back now, this is my home and I love it – there’s just so much space and I love walking in the bush – the peace and the quiet and when you are walking you just see so much as the animals aren’t that scared of you.’

Geoff and I cooked up a marvellous Spanish omelette for dinner which we shared with Mike, had a few beers, watched a bit of telly and climbed wearily into bed, luxuriating in this rare snatch of domesticity.

On the way out of town the next morning we decided to go and see the Bicentennial Tree right in the heart of the karri forests.

It is a fire-lookout tree with a platform perched 75 metres or 230 feet above the ground, where rangers would keep an eye out for smoke from bushfires and then direct firefighters to the outbreak.

The platform was built to celebrate Australia’s 200th anniversary of European settlement, and was also a practical step, as despite the use of aircraft to spot fires, the traditional use of the big trees has made a comeback as a less expensive and lower-tech way to do the same job just as accurately, if not more so.

The platform is reached by climbing a staircase made out of steel spikes driven into the trunk of the tree, with just some chicken wire acting as a balustrade and nothing beneath should you put a foot wrong.

Geoff and I eyed it warily.

‘I’m not climbing that’ he said bravely.

“I get vertigo when I stand up’.

I also demurred, pointing out that motorcycle boots were not designed for climbing trees, otherwise they would be called ‘climbing giant trees boots’, so it was left to Paul to rescue our reputation and off he went.

We lost sight of him about halfway up, but he made it to the top and climbed into the hut on top, which ways around two tonnes, showing the strength of these monsters, and which also moves around four feet from side to side in the wind.

It’s quite amazing that in this day and age of the nanny state and ridiculous health and safety rules that anyone can just turn up and take their life in their hands.

A typical blunt Aussie notice at the bottom warned people that when it was wet, the steel rods got slippery, and it was more difficult if it was howling a gale, and that was pretty much it, so go for your life, as they say over here. No ranger, no supervision, and nobody to hold your hand.

I wouldn’t have minded the climb up, it is the coming back down that bothers me as you can’t see where you are going, and despite having done many bungy jumps, abseiling and been suspended from helicopters, there is something about climbing things without a rope tied around me that plays into my primitive respect for heights.

As Paul finally made it down, we gave him a round of applause and were further humbled by the sight of a 10-year-old French girl and her mother scampering up the tree like Gallic monkeys, chattering away the whole time without a care in the world.

After faking a picture of me around four metres above the ground, we took our wounded pride and slunk away.

At Margaret River Surf School, I would finally get to show off my prowess on a board. As it was, I turned out to be crap – too unfit, fat and out of practice. My only consolation was the Geoff was even worse and drank half the Indian Ocean for breakfast, which made its way back during the entire day via his nose.

Our instructor Jarrad, a former Australian short board champion, did his best, but it was a hopeless cause and he advised me to buy a time machine to go back to the days of my youth.

Still, it was wonderful to be back out on a board in warm water again as the last time I was out was off Co Donegal and the water was so cold I had to bring a hammer to crack the surface before I could get in.

I felt my old skills were coming back with practice and got up for a few short rides, but after what seemed like about 20 minutes, Jarrad informed us it was last wave time as we had been in the water two hours.

Starving, we headed back to camp for breakfast/lunch, with cold pizza from the night before my chosen delicacy, as after being surfing you will eat anything and everything, and it all tastes like the best thing you have ever put in your gob.

Then we headed off to visit the Voyager vineyard, one of the most famous Margaret River wineries.

It’s an impressive place with manicured lawns and perfect gardens. When I say manicured, I mean it as they employ 11 gardeners and we reckoned they all must get out with nail scissors to do the lawns, as there As both of us were suffering from various muscle strains from our surfing exploits, we decided to taste everything, feeling that might work better than painkillers.

Mr Hill showed off his pretentious side coming up with all kinds of poncy wine terms, and telling Britta, who was us feeding plonk at a rate of knots that he was thinking of buying ‘a few bottles’.

‘Here, drongo, which ones did you like, as I’m going to get a couple for dinner?’

‘I think they might be a bit pricey, me old corkscrew, as she was talking about ‘lying them down’ and all that, so if you do get some, you might want to take them home for a special occasion.

‘Bugger that, life’s too short’ and off he went.

I then heard the following exchange: ‘Britta, me old grapevine, how much is it for the savignon blanc, the shiraz and the merlot?’

‘The sauvignon is $35, the shiraz $45 and the merlot $65.’

‘Err, I’ll just go and confer with my colleague to see what he prefers,’ he said, visibly blanching, before going and hiding behind a very tall wine rack, looking like he needed ‘lying down’ himself.

Chuckling, I went back to my glossy magazine ‘Wine for drongos who have no money and can’t taste the difference anyway’ – much more in my league.

We then snuck out while Britta’s back was turned, the cowards that we are.