I'm safely here in Darwin after two 500 mile rides north from Alice Springs.  Once again I was amazed at how quickly the landscape changed from the low scrub around Alice to the lush tropical vegetation and billabongs around Darwin.  The downside of the tropics is that it's about 95 degrees and 90 percent humidity here in Darwin.  I guess I better get used to it as I'm moving on to Southeast Asia soon!

 Speaking of moving on, I've been in contact with several companies about shipping the bike.  I have options for shipping by sea or by air.  While shipping by sea is much cheaper (about $700) I'm also constrained by the ship's sailing schedule, which puts the bike in Singapore around June 10.  If I ship by air I have much more flexibility in the dates but it will cost considerably more (about $900-$1400 depending on who I talk to).  I'm going to decide which way to ship within the next couple of days.

 In preparation for SE Asia, I mounted a new rear tire here in Darwin.  My old tire probably had 500-1,000 miles left on it, but it will be more difficult to get a tire in SE Asia, and I won't be able to find a quality tire there.  Here I was able to find a Metzeler Sahara 3, which was the original equipment tire on my bike when it was shipped from Germany.  This is a good performing tire that's also tubeless.  In SE Asia I probably would only have found a tube-type tire of much lower quality.  The downside of this tire is that I'll probably only get about 4,000 miles out of the Sahara tire, but that should get me through SE Asia where I'll have to get a new tire(s) in Bangkok before shipping the bike to Nepal.

 I still haven't figured out where the gas is leaking from my right side carb.  The difficulty in finding the leak is that it only leaks when I travel over 110 km/hour.  It's very hard to inspect the carb when traveling at those speeds :-)  I've checked a few things but I've found no obvious culprit.  I heard there's a new BMW dealer here in Darwin so I'm going to stop there to see if they have any ideas.  I'll see if they have a few gaskets and o-rings that might be the problem.

 I can't believe that my Australia ride is over.  I covered about 5,200 miles in Australia in about 21 days.  I burned up one rear tire and performed one oil/filter change.  The bike ran well, except for the mystery gas leak.

 Even though my ride here is finished, I still have planned some tours of the area that I'm looking forward to.  I've been researching tours out to Kakadu Park from Darwin, and I'll probably do one of the tours early next week.  Then I'll fly to Bali for a few days while the bike is in transit.

 As I hoped, Australia was a good place to start my tour.  The roads here are decent, and the people speak english (or something similar to english :-) making it fairly easy for me to get around.  I was also able to find vegetarian food in most places.  All this made it much easier for me to start my trip here, rather than in SE Asia for example.  Now that I'm properly adjusted to travel, I'm looking forward to the next more difficult stages!

 Talk to you soon.

 Story