Alan has a death wish and a new sport is born

Wednesday the 3^rd of November 2010

We went on the Cairns and Atherton Tableland ride that is promoted in the Harley Owners Group 2010 Touring Handbook Australia & New Zealand. It’s a great ride, with lots of winding roads going uphill. I spotted this piece of graffiti whilst I was riding and though it was pretty good (typically I’m not impressed by the stuff)

Unfortunately bad seems to be the way for us is that it was misty / foggy so we missed out on some of the view. But we should probably be watching the road anyway…

We stopped for a coffee at the Lake Barrine on the Gordonvale Atherton Road, where the lake is impressive but the coffee not so. It was the second most expensive coffee $4:80 each, Sydney remains the most expensive at $6:20 a couple of years ago. They did have some old photos on the wall which were fascinating, one of which showed an old lorry getting up the Gillies Road in the early 30’s, (I think) it wasn’t a good look with people digging and pushing etc. thank god for bitumen.

On the way out Alan decided to pullout in front of a rather large truck (Heavy Combination) he had to gun it but the driver still had to brake pretty hard. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t happy as he spent the next 20 minutes tailgating Alan at about 110Klm’s per hour

After lunch we were cruising around heading in the general direction of Cairns when I saw my first Cane Toad, it was sitting in the middle of the road oblivious to oncoming traffic. So in one of those daydreaming moments I came up with a new game Cane Toad Kicking. The object of the game is to see who can kick the most Cane Toads by the time we get home. The rules are simple all you have to do is kick the Cane Toads whilst riding and there has to be some evidence of the kicking.

The evidence must be irrefutable so something like splatter on boots or video footage is pretty much the only acceptable forms of evidence.

Now as a confession I invented this game because I can actually win this game. The current contest is seeing which one of us can grow the most facial hair, let’s suggest that I am losing this one quite badly. I probably should have thought more considering Alan has a full length fur coat. I really didn’t stand a chance to begin with.

The final part of our ride was to see the butterflies, funny story they mate for somewhere between 8 -14 hours. The female is bigger (the reasons for the size difference will become apparent) but the male is more colourful to attract his mate.  Once they start the female anesthetises the male after about 1 minute. So he spends the rest of the time asleep…sounds pretty good to me. The male also hangs upside down whilst the female butterfly is the right way up. This is because if there is trouble via a predator she can then carry the male and fly them both to safety, hence the size difference and the butterfly version of rohypnol.

I also had a couple of butterflies mating on me for the entire tour, when it was time to leave Alan had to carefully remove them from me by putting them onto a nearby tree. it was a delicate operation we didn't want to spoil the momment for them.

Cheers

a