Right to the Edge: Sydney to Tokyo By Any Means by Charley Boorman Page B

all day, though not just on the dirt bikes David had provided. This afternoon I’d been asked to cast my eye over a battery-powered motorbike built by a company called Zero.
    The Australian arm of Zero is based in Melbourne, but the bikes themselves come from the factory in Santa Cruz in California. Having already driven and been impressed by an electric car, I couldn’t wait to see what someone had done with an off-road motorbike.
    This morning we had David’s mate Max with us. He’d recently taken over the Lions Den, and drove down to meet us in a ute with a KTM strapped in the back - his plan was to ride with us back up to his pub. It’s an icon of the Cape York Peninsula, having been established back in 1875 when tin was discovered and miners flocked from all over.
    Max was a good rider, and as we left Karnak we both pulled a pair of pretty decent wheelies, then proceeded to spend much of the morning messing about. It was a brilliant ride; we were in the middle of the rainforest and yet at the same time we were right on the coast. We pulled over at a spot called Rocky Point. ‘It really is tropical,’ I said to David as I gazed beyond the palm trees to the beach.
    ‘Here it is, yeah,’ he agreed, ‘but not too far north it begins to dry out.’
    It was wonderful country and they were wonderful roads too. We had a mix of narrow tarmac, good dirt and plenty of flooded creeks. The vegetation was soaking and there was a mist over the mountains, almost like steam, when the sun came out.
    Australians are, by and large, a laid-back bunch. But as we’d found out with the overbearing police at our convoy in Sydney, Aussie officials can be really in your face - it is incongruous and doesn’t seem in keeping with the rest of the country. They are so hung up on health and safety. We’d experienced some of this on the last trip, when Russ was pulled over when we were hauling the motorbike sculpture in the back of a ute. They were pretty aggressive, but I tell you, they had nothing on the Bloomfield River ferrymen.
    We rode hard and fast along a narrow track between fields of sugar cane. Max was still popping wheelies and sliding his bike here, there and everywhere, and I was showing off a little bit myself. I noticed a set of train tracks that the cane farmers used to load cut cane for the factory, and me being me, I thought it would be great fun to race my bike between them. So leaving the others on the tarmac, I rode down the grass berm and hopped my bike between the rails. I really went for it, standing on the pegs and winding on the power, and raced between the fields of sugar cane. After a few hundred yards, I decided to rejoin the others. I got the front wheel clear again, but the back wheel caught in the rails. The bike snapped sideways and my stomach caught on the handlebars before I was sent flying over the high side. I landed on my left shoulder and, Jesus, I had a vision of popping a collar bone just as I’d done before the Dakar. Tumbling over and over I came to a stop in the rows of sugar cane.
    Thankfully it wasn’t my collar bone that was broken, but the Suzuki’s throttle return cable. Still pretty bad news though. On top of that I’d bent the bars and mashed up the back brake pedal. My shoulder was throbbing and I could already feel stiffness gathering down my left side. Inspecting my stomach, I discovered a serious graze, the skin around it beginning to yellow with bruising.
    Max was watching me, Claudio had the camera and David surveyed the damage to the bike.
    ‘Are you OK?’ Clouds asked me.
    ‘Yes, it’s just a graze.’
    ‘You’re sure it’s nothing internal, Charley?’
    ‘No, I don’t think so.’ I was holding my stomach, trying to see how badly I’d carved it up. ‘That’s not fat by the way,’ I said, quickly. ‘It’s just swollen.’
    I felt a right idiot. If you ride a dirt bike you’re going to fall off, that’s a given. But I had been messing about and showing off, and