Heading out from Kununurra, it wasn't long before we reached the WA/NT border and completed another tick on the bucket list...we have now ridden a Goldwing through every State and Territory in Australia.
Even better now that we are in the NT the speed limit is a bit more realistic, although gone are the days of the old unlimited speeds up here. Although the other noticeable thing is that as soon as we crossed the border the quality of the road has deteriorated somewhat. Seems a bit crazy really that all through SA and WA the highway has been fantastic but only a maximum speed of 110 and now we can go 130 the road is not as good. Also took some getting used to not backing off the throttle at that speed when it may have been a police car coming from the opposite direction.
The scenery wasn't as good as the previous days's ride either and to make it worse there quite a lot of small grass fires burning right beside the road. At one point had to come to a stop as we couldn't see through the smoke but fortunately after a couple of minutes a truck came from the opposite direction and his draft cleared the smoke enough that we could see enough to drive through and it wasn't really as bad as it looked. Wherever the fires were there was also lots of hawks circling and diving, i think to try and catch the small creatures that the fire was driving out of the bush.
Came across a few of these on the roads too...don't know what they are called....birds I suppose.
Straight stretches weren't quite as long either and even had a few mountains and cliffs around to break things up a bit.
Grass fires continued to be a common site during the day.
It was along one of these stretches that one of the hawks we had seen a lot of decided he would try to dive bomb us....well he learnt the hard way that half a tonne of Goldwing travelling at 130km/h was too much for him to take on...although he did manage to break the lower cowling on impact.
After battling all the elements and arriving at Katherine about 2pm, we decided that we would push on another 300km up to Darwin. The humidity was increasing dramatically and we arrived in Darwin very hot, sweaty and tired after a long day on the bike which saw us ride 869km in far from ideal riding conditions. Needless to say the beers went down quite well tonight, and we can now say we have ridden a Goldwing to every State, Territory and Capital City in Australia.
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