At first it’s a distant, guttural rumbling. But soon it’s a full-throated animal roar, and then a huge, gleaming dark red and chrome machine sweeps around the turning circle of the Novotel Outback Alice Springs. It pulls up, revs, cuts off. “How ya going,” says its driver. He takes off his helmet, introduces himself as Alan and tells me what’s about to happen. “The first day, you’re still feeling pressured. By the end of today you’ll start to relax. By the time I’ve finished with you you’ll be super-cruisy. Miss Relaxed Universe. Trust me.”
My first introduction to Harley-Davidsons was during Sunday family picnics on Box Hill circa 1978. One minute we’d be sleepily listening to the buzz of bees and the next we’d realise it was in fact 50 modified exhaust pipes descending down the A24 and disgorging a pack of large, hairy Hell’s Angels in black leathers who consumed vast amounts of beer and argued very publicly with their molls. The Harleys were loud, smelly, brutish – nothing like the beautiful old Norton my Dad used to drive.
But lately I’d started to see the point of them. Driving around the Australian outback in a 4x4 can be frustrating. Yes, you cover big distances, but you’re cut off from the landscape and you’re either frozen alive by the air-conditioning or you’re lulled into a stupor by the lack of it. With a Hog (as Harleys are affectionately known), you get speed – plus the wind and the smell of the eucalypts. They’re safer and more comfortable over distances than a regular motorbike; and of course there’s the deeply satisfying Vrrrrrrmmm.
With High on the Hog personalised tours of central Australia, you also get Alan Bartlett as your driver. He doesn’t look like your typical Harley man. He’s small, with a neatly trimmed goatee and no tattoos. But then I don’t look like a typical Harley moll. “Go up to the Northern Territory if you want a man with a beard and long hair,” he says.
His bike, however, is every inch the part. It’s an Electra Glide Ultra Classic, a top-of-the-line tourer. Alan calls it Ruby. Alan has names for all his Harleys – there’s a 1200cc Sportster Custom called Rocket and a 1459cc Road King Classic called Bronco. I usually distrust people who name their vehicles. But then I remember I’m about to get on the back of this man’s bike and lack of trust is not really an option.
Swinging your leg over a Harley while maintaining a degree of elegance is also not an option – at least to begin with. Especially with half the staff of the Novotel watching. But once installed on my wide, padded armchair, I feel that only a collision with a 52ft roadtrain could topple me. I’ve brought a leather jacket with me, but Alan says not to bother. So I can ride in just jeans and t-shirt and a helmet? “I do,” he says. I’m delighted.
Within a matter of minutes we’ve passed through the burbs of Alice and we’re out on the open road. It’s 36°C, there’s a gorgeous warm wind blasting our faces and intense sun lighting up a rugged, dramatic landscape. Our two days will be spent touring the West MacDonnell Ranges – or West Macs as they say here – a series of parallel ridges that stretch for 200km east and west of Alice. It’s a part of the country that most tourists overlook.
“Everyone goes to Ayers Rock and Kings Canyon, then up to Cairns. The whackos.”
It’s especially good country for walking. Tucked within the sheer red bluffs of these ranges are some beautiful hiking chasms dotted with unspoilt waterholes to cool off in.
“Brought your bathers?” asks Alan. “Not that you’ll need them. You’ll probably decide to go in without them.”
Brought up in a suburb of Melbourne, Alan got interested in the area 13 years ago when he and a pack of 15 bikers drove from Melbourne to Darwin. “I was blown away by the scenery, the nature, the solitude,” he says. Without further ado he moved to Alice and set up High on the Hog. He takes both self-drive tours, which he guides, and driven tours, like this one. When there’s more than one moll at a time, his mate Colin (who does have a beard and long hair) comes along too.
Alan gets straight to work on turning me “super-cruisy”. He’s a fan of the geology and provides a running hand-sign commentary from the front of the bike as we go, making waving, chopping or thumbs-up motions with his hands to point out all the interesting features. Soon I’m so busy watching his hand-signs that it’s a job to see any scenery at all. At Honeymoon Gap, our first stop, he instructs me to close my eyes. I do as I’m told. “The wind sounds like a waterfall cascading over rocks,” he says. There’s a kite surfing the current between the cliffs and Alan tries to engage it in a whistling dialogue, although the kite doesn’t fall for it. “Drink this,” he commands, handing me a tin cup. “Stand there,” he says, and takes a few digital photos which he says he will send me after I’m home – a nice gesture for anyone travelling alone. “Put this on your face,” he says, offering me a dollop out of a tube. By now I’ve had enough of being told what to do. I tell him no thanks, I’m already suncreamed up. “You don’t trust me, do you?” he cries, and looks at me like I’m in more serious need of decompressing than he’d realised.
The flies are starting to get pesky, so we jump back on the bike and the warm wind soon blasts them away. It is stunning country to drive through, the ranges thrusting vertically up from the flat. We leave river red gums and move on to wattles and ghost gums. The speedometer hovers around 120km/h, but when we come to an inviting slope on a bit of a bend, Alan goes, “Woah! Let’s take it!” and the needle flicks up. You don’t have to lean much on a Harley, I discover, and my armchair is so stable I take out my camera and photograph our shadow on the side of the road: two hilariously upright figures, the back one with pigtails sticking out.
At Stanley Chasm we cover Ruby in a plastic cover – dust being the number-one terror of the outback if you’re a loving Harley owner – and hike on a dappled track dotted with prehistoric cycads, corkwoods and tea trees, sheer brilliant red cliffs either side. As the chasm narrows, the afternoon strollers peter out and soon there’s just the two of us, clambering over boulders on hands and feet and crossing crevices on fallen trees. “I feel like Tarzan out here. You feeling like Jane yet?” he asks. I find out that Alan used to be a climbing instructor and before that he was a sky-diving instructor, and for a while before that he worked as a medical courier taking urgent blood around Melbourne on a bike.
The next stop is Ormiston Gorge, a deep, secluded waterhole with an overhanging cliff decorated with fairy martins’ nests. There’s an incredible, eerie stillness to the place. Keen to show off his Tarzan tricks, Alan climbs up the cliff and jumps into the water from a height. “Gunna have a go?” he keeps shouting as I float on my back trying to get a bit of peace. An eight-year-old boy takes him up on it. “Was that a good one? Was that a good one?” the boy shouts to his dad. “Stop flapping your gums and get on with it,” comes the reply, which seems to shut both of them up. They get bored eventually and Alan ends up talking to the dad. I overhear bits and it’s all about Harleys. “He used to have a Heritage Softtail,” Alan tells me afterwards. “He sold it to start a business, but I persuaded him to get another.” He looks suddenly wistful. “I really should have shares in Harleys.”
We walk back to the bike and Alan tells me to get on it in my bikini so he can take some photos. He says he needs pictures for his website. I tell him that draping myself on a bike in a wet bikini is not really my style. “Why not?” he asks. I tell him it’s a little bit tacky. He looks confused. “I don’t get it. You can say one thing to one girl and it’s fine, and one thing to another and it’s not.”
We stay the night at Glen Helen, the site of an early settler’s homestead. Over a supper of roo meat and lamb, Alan tells me how he became addicted to bikes. His father bought him a 50cc Honda Amigo minibike, aged eight. When he was 12 he saw a bunch of full-on bikers on Harleys driving past his school. “It was the rumble, the group, the freedom. It’s a resonance.” After that he had “Yammis”, Suzukis, Hondas, and bought his first Harley aged 20 – a good two decades earlier than most men. “It’s true I had to hang around with older guys for a while. But I was ready for it. Buying a Harley is a lifestyle choice: a decision to cruise.”
When we’re done talking about Harleys we talk about the sort of people that ride them. Who comes on his tours? Mostly Australian and American guys, he says, but women come on their own too. He goes a little quiet. “Women see it as a chance to liberate themselves,” he says. Ah, that super-cruisy thing. He nods. I buy him a Bundie and Coke and soon the stories come: women skinny-dipping for the first time in the waterholes, women hiking naked (he joined in, he said, to make her feel more comfortable) and, lo and behold, women wanting to ride on the Harley topless. Quite a sight in the rear view mirror, I say. “Oh,” he says quickly. “I was careful not to look.” He tells me some of his clients have turned into girlfriends. I realise just how much trust there has to be when you’re on the back of a strange man’s bike. By the time I say goodnight I’m definitely less relaxed than I was the day before.
The next morning we bike back to the gorge, swim across it and climb up the rockface on the far side. I lie on my belly on a ledge watching a rock wallaby less than six feet away. We stumble on a second secluded waterhole and Alan asks if I’m finally cruisy enough to skinny dip. “It’s our Tarzan and Jane moment,” he says. But last night’s conversation has put me off skinny-dipping with this particular Tarzan. I tell him no, but that that needn’t stop him. Rather sulkily, he says he never does it unless his clients do because it’s embarrassing getting in and out. Once in the water though, he’s struck by a brilliant idea: he thrashes around for a while, and the next thing is he’s whipped off his bathers and balanced them on his head.
Afterwards he’s worried I might think he’s a pervert. You’re not a pervert, I say. It’s the way you tell it. Where were the stories about the guys or the clients who kept their clothes on? “I’ll never understand women,” he says. On the three-hour drive back to Alice he puts his foot down, and doesn’t do any hand-signals pointing out the features. I think about those Hell’s Angels at Box Hill, arguing with their molls. Perhaps I have an inkling now what they were arguing about.
Susan Elderkin’s most recent novel “The Voices” (Harper Perennial, £7.99) is set in Western Australia and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize
