Grace McDonald is a wonderfully bad influence. So bad (and great) that this article isn’t work safe. If you are sitting at your desk watching your existence slip away and wondering if the Grim Reaper has been invited to your next “Teams” meeting, then stop here. No, really stop here. Knowing that The Road Provides is not helpful.
Grace, otherwise known on social media @BikeHendonia, was a corporate lawyer working in Sydney, Australia and was going through those emotions. Having listened to the voices in her head, Grace decided to act on them.
She sold up, got on her KTM 690 and headed off towards Paris – the one in France – which is 10,537 miles (16,958km) away if you fly.
Having been trapped in Thailand for 18 months, thanks to Covid. Grace realised that her riding style may no longer be aligned with the rules and expectations of Europe and having caught the off-road bug, Paris remains the destination, even if it is more symbolic than likely to happen anytime soon.
But isn’t that the whole point of saying, “you can take this job and shove it”? I’m sure someone clever once said something about the journey being the destination.
Anyway, philosophy aside, what is wrong with having spent the last five years getting in and out of trouble in Cambodia, Laos, and Timor Leste? Nothing as far as I can tell.
Iced Buns and Stogies
I was a couple of weeks into a trip that stretched off into infinity. Early in my motorcycling career, I learned that the worst part of every road trip is having to turn back, be it back to home, back to work, back to reality.
So, I’d set out to design a different life. My destination was the horizon, a place you’ll never arrive. I was making my way through Australia, heading north to a ship across the Timor Strait into Asia.
Night by night, I would camp on the strips of riparian land beside the rivers of inland Australia and each day, I would pick the most interesting line on the map – the twistiest, or the most off-road – and make my way across the country.
When I arrived in the small Queensland town of Mitchell, I decided that I would stay for two nights because there were hot springs in town. I’d been riding for days through the fallout of a Category 4 cyclone and had been forced by floodwaters to double back twice.
My 690 Enduro was a fabulous machine to ride through this natural carnage – tall, light, with air intake at least 8500mm off the ground – but eventually, I’d gotten cold, and I’d gotten tired. So in the morning, I packed up my camp from the misty river bank and rode into town, planning to treat myself to an iced bun.
Basking in the sun out the front of the bakery, in ecstasies at the sugar melting on my tongue, I was rudely interrupted by the clattering arrival of the most decrepit hatchback I’d ever seen.
The side panel and much of the front were stoved in, probably by kangaroos, but the driving skills on display were also less than stellar. The rattling heap came to a stop at an odd angle in front of the bakery, and the driver – an old, dishevelled man – came and sat down beside me.
There were plenty of places to sit that were not beside me, and I was annoyed. Damn, can’t a girl just eat an iced bun without getting hassled?
I ignored him until he spoke to me. Dammit, I thought, and then I saw that he was holding out tobacco and cigarette papers to me. The joints on his hands and elbow were massively deformed by arthritis, and I realized that he couldn’t roll his own cigarettes anymore. I felt terrible. He reeked of tobacco.
‘I’m so sorry,’ I told him, ‘I don’t know how to roll.’
He nodded and turned away, and then I remembered: the last vestiges of the life I’d left behind. The life of a lawyer who used to smoke cigars while reading case law in bars at 10 pm, and some of those vestiges were still with me.
I had one last cigar with me. A gift from a friend before departing. I jumped up and dug into my pannier – I knew exactly where it was – I brought it over to the old man, clipped the end, and gave it to him. He looked at me in surprise, and then pleasure, and then he said to me: you are a kind girl. No, I realized, I am just lucky.
I left him there, smoking this giant stogie out the front of the country bakery, filling the air with blue haze, puffing away like a king while I went and soaked in the hot springs. To each their own pleasure.
Getting Invaded
That night, freshly washed with my hair smelling sweet, I went back to the river bank and made camp. I was just about to light my fire when a gigantic convoy rolled up, looking like something between an invading army and a peacekeeping mission.
There was an overengineered Unimog towing an air-conditioned trailer, and extra vehicles with two boats and a quad bike. I eyed the group off carefully; they seemed harmless.
They made camp just upriver from me and invited me to join them at their fire. I went; they had an espresso machine, single malt whisky and sweet cinnamon cigarillos.
As I sat there smoking that fine, cinnamon-infused tobacco, I learnt a lesson that would keep me on the road for years and years: The Road Provides. I’d given away my last taste of luxury that day to a Gentleman outside a bakery, and the universe had repaid me.
Library Lessons
A year later, I was wrestling my overloaded KTM onto a ferry to go from Sulawesi – the big Indonesian island – to Lembeh – the tiny Indonesian island. I was with a group of local bikers and we were on our way to donate books to a makeshift library that local villagers had established in a secluded cove called Blessing Beach.
The library itself was a bamboo shelter on the beach: every day, Oma and her grandchildren would take the books from her house and put them on the salt-licked shelves, and then every evening they would bring the books back in.
My Indonesian was not very good but I found a book that was in both Indonesian and English, and the children sat with me to read aloud on the beach.
We camped there for a few days until I woke in the middle of the night and knew something wasn’t right. I had terrible nausea and cramping. It was all downhill from there.
The next morning the children found me down the beach, clutching a palm tree and trying to vomit quietly. I was not well. There was nothing left to purge. They brought me into grandma’s house and rubbed my hands and feet while I was restless with fever.
I was sick for days and days; the local policemen came to find out about the sick foreigner, and as a Policeman is a respected profession in this part of the world, I tried to put on a good front.
Nausea had other ideas, overwhelmed me and I had to run to the nearest bush and vomit again. The head policeman looked at me in alarm and said he would pray for me.
Papa Anke insisted that I drink a salty, bitter traditional medicine, and Oma played chess with her grandchildren and kept an eye on me as I rested, wrapped in sarongs against the onshore winds.
New Skills
Gradually I got stronger; the children taught me to find bait and catch fish; Oma taught me to cook my favourite vegetable porridge with sweet cassava, and every morning I would pick up the plastic rubbish that had washed up onto the beautiful beach, and the children would flock to help me.
Oma explained her vision behind the library: after having to leave school at nine or ten years old she had educated herself with books. She wanted all the other children to have the same opportunity on this tiny remote island.
The day I left the island, the ferry was completely empty: my apparently solitary journey resumed. But in truth, you are never alone; strangers become family. As always – whatever it is that you are missing – The Road Provides.
