Chapter 3 continued
The road back down to Fairbanks the next day was much easier and dryer and with the experience gained from the previous day it took only ten hours to get back, fully five hours quicker. Having talked to lots of folks who completed the Dalton highway it’s a coin toss, if you get good weather its very doable, if you don’t its gonna hurt.
The Dalton highway did extract a heavy toll though, my back pannier hopped off somewhere on the road no doubt jarred off by potholes, I didn’t even notice and I certainly wasn’t going back five hundred miles to get it. It was laden with much needed stuff but I knew I’d be able to replace the stuff in Fairbanks so I wasn’t overly upset. By the time I got to Fairbanks after over a thousand miles of dirt roads through some of the toughest terrain in the world in just two days, I was too tired to care about what I’d lost.
The motel I stayed in while in Fairbanks had two guys from Alabama working behind the counter. They saw me coming in off the road destroyed with mud, and asked “Where the hell you bin boy?” I told them and also told them where I’d been so far on the trip and where I was going, to which they replied “Mayannnn that is baaad Ayass, ya’ll must be one hardcore son of a bitch!” I went to my room beaming; make no mistake there is no greater compliment for a biker than to be called hardcore. I headed off to sleep with the guts of 1100 miles on brutal terrain under my belt and slept like a hedgehog in the winter.
Before I started to head south I decided to take three days in Valdez, Alaska, famous for many things but mostly for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I met a Scandinavian guy who was over there training the military on survival tactics and he told me that Valdez was the most incredible place that he'd ever been, never one to doubt a Scandinavian, I decided to go.
It was a detour of over three hundred miles but nothing is close in this part of the world so I just puckered up and set off. After the previous two days on the Dalton highway my ass felt like I’d been on the wrong end of some prison love in Sam Quentin so there wasn’t a lot of joy in the helmet, I needed a bit of time off the road. When I was about a hundred miles from Valdez the road steadily started to climb until you reach a place called the Thompson pass, which is a route through the mountains to Valdez. While the pass peaks at about 12000 feet, the mountains still stretch even higher all around you and you can see snow beneath you on the mountains, that’s right beneath!
The cloud formations were a wonderful spectacle, every now and then they would part to let the sunshine through and reveal a massive snow capped peak and just as quickly it would vanish only to be replaced by another on a different section of the road.
Valdez is a small fishing village on the coast and is completely surrounded by mountains. It doesn’t matter which window you look out of, you are looking directly at mountains with white wispy clouds floating just above your head. I went for a walk around the town stopping to eat in a Thai restaurant, owned by a lady who came here on holidays ten years earlier and never left.
The next day I took the whale watching cruise with a whole heap of European tourists, and at various times we saw Killer whales, Minkey whales and seals all on a waterway surrounded by gigantic snow capped peaks.
At breakfast one morning I introduced myself to a guy who was also driving a BMW around Alaska, Helmar from Los Angeles. We went on a tour of the surrounding area on our bikes even took the time to take the bike off road onto a rock precipice and take some pictures. I was standing there taking some pictures with my small Canon point and shoot camera, and over my left should Helmar appears carrying a camera you’d expect to see in a fashion shoot, while it wasn’t quite penis envy I did feel a bit girly standing there with my palm sized camera.
Helmar was an American of German extraction and ran his own business. It was a software company which allowed him to spend a lot of time on the road, sounded like the ideal life to me. We went out for a heap of beers in a local Irish bar, hard to believe that even in Valdez Alaska you can find an Irish bar! Helmar was the sort of guy who would just love to camp out by a river for a couple of days by himself and do a bit of fishing. At this moment in the trip I was saying to him “For three fuckin days, what the fuck would you be doing for three days beside a river by yourself?”
We said goodbye and I left Valdez. The biker community on the road is quite small so people run into each other quite often and Helmar mentioned that he’d met a guy from Venezuela and a guy from Switzerland and some other Europeans, especially this bird from Switzerland and that I should look out for them. At the time I said to myself, man Alaska is a big place, no chance of bumping into them. I made a note in my diary that night “Heaven is a place called Valdez”, it’s that simple
That night I made it to Tok and the place was jammed with travellers, it seemed like a different place than just a week earlier.
I met lots of people who were all on different stages of their journeys, two of them Rafael and John from Venezuela and Switzerland who I had just talked about with Helmar the night before had just finished the Pan American trip going south to North. We talked about Central America, Colombia, the Ruta 40 in Argentina all of the places which at their mere mention sent shivers of fear down my back.
Rafael only had one piece of advice for me, “Open your mind, but more importantly open your heart and you’ll have the time of your life.” I was awestruck that the guys talked so nonchalantly about locations that I was scared shitless about. We talked for about an hour in the rain and they allayed all my fears for the trip, I was beaming when I left them. These guys had completed what I was about to undertake, they were so chilled out it was untrue, any more laid back and they’d fall back!
The next day I swung north to traverse the top of the world highway on the way to Dawson city in the Yukon. A point well worth mentioning is that the Yukon Territory is bigger than France but has a population of less than 30,000 people, with over half of those living in Whitehorse.
My first stop was in a tiny gold mining village called Chicken, Alaska. I sat down in a small cafe and had an amazing slice of apple pie. Lots of people had told me about Dawson City and said that it was a great night out and not to be missed, so being Irish and never needing more than a tenuous link to having a good night somewhere with drink involved, I headed off all guns firing for the town.
On the Taylor highway aka the top of the world highway I crossed the 10,000 mile mark of the trip, I’d about a third of the distance completed for the trip and I still hadn’t got out of Canada. I'd talked to a lot of people about this road and they said that seeing as I’d survived the Dalton highway this one would be a cinch. It started to rain which made for a couple of hairy moments but bar a couple of minor scares it was no hassle.
Dawson city is only accessible via a ferry, seeing as I think it must be one of the only inland towns in North America where this is the case, I was surprised that no one had mentioned it. The ferry is small with room for about eight cars and it struggles to manoeuvre on what is a very large and fast flowing river. I imagined I was crossing into the planet of the apes.
Most of the people I’d met who were incidentally all North American said “no doubt about it Dawson City is an absolute must see” and after visiting the place and spending quite a few hours walking around I have to be honest; I don’t get it. It was an overpriced cheesy place if you ask me. It’s kept the older type building facades, and the roads don’t have tarmac so its feels fairly earthy but at $179 for a cheap hotel I was expecting a bit more.
I went to the casino which was mediocre; the centrepiece was a stage and a bunch of slot machines with a large wooden bar. I think the reason the North Americans like it is because it represents their recent history, as close to a frontier town as you can still get. Not my cup of tea, but everyone to their own as my old gaffer used to say.
As I was walking around I met this German guy who had just spent the last sixteen days kayaking in the Yukon, pulling off the rivers at night to sleep in the woods. He didn’t even have a tent, man this guy was hardcore! He told me that he does this every year, coming over from Germany and he heads out into the Canadian woods for seven weeks, alone. He had me oohing and aahing at some great stories about bears and moose. He was like talking to Michael Schumacher. The Germans would put you to shame coming from Ireland; most can knock out about three languages and don’t get me started about the pesky Dutch!...more languages than fingers!
Over a couple of tall frosty beers in Dawson city watching some particularly lame entertainment laid on for visiting tourists I started to reflect on the fact that I’d 20,000 miles to go, and 10,000 under my belt. It was 33 days since I left Ireland and only 30 since I left on the bike from Toronto. I knew that while in North America you could knock out two to three hundred miles in a morning with the roads being so good, once I got to Mexico all the distances that you’d be capable of completing in any one day would be far less aggressive.
I left Dawson city the next morning feeling a little blue. I missed the conditions of the Dalton highway in a perverse sort of way; I loved the excitement of it; so I decided I was going to set the GPS to take me to Moose creek using off-road tracks. I got about fifty miles of dirt and then was back on the highway. I was now circling south via a different loop back to Whitehorse along the Klondike highway. It’s straight as a ruler for hundreds of miles and after the off-road escapades early in the morning this was a cruel torment.
On the road I met a cool gent from Washington State called Jim Green and we rode a couple of hundred clicks together. We were both headed the same general direction so we decided to hook up for a couple of days. Jim had also completed the Dalton highway and said it was very emotional for him as it was something that he'd dreamed about since he was a boy. He was driving a BMW 1200, a newer model than mine and he was like Inspector gadget with all the bits and pieces he had round the bike. He was also armed with a big “fuck off” SLR camera. I was beginning to think that they gave them away free with BMW’s in the states.
Jim was one of the easiest going characters I’ve ever come across. While we were parked up having a soda I looked at the back of our bikes, my wheels had gnarly knobblies and he had a worn out looking street tire. I said to him “Jim did you ride the Dalton on that fucking tire?”… To which he replied… “Yep… there’s still plenty of rubber left on that bad boy too”. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have dreamt about doing it without the best of tires and there’s Jimbo cruising along on a slick without a care in the world.
We got to Whitehorse, for me it was the second time round; I couldn’t believe the amount Native Americans who were absolutely wasted drunk. Apparently the Native Americans lack an enzyme to break down alcohol so get drunk quicker and stay locked longer, that could really take on in colleges in Ireland. However the sad thing was, none of them looked happy they all just looked really angry.
On my first run through Whitehorse a guy offered to suck my John Thomas for $20 as I passed him by on the street, he looked out of his mind on drugs and was in a wheel chair. I tried haggling him down to $15 but he was having none of it (only kidding about the haggling), I gave him the $20 and declined the BJ.
The motel I stayed in became night of the living dead at around 2am with nothing but druggies and Alco’s all wandering around the car park and streets outside, if there’s a sadder place on earth I've yet to see it. The night was topped off when I went to a bar beside the motel for one Coors light to celebrate a long day on the bike and knocking out some massive miles, when a woman who was obviously a close relative of Jabba the Hutt asked me if I was "looking for company sugar?" I downed the Coors light in one go and walking out the bar door couldn’t help wonder what sort of dudes would take up that offer; I guess in a town when you get BJ's on wheels anything’s up for grabs. I'm sure there’s a good side to Whitehorse but in two visits I hadn’t managed to see it; but hey, at least it’s lively!
It was my second time through this part of the world so I was pushing things fairly hard, averaging four hundred miles a day; my thinking was that this will allow me to drop to a hundred miles a day in South America for a good period of time. I was having a ball with Jim who was ex army, ex law enforcement and was just a world of stories and fun. When two people are travelling on the road I think you tend to meet more people, I think people tend to shy away from people who travel on their own, “He’s travelling on his own, that fuckers weird!”
Every time we stopped on the road we would get talking to bikers or fellow travellers who all seemed really interested in who we were and where we were off to; we were having a ball.
We stayed for a night in Coal River in a motel come campsite and about half a mile from the back of the motel there’s a river. We strolled down to the riverbank harassed the whole way by giant mosquitoes. When we got there we were greeted by a river flowing east as the sun set in the west. The dusk air was cold but the sun was warm on our faces as we stood watching the river slowly pass us by. The moment ended quickly when Jim spotted bear tracks close to where we were standing so we both hauled ass back to the motel.
We had great weather for days at a time now and met great people on the road everywhere we went. Everyone you meet is travelling. You stop at a rest stop and people come up to you and say “so where you headed to?” You share twenty minutes of stories from the road and you’re off again.
There were plenty of obstacles on the road, more buffalo, gravel, and bridges with a grated bridge deck which almost pushes you off the bridge as it catches the knobbly tires, certainly gets the heart racing! We stopped at the sign forest in Watson Lake and I left my mark, as people from all over the world just pop along and leave a sign on one of the masts. There must be easily 20000 signs and when we stopped for some water at a lay-by we saw a crow the size of small donkey. I gave it some fruit and nut mix before it tried to fly off with my motorbike.
Both Jim and I just loved to ride the motorcycles and in just three days had knocked out over a thousand miles. The days tended to started foggy and burn off as the sun rose. The sun turns the scenery on if you know what I mean, when I passed this way ten days earlier it was lashing rain and I didn’t think too much of it. Well today the sun was out and it was mesmerizing. I’m also pretty sure the company made it feel a lot better too, every time you stop you have someone to share the experience with. The roads continued sweeping left and right as they meandered through mountain passes all the time flanked by jade green rivers and forests. The roads continued to be almost completely deserted so we had the run of the highways; I was living the dream.
After Fort Nelson the sun started beaming and the temperature soared, for the first time in over two weeks it was time to put away the fleece lining and water proof layers so I was down to just a t-shift and the enduro suit with all the vents open, long live the heat! As the evenings drew on with clear skies the bike would cast long shadows and as the roads circumnavigate large hills your shadow dances to the left, front and right of you as you’re making your way through the passes. The roads sweep unendingly left and right, as you carve a path through the countryside. At the time I wrote in my journal that “I’ve never felt as good as I do today.”
The only real downside of this part of the world is mosquitoes and black fly. Canada and Alaska are overrun with these gurriers. They actually stalk you, if you're walking home they actually follow you and wait till you leave some bare skin open and then dive straight on it. In these parts of the world they have real mossies, not the caffeine free diet mossie that has made its way into Ireland, for one thing they are about three times the size of the Irish variety.
If that wasn’t enough there’s black fly which is basically a flying set of teeth which tries to bite you a new bum hole when it lands on you. And the final piece of the jigsaw is completed by a little cur called a noseem, no-see-em get it? It’s the North American equivalent of a midge. So as soon as you hang a bit of bare skin out the door one of these three amigos is going to try and feast on you. The only way to minimize it is to spray two litres of deet on you or use countless other home remedies like bathing in yak piss; never a yak around when you need one eh!
As you’re driving along on the motorbike in the summer your visor gets hit with a variety of insects; about one every five minutes, normally right at the centre of the visor so you can see it with both eyes. This part is quite a bit worse than a car because at least you’re three feet from the windscreen in a car, with a helmet you’re about two inches away so you get to inspect the lower intestines of anything exploding on the visor.
A June bug hit my visor and it was like someone threw a bottle of Colman’s mustard at the helmet...ewwwww! I was straight off the bike gollying onto the visor and wiping him off. If you don’t get off and clean the visor the only way to get rid of them is to try and turn your head to the right or the left and see if the carcass will blow off the visor in the wind.
We met a lot of hunters, all card carrying members of the NRA. Like I said earlier I don’t get the hunting thing, but again everyone to their own. They would come up and ask you “Hey did you see any caribou?” Yeah like I’m gonna tell you so you can go up and shoot it! It’s mad you've 99% of folks looking out of the windows like oul ones waiting for the postman for any sign of a wild animal and then these boys are out shooting them! There’s a huge debate in the states about hunting and its relative merits, so no point in taking it any further here.
As Jim and I were pulled over on the Ice field parkway a bike pulled up and Rafael from Venezuela jumped off and said hello. It was great because today was the day when Jim road and my own would diverge and I wasn’t looking forward to it. It was like fate was paying me back for all the lonely riding in Canada, “Don’t worry Ois, here’s another biker buddy for ya”. We spent the day mucking around on Glaciers, looking at bears and mountain goats and generally having a great laugh. The three of us were pulled over at a glacier and given there was an Irish, USA and Venezuelan registration plates we were attracting a lot of attention. Lots of folks asked if they could take a picture of us, it was one of the first times that I really felt other people thought, what we were doing was cool.
It came time to say goodbye to Jim, we had rode from Dawson city the whole way down to Lake Louise where he cut off to Washington State. We'd a great four days covering almost 1600 miles together and I knew I was going to miss him. Rafael was a completely different sort of character. He was a tall Latin dude with long black hair who was too cool for school. We immediately hit it off and were straight away having a great time. He was headed for Houston in Texas so our roads would likely be the same for over a thousand miles which suited the two of us down to the ground.
I was constantly badgering him with questions about Mexico and Central America, he gave me one piece of advice, “Never look at the news in these countries, if you do you’ll be afraid to leave your room!” The first question I asked Rafael was what did he do for a living to which he replied “I'm a drug dealer.”
After 12,500 miles it was my last day in Canada. Pablo Escobar, aka Rafael and I pulled into a town near the USA border with Montana called Black diamond. The town was as dead as a door nail but was a nice place. We went out for a couple of beers in the local hotel and while I was getting petrol I bumped into the ugliest women I’d ever seen. She was dressed like a nurse, and if this is what nurses looked like in this part of the world, I reckon people didn’t stay long in the hospital; she had a face like a bull dog licking piss off a nettle.
We had spent most of the day getting some new tires on the bikes, and I had a full service, the bike had been through a bit of an ordeal by this stage. We didn’t go to a BMW dealer to get the work done, and the only thing I can say is that this was a mistake, and I’ll leave it at that. While we were waiting on the bikes we went over to a place called Blackfoot BMW to see if they had any bits of kit worth picking up. We met a guy there from Chile while we were hanging around and it turned out he was a veteran overlander who had done the Pan American highway a bunch of times.
He was the spitting image of a friend of my brothers called Foxy in every way except he spoke with a Spanish accent. This guy was fifty eight years old and was married to a thirty year old polish girl who was really hot and about a foot taller than him. I asked him what’s his secret and he said, exactly like Speedy Gonzales would have said it “eets coz I’m sexy no?!” In his wallet he had a picture of him in the Atacama Desert but the stories he told me made me more nervous than ever about crossing into Mexico.
We rode out of Calgary into a thunder storm as the sun was setting on the Rockies in the distance while being completely black overhead. We spent that night in a hostel, first time in a while for me it has to be said and because we arrived late I got one of the top bunks in a room holding six people with three bunk beds. There was a Japanese lad beneath me who if I did end up falling through the top bunk on top of him, was going to end up rightly fucked.
The top bunk was about two foot from the ceiling and had a wooden surround. I hadn’t been in a bunk bed since I was about five years old, which was about the last time I was able to fit in one and things hadn’t changed. I was too tall for the bed and too wide and with the really low ceiling it really was like looking out of an open casket coffin. I hit the scratcher late to be more tired than normal so I’d sleep but looks like everyone does this so I ended up being first in the scratcher.
For about two hours, on the half hour the rest of the guys in the room would come in, turn on the light, go in and brush their teeth etc, then go to bed, turn off the light, but the whole time all I was thinking about especially after the guy got his head hacked off on the greyhound bus in Manitoba “ok this fucker is a serial killer...he’s gonna take out a bowie knife and do me in the goolies with it.”
I guess I’m just not comfortable sleeping in a room with five strangers. Also the people who go to hostels here aren’t the same as in Europe. They aren’t inter-railer’s, or students. A lot of them are hunters, and other types of cabbages most not the sort of folks you'd be striking up a conversation with.
I talked with one of them earlier in the night and he was on sick leave for some reason and here was the only place they had a doctor, he didn’t elaborate. In my spinning mind this translated to “ok this guy is a nutter, no way they have a doctor here in Canmore and not in Calgary.” The fact that he had a moustache and a real dodgy comb over didn’t do anything to allay my worries. I thought to myself, if I’m gonna get slaughtered in the middle of the night; I don’t want it to be by a dude with a tache and a comb over!
I could see myself in the serial killer year book. On the left page a full page picture of the serial killer, and on the right a montage of all the people he’d killed, and on the top row, two in from the left was me.
__________________
Ride on!
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The road back down to Fairbanks the next day was much easier and dryer and with the experience gained from the previous day it took only ten hours to get back, fully five hours quicker. Having talked to lots of folks who completed the Dalton highway it’s a coin toss, if you get good weather its very doable, if you don’t its gonna hurt.
The Dalton highway did extract a heavy toll though, my back pannier hopped off somewhere on the road no doubt jarred off by potholes, I didn’t even notice and I certainly wasn’t going back five hundred miles to get it. It was laden with much needed stuff but I knew I’d be able to replace the stuff in Fairbanks so I wasn’t overly upset. By the time I got to Fairbanks after over a thousand miles of dirt roads through some of the toughest terrain in the world in just two days, I was too tired to care about what I’d lost.
The motel I stayed in while in Fairbanks had two guys from Alabama working behind the counter. They saw me coming in off the road destroyed with mud, and asked “Where the hell you bin boy?” I told them and also told them where I’d been so far on the trip and where I was going, to which they replied “Mayannnn that is baaad Ayass, ya’ll must be one hardcore son of a bitch!” I went to my room beaming; make no mistake there is no greater compliment for a biker than to be called hardcore. I headed off to sleep with the guts of 1100 miles on brutal terrain under my belt and slept like a hedgehog in the winter.
Before I started to head south I decided to take three days in Valdez, Alaska, famous for many things but mostly for the Exxon Valdez oil spill. I met a Scandinavian guy who was over there training the military on survival tactics and he told me that Valdez was the most incredible place that he'd ever been, never one to doubt a Scandinavian, I decided to go.
It was a detour of over three hundred miles but nothing is close in this part of the world so I just puckered up and set off. After the previous two days on the Dalton highway my ass felt like I’d been on the wrong end of some prison love in Sam Quentin so there wasn’t a lot of joy in the helmet, I needed a bit of time off the road. When I was about a hundred miles from Valdez the road steadily started to climb until you reach a place called the Thompson pass, which is a route through the mountains to Valdez. While the pass peaks at about 12000 feet, the mountains still stretch even higher all around you and you can see snow beneath you on the mountains, that’s right beneath!
The cloud formations were a wonderful spectacle, every now and then they would part to let the sunshine through and reveal a massive snow capped peak and just as quickly it would vanish only to be replaced by another on a different section of the road.
Valdez is a small fishing village on the coast and is completely surrounded by mountains. It doesn’t matter which window you look out of, you are looking directly at mountains with white wispy clouds floating just above your head. I went for a walk around the town stopping to eat in a Thai restaurant, owned by a lady who came here on holidays ten years earlier and never left.
The next day I took the whale watching cruise with a whole heap of European tourists, and at various times we saw Killer whales, Minkey whales and seals all on a waterway surrounded by gigantic snow capped peaks.
At breakfast one morning I introduced myself to a guy who was also driving a BMW around Alaska, Helmar from Los Angeles. We went on a tour of the surrounding area on our bikes even took the time to take the bike off road onto a rock precipice and take some pictures. I was standing there taking some pictures with my small Canon point and shoot camera, and over my left should Helmar appears carrying a camera you’d expect to see in a fashion shoot, while it wasn’t quite penis envy I did feel a bit girly standing there with my palm sized camera.
Helmar was an American of German extraction and ran his own business. It was a software company which allowed him to spend a lot of time on the road, sounded like the ideal life to me. We went out for a heap of beers in a local Irish bar, hard to believe that even in Valdez Alaska you can find an Irish bar! Helmar was the sort of guy who would just love to camp out by a river for a couple of days by himself and do a bit of fishing. At this moment in the trip I was saying to him “For three fuckin days, what the fuck would you be doing for three days beside a river by yourself?”
We said goodbye and I left Valdez. The biker community on the road is quite small so people run into each other quite often and Helmar mentioned that he’d met a guy from Venezuela and a guy from Switzerland and some other Europeans, especially this bird from Switzerland and that I should look out for them. At the time I said to myself, man Alaska is a big place, no chance of bumping into them. I made a note in my diary that night “Heaven is a place called Valdez”, it’s that simple
That night I made it to Tok and the place was jammed with travellers, it seemed like a different place than just a week earlier.
I met lots of people who were all on different stages of their journeys, two of them Rafael and John from Venezuela and Switzerland who I had just talked about with Helmar the night before had just finished the Pan American trip going south to North. We talked about Central America, Colombia, the Ruta 40 in Argentina all of the places which at their mere mention sent shivers of fear down my back.
Rafael only had one piece of advice for me, “Open your mind, but more importantly open your heart and you’ll have the time of your life.” I was awestruck that the guys talked so nonchalantly about locations that I was scared shitless about. We talked for about an hour in the rain and they allayed all my fears for the trip, I was beaming when I left them. These guys had completed what I was about to undertake, they were so chilled out it was untrue, any more laid back and they’d fall back!
The next day I swung north to traverse the top of the world highway on the way to Dawson city in the Yukon. A point well worth mentioning is that the Yukon Territory is bigger than France but has a population of less than 30,000 people, with over half of those living in Whitehorse.
My first stop was in a tiny gold mining village called Chicken, Alaska. I sat down in a small cafe and had an amazing slice of apple pie. Lots of people had told me about Dawson City and said that it was a great night out and not to be missed, so being Irish and never needing more than a tenuous link to having a good night somewhere with drink involved, I headed off all guns firing for the town.
On the Taylor highway aka the top of the world highway I crossed the 10,000 mile mark of the trip, I’d about a third of the distance completed for the trip and I still hadn’t got out of Canada. I'd talked to a lot of people about this road and they said that seeing as I’d survived the Dalton highway this one would be a cinch. It started to rain which made for a couple of hairy moments but bar a couple of minor scares it was no hassle.
Dawson city is only accessible via a ferry, seeing as I think it must be one of the only inland towns in North America where this is the case, I was surprised that no one had mentioned it. The ferry is small with room for about eight cars and it struggles to manoeuvre on what is a very large and fast flowing river. I imagined I was crossing into the planet of the apes.
Most of the people I’d met who were incidentally all North American said “no doubt about it Dawson City is an absolute must see” and after visiting the place and spending quite a few hours walking around I have to be honest; I don’t get it. It was an overpriced cheesy place if you ask me. It’s kept the older type building facades, and the roads don’t have tarmac so its feels fairly earthy but at $179 for a cheap hotel I was expecting a bit more.
I went to the casino which was mediocre; the centrepiece was a stage and a bunch of slot machines with a large wooden bar. I think the reason the North Americans like it is because it represents their recent history, as close to a frontier town as you can still get. Not my cup of tea, but everyone to their own as my old gaffer used to say.
As I was walking around I met this German guy who had just spent the last sixteen days kayaking in the Yukon, pulling off the rivers at night to sleep in the woods. He didn’t even have a tent, man this guy was hardcore! He told me that he does this every year, coming over from Germany and he heads out into the Canadian woods for seven weeks, alone. He had me oohing and aahing at some great stories about bears and moose. He was like talking to Michael Schumacher. The Germans would put you to shame coming from Ireland; most can knock out about three languages and don’t get me started about the pesky Dutch!...more languages than fingers!
Over a couple of tall frosty beers in Dawson city watching some particularly lame entertainment laid on for visiting tourists I started to reflect on the fact that I’d 20,000 miles to go, and 10,000 under my belt. It was 33 days since I left Ireland and only 30 since I left on the bike from Toronto. I knew that while in North America you could knock out two to three hundred miles in a morning with the roads being so good, once I got to Mexico all the distances that you’d be capable of completing in any one day would be far less aggressive.
I left Dawson city the next morning feeling a little blue. I missed the conditions of the Dalton highway in a perverse sort of way; I loved the excitement of it; so I decided I was going to set the GPS to take me to Moose creek using off-road tracks. I got about fifty miles of dirt and then was back on the highway. I was now circling south via a different loop back to Whitehorse along the Klondike highway. It’s straight as a ruler for hundreds of miles and after the off-road escapades early in the morning this was a cruel torment.
On the road I met a cool gent from Washington State called Jim Green and we rode a couple of hundred clicks together. We were both headed the same general direction so we decided to hook up for a couple of days. Jim had also completed the Dalton highway and said it was very emotional for him as it was something that he'd dreamed about since he was a boy. He was driving a BMW 1200, a newer model than mine and he was like Inspector gadget with all the bits and pieces he had round the bike. He was also armed with a big “fuck off” SLR camera. I was beginning to think that they gave them away free with BMW’s in the states.
Jim was one of the easiest going characters I’ve ever come across. While we were parked up having a soda I looked at the back of our bikes, my wheels had gnarly knobblies and he had a worn out looking street tire. I said to him “Jim did you ride the Dalton on that fucking tire?”… To which he replied… “Yep… there’s still plenty of rubber left on that bad boy too”. I couldn’t believe it. I wouldn’t have dreamt about doing it without the best of tires and there’s Jimbo cruising along on a slick without a care in the world.
We got to Whitehorse, for me it was the second time round; I couldn’t believe the amount Native Americans who were absolutely wasted drunk. Apparently the Native Americans lack an enzyme to break down alcohol so get drunk quicker and stay locked longer, that could really take on in colleges in Ireland. However the sad thing was, none of them looked happy they all just looked really angry.
On my first run through Whitehorse a guy offered to suck my John Thomas for $20 as I passed him by on the street, he looked out of his mind on drugs and was in a wheel chair. I tried haggling him down to $15 but he was having none of it (only kidding about the haggling), I gave him the $20 and declined the BJ.
The motel I stayed in became night of the living dead at around 2am with nothing but druggies and Alco’s all wandering around the car park and streets outside, if there’s a sadder place on earth I've yet to see it. The night was topped off when I went to a bar beside the motel for one Coors light to celebrate a long day on the bike and knocking out some massive miles, when a woman who was obviously a close relative of Jabba the Hutt asked me if I was "looking for company sugar?" I downed the Coors light in one go and walking out the bar door couldn’t help wonder what sort of dudes would take up that offer; I guess in a town when you get BJ's on wheels anything’s up for grabs. I'm sure there’s a good side to Whitehorse but in two visits I hadn’t managed to see it; but hey, at least it’s lively!
It was my second time through this part of the world so I was pushing things fairly hard, averaging four hundred miles a day; my thinking was that this will allow me to drop to a hundred miles a day in South America for a good period of time. I was having a ball with Jim who was ex army, ex law enforcement and was just a world of stories and fun. When two people are travelling on the road I think you tend to meet more people, I think people tend to shy away from people who travel on their own, “He’s travelling on his own, that fuckers weird!”
Every time we stopped on the road we would get talking to bikers or fellow travellers who all seemed really interested in who we were and where we were off to; we were having a ball.
We stayed for a night in Coal River in a motel come campsite and about half a mile from the back of the motel there’s a river. We strolled down to the riverbank harassed the whole way by giant mosquitoes. When we got there we were greeted by a river flowing east as the sun set in the west. The dusk air was cold but the sun was warm on our faces as we stood watching the river slowly pass us by. The moment ended quickly when Jim spotted bear tracks close to where we were standing so we both hauled ass back to the motel.
We had great weather for days at a time now and met great people on the road everywhere we went. Everyone you meet is travelling. You stop at a rest stop and people come up to you and say “so where you headed to?” You share twenty minutes of stories from the road and you’re off again.
There were plenty of obstacles on the road, more buffalo, gravel, and bridges with a grated bridge deck which almost pushes you off the bridge as it catches the knobbly tires, certainly gets the heart racing! We stopped at the sign forest in Watson Lake and I left my mark, as people from all over the world just pop along and leave a sign on one of the masts. There must be easily 20000 signs and when we stopped for some water at a lay-by we saw a crow the size of small donkey. I gave it some fruit and nut mix before it tried to fly off with my motorbike.
Both Jim and I just loved to ride the motorcycles and in just three days had knocked out over a thousand miles. The days tended to started foggy and burn off as the sun rose. The sun turns the scenery on if you know what I mean, when I passed this way ten days earlier it was lashing rain and I didn’t think too much of it. Well today the sun was out and it was mesmerizing. I’m also pretty sure the company made it feel a lot better too, every time you stop you have someone to share the experience with. The roads continued sweeping left and right as they meandered through mountain passes all the time flanked by jade green rivers and forests. The roads continued to be almost completely deserted so we had the run of the highways; I was living the dream.
After Fort Nelson the sun started beaming and the temperature soared, for the first time in over two weeks it was time to put away the fleece lining and water proof layers so I was down to just a t-shift and the enduro suit with all the vents open, long live the heat! As the evenings drew on with clear skies the bike would cast long shadows and as the roads circumnavigate large hills your shadow dances to the left, front and right of you as you’re making your way through the passes. The roads sweep unendingly left and right, as you carve a path through the countryside. At the time I wrote in my journal that “I’ve never felt as good as I do today.”
The only real downside of this part of the world is mosquitoes and black fly. Canada and Alaska are overrun with these gurriers. They actually stalk you, if you're walking home they actually follow you and wait till you leave some bare skin open and then dive straight on it. In these parts of the world they have real mossies, not the caffeine free diet mossie that has made its way into Ireland, for one thing they are about three times the size of the Irish variety.
If that wasn’t enough there’s black fly which is basically a flying set of teeth which tries to bite you a new bum hole when it lands on you. And the final piece of the jigsaw is completed by a little cur called a noseem, no-see-em get it? It’s the North American equivalent of a midge. So as soon as you hang a bit of bare skin out the door one of these three amigos is going to try and feast on you. The only way to minimize it is to spray two litres of deet on you or use countless other home remedies like bathing in yak piss; never a yak around when you need one eh!
As you’re driving along on the motorbike in the summer your visor gets hit with a variety of insects; about one every five minutes, normally right at the centre of the visor so you can see it with both eyes. This part is quite a bit worse than a car because at least you’re three feet from the windscreen in a car, with a helmet you’re about two inches away so you get to inspect the lower intestines of anything exploding on the visor.
A June bug hit my visor and it was like someone threw a bottle of Colman’s mustard at the helmet...ewwwww! I was straight off the bike gollying onto the visor and wiping him off. If you don’t get off and clean the visor the only way to get rid of them is to try and turn your head to the right or the left and see if the carcass will blow off the visor in the wind.
We met a lot of hunters, all card carrying members of the NRA. Like I said earlier I don’t get the hunting thing, but again everyone to their own. They would come up and ask you “Hey did you see any caribou?” Yeah like I’m gonna tell you so you can go up and shoot it! It’s mad you've 99% of folks looking out of the windows like oul ones waiting for the postman for any sign of a wild animal and then these boys are out shooting them! There’s a huge debate in the states about hunting and its relative merits, so no point in taking it any further here.
As Jim and I were pulled over on the Ice field parkway a bike pulled up and Rafael from Venezuela jumped off and said hello. It was great because today was the day when Jim road and my own would diverge and I wasn’t looking forward to it. It was like fate was paying me back for all the lonely riding in Canada, “Don’t worry Ois, here’s another biker buddy for ya”. We spent the day mucking around on Glaciers, looking at bears and mountain goats and generally having a great laugh. The three of us were pulled over at a glacier and given there was an Irish, USA and Venezuelan registration plates we were attracting a lot of attention. Lots of folks asked if they could take a picture of us, it was one of the first times that I really felt other people thought, what we were doing was cool.
It came time to say goodbye to Jim, we had rode from Dawson city the whole way down to Lake Louise where he cut off to Washington State. We'd a great four days covering almost 1600 miles together and I knew I was going to miss him. Rafael was a completely different sort of character. He was a tall Latin dude with long black hair who was too cool for school. We immediately hit it off and were straight away having a great time. He was headed for Houston in Texas so our roads would likely be the same for over a thousand miles which suited the two of us down to the ground.
I was constantly badgering him with questions about Mexico and Central America, he gave me one piece of advice, “Never look at the news in these countries, if you do you’ll be afraid to leave your room!” The first question I asked Rafael was what did he do for a living to which he replied “I'm a drug dealer.”
After 12,500 miles it was my last day in Canada. Pablo Escobar, aka Rafael and I pulled into a town near the USA border with Montana called Black diamond. The town was as dead as a door nail but was a nice place. We went out for a couple of beers in the local hotel and while I was getting petrol I bumped into the ugliest women I’d ever seen. She was dressed like a nurse, and if this is what nurses looked like in this part of the world, I reckon people didn’t stay long in the hospital; she had a face like a bull dog licking piss off a nettle.
We had spent most of the day getting some new tires on the bikes, and I had a full service, the bike had been through a bit of an ordeal by this stage. We didn’t go to a BMW dealer to get the work done, and the only thing I can say is that this was a mistake, and I’ll leave it at that. While we were waiting on the bikes we went over to a place called Blackfoot BMW to see if they had any bits of kit worth picking up. We met a guy there from Chile while we were hanging around and it turned out he was a veteran overlander who had done the Pan American highway a bunch of times.
He was the spitting image of a friend of my brothers called Foxy in every way except he spoke with a Spanish accent. This guy was fifty eight years old and was married to a thirty year old polish girl who was really hot and about a foot taller than him. I asked him what’s his secret and he said, exactly like Speedy Gonzales would have said it “eets coz I’m sexy no?!” In his wallet he had a picture of him in the Atacama Desert but the stories he told me made me more nervous than ever about crossing into Mexico.
We rode out of Calgary into a thunder storm as the sun was setting on the Rockies in the distance while being completely black overhead. We spent that night in a hostel, first time in a while for me it has to be said and because we arrived late I got one of the top bunks in a room holding six people with three bunk beds. There was a Japanese lad beneath me who if I did end up falling through the top bunk on top of him, was going to end up rightly fucked.
The top bunk was about two foot from the ceiling and had a wooden surround. I hadn’t been in a bunk bed since I was about five years old, which was about the last time I was able to fit in one and things hadn’t changed. I was too tall for the bed and too wide and with the really low ceiling it really was like looking out of an open casket coffin. I hit the scratcher late to be more tired than normal so I’d sleep but looks like everyone does this so I ended up being first in the scratcher.
For about two hours, on the half hour the rest of the guys in the room would come in, turn on the light, go in and brush their teeth etc, then go to bed, turn off the light, but the whole time all I was thinking about especially after the guy got his head hacked off on the greyhound bus in Manitoba “ok this fucker is a serial killer...he’s gonna take out a bowie knife and do me in the goolies with it.”
I guess I’m just not comfortable sleeping in a room with five strangers. Also the people who go to hostels here aren’t the same as in Europe. They aren’t inter-railer’s, or students. A lot of them are hunters, and other types of cabbages most not the sort of folks you'd be striking up a conversation with.
I talked with one of them earlier in the night and he was on sick leave for some reason and here was the only place they had a doctor, he didn’t elaborate. In my spinning mind this translated to “ok this guy is a nutter, no way they have a doctor here in Canmore and not in Calgary.” The fact that he had a moustache and a real dodgy comb over didn’t do anything to allay my worries. I thought to myself, if I’m gonna get slaughtered in the middle of the night; I don’t want it to be by a dude with a tache and a comb over!
I could see myself in the serial killer year book. On the left page a full page picture of the serial killer, and on the right a montage of all the people he’d killed, and on the top row, two in from the left was me.
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Ride on!
30000mileson2wheels.blogspot.com
BacktoBroke.blogspot.com
Inspiring stuff thanks for sharing.
