Senses working overtime

Have you ever thought about how much motorcycle riding is a very sensual affair?  Our enjoyment (and safety!) means that we bring our five senses constantly into play as we use and enjoy our bikes.

Even the way we describe our rides reflects its physicality.  Feeling the wind in our faces.  The sensation of the road through our handlebars.  Being at one with our bike.

Occasionally, there’s even a spirituality in riding that comes from and surpasses your senses.  Often, when a ride really comes together, you end up in a zone where your subconscious mind looks after the routine elements of riding, leaving your mind free to wander.  When this happens, your heightened senses make you one with the landscape, leaving intense images, sounds and smells seared into your brain. 

If you’ve ridden for a while, you’ve had rides like that.  For me, it was an 18-day jaunt to Uluru, Alice Springs and the Australian Outback – a sublime ride to places I’d never been before.  New roads, new sensations. 

Like Burra, the point where we started to cross the line into the Outback and a first exposure to the space that is the essence of Australia.  A landscape flat in every direction, with no major landform to break the impression.  Space like that can cause anyone to wax a bit poetic and I was awed by what unfolded each new mile.

Like a pure blue sky with a few scattered fluffy clouds that looked as though they had been placed there purely for effect.  An effect so perfect that it seemed as though the sky had been painted in by some enthusiastic artist.

Like a flat horizon in every direction.  A sense of isolation, of "nothing here".

Like the Hay Plain, where a low to the ground haze gradually transformed into a solid cloud of hopping, flying, squishing locusts. 

Like roadkill, where massive roadtrains had left kangaroos on the side of the road in varying stages of decomposition.  Certainly makes for a variety of scents, as heightened senses discerned a difference between each one.

Like the ancient grandeur of Uluru, it’s calm serenity rudely shattered by the thunder of thousands of Harley-Davidsons.  An eerie juxtaposition of the modern and the timeless.

The thought repeatedly came to me as I was riding that we are extremely lucky riding Harley-Davidsons, especially in Australia.  We’re blessed with exceptional scenic beauty of a type not often seen anywhere else in the world.  Maybe touring on a Harley is not for everyone.  But, on two wheels, we experience parts of the country in a way that most people never could.  We’re in it, and every sense is engaged.