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Driving out from Alice Springs to Kings Canyon we passed over the Finke River. We'd passed over it the previous day on The Ghan and it had looked interesting, so we did a rapid U-turn and stopped in the parking area next to the bridge. |
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| To our surprise we noticed a small motorcycle sidecar unit (a
200cc Honda), and
sitting in the shade under the shelter was the motorcyclist. We
started to talk and immediately noticed he was American (of course
we'd already spotted the Stars and Stripes on the bike, so it wasn't
that clever of us). He introduced himself as Frank Wheeler and told us that he was crossing Australia west to east, and was heading for Alice Springs to get some new tyres. |
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Spotting that we were Brits he immediately offered us a cup of tea, as he was brewing up for his lunch. What a gentleman! As we talked Frank told us about some other exploits, such as walking The Simpson Desert in Australia, and Death Valley in the USA. Having been to Death Valley and managed ourselves to walk all of 400 yards in the heat we were very impressed. |
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We didn't take any still photos of Frank, as we thought it would be intrusive, but we did take some video of the area. We asked Frank to say Hello to people in England, and he responded with a perfect one-take piece to camera. The pictures are taken from the video, so the quality's not as good as we would like. |
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We've learned since that Frank is legendary in the world of motorcycling. Thirty odd years ago he completed a trip round the whole coast of Australia on a 125cc Hodaka - a specialist 'dirt bike' (don't know if these details are right because Anne refuses to let Les go back to motorcycling). |
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