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MORE TO EXPLORE: For additional photos of motorcycling through the Australian outback, go to travel.azcentral.com.
SYDNEY, Australia — Thousands of miles of roads crisscross Australia’s vast outback. Most travelers miss out on the beautiful sites dotted across the land by flying from one city to the next. Four mates and I decided it was time for a closer exploration of the country we call home. So, armed with our cameras, we hit the road for a seven-day, 1,900-mile journey across the outback on our motorcycles.
When traveling in such a remote area, planning is essential. We booked our accommodations in advance, which helped us stick to our schedule.
We set out from Sydney and headed southwest across the state of New South Wales, bypassing the nation’s capital, Canberra, and heading west to Griffith. Thousands of sheep graze in pastures surrounding the town, which has a strong Italian heritage, a passion for food and a vibrant, creative culture. Griffith is Australia’s largest wine-producing region, featuring more than a dozen wineries and rich citrus and stone-fruit orchards.
We stopped in Griffith because it was a convenient location, but we soon discovered its charms after a delicious dinner at the Bistro inside the Griffith RSL Club, a popular social club. The osso buco was one of the best I’ve tasted.
Trips like this sometimes entail extreme conditions, which for us meant cold, earlymorning departures on dark roads infested with kangaroos and emus. It’s dangerous no matter what you’re driving, as ’roos bound across the pavement without warning. Liftopia.com is offering preseason discounts on lift tickets at ski resorts around the country. Prices during the Red Hot End of Summer Sale include single-day lift tickets at Crested Butte in Colorado starting at $19, single-day lift tickets at Diamond Peak in Lake Tahoe starting at $30 and two-day lift tickets at Snowbasin in Utah starting at $103.99.
Thankfully, outback driving etiquette was on our side. Lumbering buses — better equipped than a motorcycle to withstand a ’roo strike — let us follow them, the drivers hitting their turn signals to warn us of hopping threats approaching from the left or right.
We made it safely to the Hay Plains, a flat region with little blocking the view of the horizon, and photographed a spectacular sunrise before traveling to Wentworth. The southwest New South Wales town is best known as the junction of the Murray and Darling rivers, the country’s largest river system, and boasts the stunning Perry Sandhills, an expanse of windswept, red sand dunes.
After 620 miles on our bikes, Wentworth was a nice break, offering plenty of sites to explore on foot and on the water, including a tour of a historical jail and a ride aboard an old-fashioned paddleboat.
Meals at the pub, the Captain Sturt Hotel, provided a good opportunity to meet (and play pool with) the locals, and taste some hearty outback cuisine. Vegetarians beware: The steaks here are the size of small dogs.
Our next stop was Broken Hill, a mining community in far west New South Wales. This is where you find the harsher side of the outback, with dry, cracked earth, spiky spinifex grass and jagged outcrops of granite and sandstone. The highway stretches as far as the eye can see, cutting through barren, yet beautiful, countryside. You can travel an hour without seeing another soul.
Broken Hill offers accommodation ranging from $20 hostels to swank $250 hotels. After the long ride, we opted for swank and checked into our posh digs before heading to nearby Silverton, famous as the shooting location for the post-apocalyptic film “Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior.”
At first glance, Silverton (population 36) doesn’t look like much. There’s a museum, an old Masonic lodge, a touristinformation center and a collection of old cars used in “Mad Max 2.” But a visit to the pub revealed how popular this place is: More than 1,000 signatures adorned the town’s visitors log, which is kept on top of the bar.
The 1981 Mel Gibson flick is the real draw here. The pub walls are plastered with movie memorabilia and newspaper articles documenting the film shoot, and a glass case boasts a now-empty box that once held the gun carried by the film’s bad guy, Humongous.
With a takeout dinner of fish and chips in hand, we rode out to the desert to photograph another dazzling sunset before returning to Broken Hill for the night.
The next day, we stopped at the Living Desert Reserve, which features Aboriginal rock carvings and a collection of giant, manmade sandstone sculptures jutting out of the red earth.
The next day we rode more than 470 miles to the city of Dubbo, where we switched the theme of our trip from rural Australia to African safari: We had booked a two-night stay at the Taronga Western Plains Zoo. The drive there was chal-