Adventure in the Pindan: Mud, Mulga & Motorcycles

By Dan Talbot

“We’re heading out into the desert for five days of the most remote motorcycle riding you can saddle up for.” Craig ‘Batesy’ Bates (Desert and Coastal Adventures)

WHO doesn’t dream of blasting through the desert on a big-bore dirt bike, forging a path through the mulga and roosting red Pindan mud from chunky knobby tyres? Well me, as it turned out. But that’s all changed.

I like to treat myself to at least one motorcycle odyssey every year. In the past, I’ve ridden through the Kimberley, tackled Cape York and, just last year, explored New Zealand. But in 2026, I decided to holiday in my own backyard—the vast, beautiful and unforgiving desert country of Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields.

I have both ancestral and professional connections to the Goldfields. My great-grandfather was a pioneer of the region, my grandfather was born there, my daughter was born there, and I spent several years working in Kalgoorlie. It had been almost 20 years since I left, so this trip was more than just another motorcycle adventure. It was a personal sojourn—a return to a place woven into my family history and my own life.

Our adventure began on an otherwise unremarkable Spring morning in Laverton. Or so we thought. The normally arid Great Victoria Desert had been drenched by rain and, as it turned out, would continue receiving more throughout our trip. The Pindan was no longer the familiar red dirt; it had been transformed into mud.

For us, that was almost perfect. The bikes revelled in it, we were kept cool and my new tyre roosted riders 30 metres away.

Our only concern was that the support vehicles were considerably less enthusiastic. Heavy vehicles and desert mud are a particularly unforgiving combination, and the prospect of burying a truck in some remote quagmire was very real. Getting a bogged support vehicle out of the desert, potentially hundreds of kilometres from the nearest assistance, could easily run into tens of thousands of dollars—a scenario any tour operator would be desperate to avoid.

For us, however, the rain had created almost perfect riding conditions. Rumbling out of Laverton on a dozen big-bore four-stroke dirt bikes, we headed into the desert with equal measures of excitement and trepidation. I was looking for some desperately needed time out, and I wasn’t the only one.

“Most of the blokes here run their own business. This is their golden opportunity to get off the phones, get away and just reconnect with nature. You ride all day and, at night, you get to sit down around a fire, chill out, no world to annoy you.”

And that was exactly the attraction.

We would spend most of our time on rough and ready 4WD tracks and single-track trails, many of them reduced to long stretches of water and mud. The surface was skatey, unpredictable and constantly changing. As usual, the best approach was to keep the power on, let the bike move beneath you and trust it to find its own line.

That worked particularly well for those with great gobs of horsepower but, for reasons not entirely clear to me, I had opted to take my 50-year-old Yamaha TT500. It was certainly no slouch, but compared with my KTM-riding companions, the old Yamaha had slow steering, poor brakes and roughly half the suspension travel. On paper, it looked distinctly outclassed. In the dirt, however, the old TT proved more than capable.

It handled the mud, water and rough going with the sort of stoic reliability for which these old Yamahas are renowned. In fact, the only mechanical failure of the entire trip was the aftermarket exhaust system—basically brand-new, but apparently less durable than the 50-year-old motorcycle it was bolted to.

DACA—Desert and Coastal Adventures—runs a fleet of modern KTM EXC 500s. I have one myself, and they’re bloody awesome. Like me, most of the blokes on the trip chose to bring their own bikes, leaving just three DACA machines in the mix, plus a backup bike strapped into the truck. That one was reserved for the clown who thought taking a 50-year-old motorcycle into the desert was a good idea.

Most of the bikes were 500cc, although we also had a KTM 350 and a 300 Sherco. Honestly, once we hit the dirt, the difference in engine capacity hardly mattered. Out there, it was less about cubic centimetres and far more about the rider. What really made the difference was ability—and the determination to crack on.

Our group were all experienced, capable riders who would much rather be blasting along a twisting single-track before bursting out onto an open gravel road than taking the easy option. Of course, DACA caters for less confident riders too, with more open country and easier routes available when needed. On this trip, however, we didn’t need any of that.

“It’s about the banter, right? You have no idea what their riding capabilities are, and every tour builds a group of people that you would go to war with.”

There was certainly plenty of banter.

The original plan was to complete a big 1,000-kilometre lap of the desert, but adventures seldom go to plan. Day One ended about 180 kilometres east of Laverton at a hunter’s lodge—or, more accurately, a shooter’s shack—on the shore of normally bone-dry Lake Raison. Except Lake Raison wasn’t bone-dry anymore. Recent rain had transformed the lake into something resembling an inland sea. The shack offered shelter for the swags, solar electricity and, best of all, fresh water.

Sheer luxury.

We ended up staying there for three nights, giving us a surprisingly comfortable base from which to push out into the desert in different directions. On Day Two, we set off to circumnavigate the 250 kilometre perimeter of Lake Raison, taking full advantage of the extraordinary conditions. The bush was lush and green, alive with wildflowers, dingoes and camels. A graded trail of around 75 kilometres, with perhaps 200 bends, provided the perfect playground for some spirited bar-to-bar power slides. It was hard to imagine a better place to ride.

There was, however, a sobering reality beneath the fun. If one of us came unstuck, help was potentially two days away—or an expensive helicopter ride, so having fun and staying out of trouble were very much part of the same equation. The remoteness was both the attraction and the danger.

“At the end of a ride out here, every single bloke said, ‘Mate, this week has been an adventure.’ Everything from broken cars, fixing axles, flat tyres, broken motorbikes, lost swags.”

And that, perhaps, sums it up perfectly.

It wasn’t the kilometres we covered or the number of bends we conquered. It wasn’t even the bikes, although twelve big-bore dirt bikes charging through the desert certainly helped. It was the place. The isolation. The weather. The mud. The camaraderie. The nights around the fire. The occasional mechanical drama. The knowledge that beyond the headlights there was little more than thousands of square kilometres of bush and desert.

And somewhere in all of that, I rediscovered a part of the Goldfields I thought I already knew.

“Mustering cattle was all about motorbikes for me as a kid. As I got older, I realised it wasn’t so much about the motorbikes—it was about being on the land.”

Maybe that’s what this trip was really about. The motorcycles got us there. The adventure kept us moving. But it was being out on the land that made the trip what it was.

Back in Laverton, it was time to wash the dust, mud and red Pindan from ourselves and the bikes, and reflect on five brilliant days of riding through one of the most remote corners of Australia. Batesy had called it the most remote riding you could saddle up for and he wasn’t wrong.

*Pindan is a Yamatji word for red-dirt.