One of the coolest things we tried here in Western Australia was quad biking. After an approximately drive of an hour and a half into the north of Perth, we arrived at the small town Lancelin. It’s a small dreamily village with an enormous dune landscape. As we got out of the car, we became nearly snow-blind. The white sand gave you the impression to be in the midst of a huge snow landscape.

Via the internet we booked an one-hour tour over the dunes. After we had signed the safety regulations, we put on our helmets and goggles. The men of our group had experience we driving a motorbike, so they got quad bikes with powerful engines and gear changing. The female members of our team got somewhat smaller bikes with an automatic transmission.

At the beginning we drove slowly around in the flat area in order to get to know the vehicle. For example you had to get accustomed to the fact that you had to accelerate with the right thumb. After about 10 minutes our tour guide led us to the dunes. Uphill, downhill, higgledy and piggledy in the middle of nowhere. What shall I say - it’s amazing! Driving as fast as possible, or better as strong as your thumb is, sliding until you’re dizzy, but don’t try to stop. Faster as you can think you are stuck in the sand up to your half. Not only once we had to dig our bikes out of the sand. That’s quite exhausting, because the bikes are pretty heavy.

The girls were happy as long as they could cruise in-plane, but when they were supposed to drive downhill or uphill, we heard quite often: “I am not stupid, I am NOT driving down this dune!” or “What!? I shall drive up this steep dune? Never!” The boys didn’t have these problems. They followed our guide to the steepest dunes without hesitation. The girls took rather the more comfortable ways around the really daunting dunes.

As a matter of course of high spirits we managed also an overturning, but nothing serious happened. The sand was very soft and so we had just a few bruises.

After one hour of speeding and sliding we were totally exhausted. We hadn’t expected that quad biking is quite arduous, especially on the sand and tough you have enough horsepower under your bum.

In these dunes you can also do sand boarding, but we saw this only at the end and we had no energy for it anymore. But this gives us a reason to make another trip to Lancelin. In any case it was an awesome day and we had heaps of fun!

If you’re interested in the story from a female point of view, visit Sue Zann’s web site.
If you want to try the fun yourself, visit the Dirt Bike web site.