I love Aussie meat pies. Like Vegemite, they're a staple in the Australian diet. But I also discovered recently from Food Standards Australia New Zealand that the ubiquitous pie may contain any of the following: beef, buffalo, camel, cattle, deer, goat, hare, pig, poultry, rabbit, sheep and/or kangaroo, including snouts, ears, tongue roots, tendons and blood vessels!

The clear icy waters of the Snowy River are framed in yellow leaves and the nearby ski slopes of the Snowy Mountains wind through the wooded hills. It's the end of May and winter knocks on the door in the southern hemisphere. To escape the cold, we're pointing our bikes north toward Cape York, 3,000 miles away, where the scenery more closely resembles what one typically sees in Australian travel brochures - sunny days on white strands fringed with swaying palm trees.

I don't know what came over me. What on earth was I thinking? After one year spent traveling across Africa and its numerous border crossings, I had become an utterly cynical creature of habit, all too used to victimization at the hands of frontier officials. Those hands, I must add, had never once reached toward ours in greeting. Instead, with palms out, they gestured impatiently time after time for the payment of bribe after bribe. An accepted component of everyday life there, corruption seems as natural as eating or sleeping. After twelve months of this, one might be excused for thinking that's the way the rest of the world works - at and around the edges where no one ever bothers to inscribe the rules.

The Hume Highway is a one-day straight shot of superslab, notorious for the fleets of truck convoys thundering over its tarmac, their drivers reputedly addled by sleep deprivation and amphetamines. Aussie bikers call it the "Gloom and Doom," and avoid it like warm beer.Then, there's the Princes Highway, a two-day ramble around Victoria's rolling farmland and the coast of New South Wales. Though it too has its challenges - wildlife incursions and indifferent surfacing, for example - the Princes easily persuades riders to take their time and smell the roses.

Complacency can kill. I'm accelerating away from a gas station near Wynyard on Tasmania's A2 north coast road when I see a "ute" - an Aussie pickup - heading straight for me on my side of the road. For a second I'm stunned. Then just as the ute swerves violently to its right and out of my path, I realize what the problem is: I'm on the wrong side of the road...