Five days, 500-and-something kilometres, four bikes and no support vehicle worth mentioning.
We started in a motel car park on a grey morning, the Land Cruiser still beaded with overnight rain and four bikes hanging off the back like a promise we hadn’t earned yet. The plan was simple enough to say out loud: ride across Tasmania’s high country, five days, five-hundred-and-something kilometres, carrying what we needed and charging batteries wherever there was a wall socket and someone willing.
The first days set the pattern. Highland gravel that went on long enough to empty your head. Hydro country — canals and still reservoirs cut through paddocks the colour of a dry summer. Long climbs where the motors hummed along under us at a polite 25 km/h and the conversation kept going, which is the whole argument for these bikes in one sentence: you’re still riding, you’re just riding further.
The middle days
Somewhere in the middle of the trip the rides stopped being about distance. We lined the four bikes up on a creek bank under a row of autumn poplars and realised nobody had touched a car in days. We crossed a collapsed timber bridge one at a time, walking the bikes over grey logs that had carried farm traffic a century ago. And on the hottest afternoon we dropped everything at a bridge over a slow river and got in, boots on the rocks, one red bike standing guard.
Batteries did what the maths said they would. With 840 Wh each and a spare in the bags, an 80 km highland day was comfortable rather than heroic — assist low on the flats, saved up for the climbs. Every night the chargers went into motel power points and pub wall sockets, and every morning the bikes were full before we were.
The burnt country
The stretch nobody forgot was the burnt forest. Black soil, silver trunks, a canopy of bronzed leaves that the fire had cooked but not taken, and a clear trail running straight through the middle of it, green shoots already pushing up along the edges. It’s a strange thing to ride through country like that: quiet, a bit solemn, unmistakably alive.
We rolled into the last town filthy and pleased with ourselves, leaned the bikes against a pub rail, and did the trip’s final climb: the front steps. Nothing on the bikes had failed. The mud came off with a hose. The habit of looking at a map and thinking we could just ride there has proved harder to wash out.
That trip is why Roar exists the way it does. The bikes we sell are the bikes we took — same carbon frame, same certified Bafang drive, same batteries, because a spec sheet is a claim, and five days across Tasmania is a receipt.