W
hen Deydeep Satheesh left Melbourne on his motorcycle on 13 June, he wasn’t setting out to ride around Australia. There was no grand itinerary, no support crew waiting along the way, and, at that stage, no plan to reach the northernmost point of the mainland.
The IT consultant from Bangalore has called Australia home since 2010. Based in Melbourne, he’d embraced a flexible lifestyle of late — renting apartments in places he liked and working remotely, free to travel without being tied to one place. Somewhere in that drifting life, a much older itch resurfaced: a lifelong wish to be fully mobile on a motorcycle, everything he owned strapped to the back, no fixed address, just the road.
“If I’m not tied to one place anyway, why not keep moving?” he tells The Indian Sun. So he got the bike out, packed it, and started riding. There was no grand plan yet. “The bigger goals came later,” he says. Reaching the Tip of Cape York became the target once he’d found his rhythm on the road; a full lap of the country came after that.
Deydeep rode back into Melbourne on 13 September — 93 days and nearly 15,000 kilometres after he’d set out.
The route reads like a spine drawn down and up the country. From Melbourne he went through Canberra and up the east coast to Brisbane, then followed the Queensland coastline through Hervey Bay, Bundaberg, Mackay and Townsville to Cooktown. From there he turned onto the Cape York Peninsula and rode all the way to the Tip — the northernmost point of the Australian mainland — arriving on 9 August.
After resting and working a while in Cairns, he swung west into the outback: the Atherton Tablelands, Hughenden, Winton, Mount Isa, across the Barkly Tableland to Three Ways, then down the Stuart Highway through Alice Springs to Uluru. From the Red Centre he pushed south through Coober Pedy and Port Augusta to Adelaide, followed the coast through the Great Ocean Road, and finally reached Wilsons Promontory — where a gruelling trek on foot took him to South Point, the southernmost tip of the mainland.
In one continuous stretch, he’d touched both the top and the bottom of the continent.
Being self-supported meant everything he needed had to travel with him. “Every tool, camera, and spare part was strapped to my bike,” says Deydeep. Packing and unpacking the bike each day, he admits, was one of the hardest parts of the whole trip. There was no backup crew and no camping — he relied on offline maps, since reception was never guaranteed, and stuck to strict daily routines to stay safe on the road. Servicing had to be planned well ahead too, with some stretches having no dealer for thousands of kilometres.
He stayed in motels, roadhouses, Airbnbs and hotels along the way. Wherever he settled somewhere longer for work, he’d buy groceries and cook proper meals. But once he pushed past Cairns and into the outback, options grew scarce. “I’d eat breakfast if there was any and leave, then stop every 75 to 150 kilometres for a protein bar, a yoghurt, a banana and water.”
Ask him for the hardest stretch and the answer is the 350 kilometres of teeth-rattling corrugated dirt on the Cape York Peninsula. “One wrong move in the deep sand or dust clouds from road trains, and you’re down.”
Much of that punishment came on the Peninsula Development Road, where he stood on the footpegs for 200 to 300 kilometres of corrugations at a stretch. “It rattled me to the bone — literally. My hands wouldn’t stop vibrating for hours afterward.”
Strangely, it wasn’t there that he crashed. His only fall of the trip came later, on a slippery river crossing, right after he’d cleared the hardest section — the moment he finally let his guard down.
Doubt, though, never really entered the picture. “I was too focused on surviving the next 10 kilometres to even think about failing. Once I decided in Townsville that I was going to ride to the Tip, I never once thought I wouldn’t make it. Maybe it was just that I didn’t know how hard it was going to be. Every time I did something hard, the next day was harder.”
That toughness cut both ways. His worst day on the road wasn’t a remote outback crossing — it was the very last day of the trip, when his feet were raw and bleeding from a 32-kilometre trek, the bike had started misfiring, and he found himself “emotionally torn about returning to normal life”.
Even when things got gruelling, turning back never crossed his mind. “Problem-solving mode,” he calls it. “Even when running out of gas, I just calculated how many hours I’d need to push the bike and kept moving forward.”
All of it led to one moment: parking the bike and walking the final stretch to the Pajinka sign. “Overwhelming,” he says. “Sitting on the rocks in full riding gear, looking out at the ocean — I felt a true sense of achievement. It was pure pride and relief.”
There were foot journeys too, when the bike simply couldn’t go any further — a scorching 10-kilometre loop around Uluru, and that brutal 32-kilometre trek to South Point that left his feet in ruins.
Somewhere in the Northern Territory, he detoured just to take a photo beside one of Australia’s most infamous road signs: “No fuel for 375 km.” He didn’t actually ride that stretch; he was staying at Barkly Homestead for the night and simply rode a little way up the road for the picture. Fuel, he says, was never really the worry.
“A sign like that reminds you of the remoteness. You respect the sheer emptiness. Carrying extra fuel is easy; handling the psychological weight of total isolation is the real test.”
Through most of the remote north, phone signal vanished entirely between roadhouses, appearing again only when he stopped for fuel. Satellite communication kept him tethered to the world when nothing else could. Even so, rain on day one left him more rattled than any dry outback silence — soaked through and suddenly terrified of losing grip and going down at a petrol station.
The road brought him strange, generous company. Two bikers who’d already clocked 18,000 kilometres with no end date in sight. A family travelling in two four-wheel-drives, one taking the notoriously rough Old Telegraph Track while the other looped around it with a camper in tow. But one encounter stuck: over lunch at Curtin Springs, on his rest day after the Uluru walk, he met a 63-year-old Kiwi travelling Australia with his wife — a couple who had, between them, already walked the entire length of New Zealand.
“Proof that adventure has no age limit,” reflects Deydeep.
Despite the isolation, he found the solitude addictive rather than draining. “Your senses are dialled to 100 per cent, and the instant the wheels start rolling, all stress disappears. Psychologically, that’s the best part of being on a motorbike rather than in a car. Walking, trekking, running or cycling come close, but a motorbike gives you that same sense of isolation while the throttle lets you go much further.”
His wife, Italailin Jana, currently in India, was his biggest supporter through the whole trip. She had been the only person in his family who knew his plans from the start, quietly cheering him on before eventually sharing his progress with the wider family, who then became, in his words, his “biggest cheerleaders.”
Deydeep had set out hoping to complete a full lap of the country. He got through the top half — Melbourne to the Tip, across the outback, down to Uluru, and back through the south to Wilsons Promontory — before a call from his sister brought him back to India for personal reasons.
The second half, tracing the east coast home, will have to wait. For a man who took on 15,000 kilometres of corrugations, crocodile country and empty highways without once thinking of turning back, it’s safe to assume he’ll finish what he started.
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