Sue Zann Toh

In 2005, I thought I’d do something a little different for my birthday. I thought I’d take my boyfriend, his sister and her husband up to Lancelin, WA for a little Quad Biking adventure!

Lancelin is about one and a half (1.5) hours north of Perth, on the coastline. It’s famous for it’s beaches, where surfers are frequently seen riding the waves, and it’s sand dunes, where extremist are frequently seen riding the dunes. The dunes are truly amazing, it looks like some giant took a bucket of clean white sand, and dumped it inland to form these dunes. It’s so white, it’s almost blinding! The sand dunes at Lancelin are a popular place for sandboarding, dune buggys, dirt bikes, quad bikes and four wheel driving.

We found DirtBikeHire.com on the internet, and booked for a one hour quad bike hire and tour for $70 per person. When we arrived at the sand dunes, we signed our hire agreement and disclaimer form, put on the helmets and goggles provided with the hire, then hopped onto the quad bikes.

There were two types of quad bikes, the manual quad bikes with gears like a dirt bike or motorcycle, and the automatic quad bikes. I was eternally thankful that I got the automatic quad bike as I’ve never been on a motorcycle in my life. Although the automatic quad bikes were less powerful, they were much easier to drive, there was the “Go” button on the right handle, the front brake on the right handle and the back brake on the right foot.

At the beginning, we were sent to the “idiots hill” and given some time to get use to the bikes. I felt like a complete dope after the guide came up to me and said “Go faster!” (Yes, I was driving as fast as a turtle). After that, our tour guide took us around the sand dunes where he would stop and let us zoom around, up and down the dunes. It was a whole heap of fun! I enjoyed it much more than I expected, even when I fell off the bike! I didn’t hurt myself, but I did feel stupid for about half a second.

My most memorable moment of quad biking was going over some of the larger sand dune. We were warned to be careful driving up the sand dunes as the other side of the dune was usually a sharp drop. My thoughts were, “Uh huh, OK whatever”, but then I drove up the first sand dune, saw the HUGE drop on the other side and some profanities escaped my lips. I was scared, so I stopped my quad bike at the top of the dune and consequently got bogged (stuck). The guide had to push me off the dune, so I had no choice but to tackle the huge drop. I encountered many more huge drops on the other side of sand dunes, but I was smarter this time, and found an alternate route for my quad bike.

Although there were some scary moments, I really did enjoy my first quad bike experience. At the end of the hour, I was physically and emotionally tired from the excitement. I highly recommend that everyone tries quad biking at least once in their lifetime!

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