Wheels of fortune

If you could take a day and set it in amber, so that any time in the future you could put your eye right up to it, look into that translucent goldness and let it play again, which day would it be?

Among mine, I'd save this day motorcycling through the mountains of Ethiopia, through golden agricultural lands, villages with homes of mud and straw, strings of laden donkeys, carts piled high and cattle herds.

Of children waving, waving, waving, and the odd boy shooting me with a stick (boys will be boys).

And then a rhythmical climb through serpentine hairpin bends and over two high passes.

It begins at 8.30am, alongside Tony Evans, leading a Travel Directors tour of Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, and Phill Whitford, of Mandurah.

We are cutting loose - breaking away from the group for the day.

Tony has arranged bikes for us to ride from the town of Bahir Dar to Gondar. It's only about 180km but through interesting country.

The bikes are small - I have a rather gnarly Yamaha YT115, Tony and Phill rather more swish Boxer 125s.

Let's do a quick assessment. The kickstart (no electric) hangs out to the side. The gearshift is bent almost beyond reaching. No front brake to speak of. And, well, no back brake to speak of either. Only one mirror, and it's cracked. The speedo's not working and neither are the indicators.

I kick it into life and it coughs blue smoke.

Perfect.

I love rubbish bikes. I love the way they carry their scars and the way stuff doesn't quite work. They're individuals, not just cloned perfections, and have to be learnt and cajoled - allowances have to be made. By the end of the day, you know them inside out and don't want to hand them back.

We all decide it's not a race - we are here just to cruise and see the countryside from our favourite mode of transport. (Sure.) And Tony reckons that if you knock anyone down, you go straight to jail, anyway.

I do know some of the road rules. There's a 160-birr ($9) fine for driving with excessive sound of radio, CD player or tape, and I decide to sing quietly. The same fine applies, apparently, for driving while watching television or video (I search the YT115 but neither is fitted).

Of more interest to me is the 80-birr fine that can be applied for driving below the standard speed limit, for sprinkling water on pedestrians and for failure to remove broken parts after a collision. (I think they mean the vehicle's.)

We set off through Bahir Dar, groping our way round the new bikes. For this first leg, Tony is joined by pillion passenger Barbara Malinowski, who is 82, and rides on the back of his bike to the source of the Blue Nile. In fact, we cross a bridge over the Blue Nile which is only 300m from the place where the river drains from Ethiopia's biggest lake, Lake Tana. Then, up a rock and dirt road not far from Bahir Dar, we pass one of former emperor Haile Selassie's modest palaces and stop on clear ground to look down on the river.

There is debate over the true source of the Blue Nile but for Firew Ayele, who is showing us around and is a rock-solid geographer and historian, it is Lake Tana. He argues that many rivers feed into it, so who could say which of those is a true source? We are looking at the river as it has just emerged from Lake Tana.

After the Blue Nile stop (Barb hops back in the bus), we open the bikes up on a wide, smooth bitumen road. Initially, the Yamaha leaves a curling tail of blue smoke but, as the day progresses, I get the engine's temperature right up and burn it out clean.

The blue and white local buses are crowded with locals. They might have "With God's Will" and a dove painted on the back but some seem driven by the devil himself.

As I pass them, I see a mash of sacks and bags and faces staring back.

Big trucks are fully laden but still crack along at speed. In the fields, people are winnowing grain and hay is being stacked in big domes.

After the first hour or so, I am in the groove . . . locked into the rhythm of the bike and the country passing . . . feeling light and free.

By now, the riding group has rather dissolved as we all find our own pace and do our own thing.

I know I am aiming for the Taye Hotel in Gondar and that's good enough for me. I climb up into the mountains, round hairpin bends and pass Penis Rock, which is extremely large.

A monkey crosses the road, stops, looks at me and holds up a middle finger.

I pass men who have sticks across their shoulders, draping their arms and a cloth over them, so they look a little like elegant scarecrows.

In one village, a man does the same with a rifle, which I'm pretty sure is an ancient .303.

I slow for the ambling herds of cattle which cross the road, small boys herding them.

And I give a wide berth to the donkeys with the loads, strung nose to tail, and knowing just where they are going (some don't even have a human with them).

The Ethiopian domestic donkey is indigenous to Africa, its forebears being the Nubian and the Somali wild ass. It is estimated that there are between four and five million donkeys in Ethiopia (maybe more) - certainly more than 10 per cent of the world's donkey population and the second-highest number, behind China. About 85 per cent of Ethiopians are still subsistence farmers and rely on their donkeys.

I had care of 13 donkeys as a child and see their condition and treatment on these roads are generally good and their loads not huge, though I know this is not the case throughout the country.

They carry timber, charcoal and produce in neat parcels.

Most are grey-brown, one chocolate, and I see one white donkey tethered against a dark- coloured hut. The distinctive stripes running down from their shoulders are said to be the marks from Jesus Christ's legs - a reminder that a donkey carried him into Jerusalem. (They also remind me that in some Aboriginal communities with a Christian presence, I have heard them called "taxi belonga Jesus".)

I move out to give a string of donkeys a wide berth, with a blue, three-wheeled tuk-tuk coming towards me, and a local bus decides to squeeze through, too.

It's no big deal. The trick to riding motorcycles around the world (or driving a car, come to that), is to quickly tune into the way the traffic moves and the way drivers behave. Do it their way and you are doing what they expect. Hesitate or behave like a nervous ninny and you are more likely to run into problems.

By mid-afternoon, I am so tuned into the bike and the day and the landscape - and the whole, sheer joy of motorcycling in Ethiopia - that I don't want it to end.

I want to ride on forever.

I've been stopping to take photographs and fallen a bit behind Tony, and the dreamlike quality that has developed in my head is broken when I see him standing at a fork in the road.

Gondar's a home of sorts to him, and this is the road in.

It's over. We slide through the traffic, past tuk-tuks and trucks, along streets lined with little shops and busy life going on, and pull up at a coffee shop.

The big smile of Senait Seraw greets us.

"Super-Senny," Tony says, and they greet in the particular Ethiopian way, man to woman, of a handshake combined with three kisses . . . left, right, left.

Senait is possibly the best coffee maker in Gondar and, in her corner coffee shop, people sit on low leather cushions as she performs the ceremony of making coffee. It first grew naturally in Ethiopia and can still be found in the wild.

I greet her in the traditional way.

"Was the day good," Senait asks.

"Yes," I say. "It was good." Very good. In fact, a day to be set in the amber of memory.

• fact file *

·Travel Directors' African Dawn tour is a 28-day journey through Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia from January 4 to January 31, 2015. 9242 4200 or traveldirectors. com.au.

·Qatar Airways flies daily direct between Perth and Doha and connects to Africa, among its 130 global destinations. qatarairways.com/au or 1300 340 600.

Stephen Scourfield was a guest of Travel Directors and Qatar Airways. See more of Stephen Scourfield's Ethiopian journey in his video feature, online at thewest.com.au/ travel.