I'm heading over to Oz on the working holiday thing in October, and I fancy getting myself a bike as soon as possible. I've become attached to the idea of a Honda XR600 but am open to considering any medium-ish sized trailie.

I'm flying into Melbourne so I've been looking at bikes in Victoria on Gumtree and eBay, and done a bit of research about the paperwork side of it. However I'm coming to the conclusion this is going to turn out to be a right pain in the derriere! A lot of the bikes I've seen for sale seem quite overpriced, many of them have no registration, and a large portion of the trailbikes sold with registration are on 'recreational reg'. As far as I understand it if you're selling a bike without registration you need to supply it with the equivalent of an MOT, but this has been made quite expensive in the last few years so quite a lot of ads specifically state that they're selling without the RWC - Despite the fact that this is illegal as far as I understand?

Basically I want to know if I'll be better off heading to a different state to buy a bike? I'm planning on touring round the country over the course of the year, so I expect irregardless of which state I buy the bike in, I'll be spending more time out of it than in.


The recreational reg thing in Victoria actually sounds quite interesting if there's the possibility of blatantly ignoring the law about where you can ride. Does anyone know anything about it? Taking the bike out-of-state on the rec-reg would probably be the crucial bit.

I don't understand why some of the bikes I'm seeing are so overpriced. $5k for bikes up to 10 years old, that can't have cost any more than 7 or 8 grand brand new. I've never paid more than a grand sterling for a bike here, and that's also without having to faff around getting expensive inspections and registrations done!

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UK to Mongolia 2009, on a DR350