The best motorcycle roads in South Australia

South Australia’s advantage is proximity. In Sydney or Melbourne, good riding starts after an hour of suburbs and freeway. In Adelaide, you can be on a genuinely good road about fifteen minutes after leaving the CBD, and in the hills proper before your tyres are warm.

Gorge Road

The signature road. Along the Torrens from Athelstone up toward Cudlee Creek — roughly 24 kilometres with about 56 corners, running through the gorge with a rock wall on one side and the river below on the other.

What makes it good is the rhythm: corner after corner with almost no straight sections, and a surface that is generally decent.

What to know before you ride it:

• It is narrow. In sections there is nowhere to go if you get a line wrong, and oncoming traffic sits closer to the centre line than you would like.
• Cyclists, constantly. It is one of Adelaide’s premier cycling roads as well, and weekend mornings are full of them.
• Rockfall and debris after rain, particularly on the gorge side.
• It is well known to police. As every famous road is.

Ride it as a technical road rather than a fast one and it is one of the best 25-kilometre stretches in the country for the effort involved.

The Adelaide Hills network

Past the top of the gorge, the hills open into something more valuable than any single road: a dense network of quiet sealed back roads.

Lobethal, Woodside, Charleston, Gumeracha, Birdwood, Mount Torrens, Hahndorf, Echunga, Meadows — the towns are pleasant and the roads between them are the point. Rolling, well-surfaced, and there are dozens of ways to link them.

This is the best exploring terrain of any Australian capital’s hinterland. There is no single famous road that everyone rides, which means the traffic disperses and there is always another way round.

The Torrens Valley and the roads through the Cudlee Creek area are the obvious start. Lobethal to Mount Torrens and the roads around Birdwood are quieter still.

The Fleurieu Peninsula

The best full-day loop from Adelaide. Down through the hills to Strathalbyn, across toward Goolwa and Victor Harbor, then back up the coast through Myponga and Yankalilla.

You get everything in one day: hill roads, open farmland, a coastal run, and enough towns for coffee, lunch and fuel. The roads down the western side of the peninsula, looking out over the gulf, are the highlight.

Range Road and the Willunga Hill climb are worth building into any Fleurieu loop, and the McLaren Vale roads at the bottom make a good lunch stop with the obvious caveat about wineries and riding.

North: the Barossa and Clare

The Barossa is an hour north and its back roads are excellent — fast, rolling, and lined with vines. Easy riding rather than technical.

The Clare Valley, further north again, is a proper day trip and rewards it. The roads through the ranges around Clare and Burra are quiet, open and fast, with a completely different feel from the hills near the city.

Mount Crawford Forest sits between them, with a network of roads through the pine plantations — good riding and a genuine caution about unsealed sections, which are common and not always obvious from the map. Set your surface tolerance properly if you are on a road bike.

Practicalities

Cyclists. Everywhere in the hills, all year, in large groups. Give them room and expect them around blind corners on the narrow roads.

Winter gravel. SA winters wash gravel and clay onto the corners on the hill roads. Early winter after the first serious rain is the worst.

Heat in summer. The hills are cooler than the plain, but a 40-degree Adelaide day is still a 35-degree day in the hills, and there is a fire-danger dimension. On catastrophic days, do not ride into the hills — roads close, and being on a bike in a fire zone is a genuinely bad place to be.

Fuel is easy in the hills and the Fleurieu, and gets sparse north of Clare and out toward the Murray.

Where to go when you have done them all

Gorge Road is 24 kilometres. The Fleurieu loop is a day. Adelaide riders run out of famous roads faster than riders in bigger states — and then find that the hills have hundreds of kilometres of unremarkable-looking sealed lanes that are, in practice, lovely.

That is what makes SA the best state in the country for avoid-visited routing. The network density is high, the roads are close together, and there is no single obvious route between two towns. Record your rides, watch the map fill in, then ask for something that skips what you have done. You will spend a year finding new roads inside a 60-kilometre radius.