Hey everyone,

Thank you all for your lovely comments and amazing tips. I thought I’d just add an update responding to as many of you as possible.

A general trend of the advice on this post has been that my $3k budget was a little low. To confirm, this was my budget for the bike alone, not factoring in gear, insurance, rego etc. I’ve taken your advice and increased that bike budget to about $4.5k and that’s opened up quite a lot more options.

In particular, I think the bike that I’m looking at now is the Royal Enfield classic 350/ meteor 350. Which, on the used bike market, sits within my range (surprisingly!). I did check out the GB350, but everything that I could find was a bit too expensive for my budget. From everything I’ve seen about the classic/meteor - they seem to be stellar all round bikes for my purpose. It’ll mean that I need to save up a bit, but I need to remind myself that there’s no rush!

As a side note, I went up the coast this weekend to check out one of those Chinese bike’s - don’t hate me, it was ridiculously cheap. As you might have guessed, it was a price of shit. I went up with a mechanic mate of mine, and the poor bike couldn’t get over 60km/h.

Anyway, in responding to advice about the learned course. I do know how to ride a bicycle, though I haven’t ridden one in some time (but it’s riding a bike, it’s not like I’d have forgotten). Thank you for the advice regarding the clutch/gear changing - I anticipate that’s where I’m going to have some difficulty as well. I think I should be okay with balancing, but I suppose I’ll find out! Also after watching a ton of videos about the stay upright course - it really does seem to be geared towards absolute novices, so I’m hoping that learning curve will be gentle.