Newbie from Western Australia

[ZMC888]

Whitworth, I don't really understand why you want a dirt bike. Sure road/trail possibly, but people are doing big trips on tourers these days. Not every road is a lunar landscape, there are millions of kilometers of smooth black asphalt and concrete too.

If you are going 250cc, personally I'd be inclined to buy a Jianshe Yamaha YBR250 for the type of trip you are into. Then put road/trail tires on it, hand protectors and a luggage rack. Sure it would be nice to have more suspension travel, but it can deal admirably well with the conditions. YBR's have been ridden around China and across Asia plenty of times. Light, reliable and easy to fix, you can pick it up when you drop it. Sure, you worry about EFI, but I'd take Yamaha EFI over a Yingang carb any day. Also China is very mountainous so playing around with jets is a pain at altitude. The Yamaha's the real thing, not a copy of it. Sure those copy bikes will look like your ideal bike the WR250R but they won't have the Yamaha reliability. In my view there is no reason to throw away all that Yamaha reliability for an extra 40mm of suspension travel on a Chinese bike.

Go with Chinese bikes only if you are dead set on a bigger engine and the bike you'd like isn't available in China or is ridiculously expensive.
Going bigger I'd suggest the CFMOTO 650TR, the Jialing JH600 or wait until CFMOTO and Benelli have released their new adventure models next year.