Motorcycle Quote of the Day

[Biggles]

There are sacrifices to be made when you leave the safety of the four-lane tarmac for sure. But the rewards far outweigh the discomforts. If you want to see India, or any country, get into the guts of it. Get messy. You don't see the things we have seen from the highway, it's not possible.
Spectacular sunsets splashing every conceivable hue of red, purple and orange across the heavens don't appear in-between off ramps. In Gujarat, we had to pull over to watch. The symphony in the sky was too distracting to ride through without staring at it, the riot of colour made it impossible to limit ourselves to the odd westward glance. So we stopped and dismounted. After turning off the bikes, we stood on the side of the road, wrapped in the warm blanket of dusk, and witnessed the onset of twilight in complete wonder.
I am yet to see an expressway exit sign that says "Crystalline Hidden Lake 2 km. Look Left". Yet, to the left of this tiny country road, we found a huge deposit of clear blue aqua pura that beckoned us to her stony shore and allowed us to sit and gaze. Contentedly embraced by tranquility, we sat as the village children played around us. Pure magic!
Memoir Of A Motorcycle Madman  L. A. Nolan p59

[Biggles]

Without warning, a darkness appeared ahead. It was impossible to tell how far away this shroud of mystery was. There was no visual reference. Two kilometres? Ten? After a few moments it became clear what it was and Sandy slowed to 60 kmph. Sandstorm! I zipped my leather up tight to my neck as I had been cruising with it open to enjoy the breeze. I struggled to pull my buff up over my mouth and nose, difficult to do in gloves and a full-face helmet. Just as I was considering stopping to do it, the tidal wave of whipping sand engulfed us.
Visibility dropped to three meters in a heartbeat, it was dark as a winter's night. I slipped back in behind Sandeep, gripped the handlebars and squeezed the tank with my knees. The swirling sand pelted my visor, and the wind buffered me from all sides, like a massive invisible finger giving me a poke this way, then that. The tarmac was alive! It was shifting, undulating, with pebbles and dust. My bike skipped and slid its way along looking for a solid purchase. The adrenaline meter rose to 100% and I clenched my teeth as a wicked smile broke across my face. Alas, the desert Gods were just toying with us. It wasn't severe and after several minutes of intense excitement we burst back into brilliant sunshine. Amazing!
Memoir Of A Motorcycle Madman  L. A. Nolan pp60-1

[Biggles]

Gingerly we picked our way down the side of the foothill and within thirty minutes, were back on glorious smooth and twisty tarmac. For the next hour, it engulfed me in pure motorcyclist euphoria. I was riding third in a mechanical column that settled into a rhythmic meander, winding its way through a panoramic mountain scape. As bikers, we all have our talents and shortcomings, our preferences and dislikes. For me it's twisties. I am seldom more content than when I am weaving my bike along a series of hairpin bends. The dip and flow of a winding road soothe me. I squeeze the tank with my knees, become one with my bike and we choreograph ourselves into a precise and balanced dance between man machine and asphalt. That is how it was, right until the music stopped.
Memoir Of A Motorcycle Madman  L. A. Nolan pp83-4

P.S. For me, Biggles, he can have his hairpin bends.  I like curves.  Hairpins are just hard work and too slow.

[Biggles]

That was really my first experience notorcycle 'touring', but as the weather grew warmer so the distances grew longer. Almost every Sunday we would ride somewhere- anywhere- just for the joy of riding. Wicklow, Arklow, Wexford; 80 miles, 100 miles, 150 miles. One Saturday morning we even rode the 202 miles to Belfast and back simply to buy a Barbour jacket. A lot of folks said we were crazy: maybe they were right. A lot of folks still say we're crazy; maybe they're still right.
The important thing was that I was getting out there on my bike and seeing new countryside. Sure, we'd sit back and watch numbers of the Dublin Motorcycle Tour Club blast past on their new Honda 750s, BMWs and a lone Moto Guzzi V7 Ambassador en route to some far-flung corner of the land at intergalactic speed sitting there on our slightly ratty little Hondas and hold forth at great length on why we'd never bother with such-and-such a superbike for touring, but we each knew precisely which bike we'd buy for that Big Trip.
Being realists as well as dreamers, however, we stayed for the time being with our little bikes and little trips. It was the first of many lessons learned over the years to be proved true time and time again: you don't need a large engine or a specialized touring bike to go touring. It makes the journey easier in many ways, but it sure ain't essential.
What is essential is a certain degree of wanderlust, that strong desire to experience as much of the world beyond your own back door as possible. That's the basic ingredient: the only other indispensable item is some kind of powered two-wheeled transport. 
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p13

[Biggles]

If they're not strutting around on beaches they're busy making an art form out of driving badly- no, make that atrociously. When we hit Naples we came upon a two-way street designed to take two lanes of cars in each direction, with a solid white line down the middle. But because the volume of traffic going south was by far the greater, the drivers took it upon themselves to use all four lanes in one direction. A thin line of Fiat 500s tried to squeeze northwards between the other cars and the pavement as well.  What the southbound drivers had all forgotten was that this street also had tram tracks running up the centre, so, when two trams tried to force their way up against the tide of Neapolitan madness, chaos reigned supreme. More cars took to the pavements; the others tried to split in the middle to let the trams by. It was the ultimate traffic mess. When we eventually fought our way out of it we had to ride for 20 minutes through the most depressing slums I have ever encountered, along garbage-strewn cobbled streets wet with overflowing drains in the 95° heat. After paying a 500 lire toll to get in we had to cough up a further 100 lire to get out! 'See Naples and die'- we know what you mean.   
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p45

[Biggles]

Down by the harbour we discovered the statue of the 'Merlion', Singapore's heraldic beast. It bears a plaque reading 'The Merlion is a mythological beast created by the Singapore Tourist Board in 1975'. With Annie gone, it was time to tame the Paper Tiger, so we went down to the insurance office for Third Party insurance, valid in Singapore and Malaysia; to the Singapore AA for an import licence and a circulation permit; to the shipping office for a delivery order, and to the wharf for... the bikes? Oh, no! First the bikes had to be lifted out of the hold. They were covered in a stinking film from the sheep with whom they'd shared their home. Then the wharfage had to be calculated. A clerk measured them, over the extremities, and arrived at a figure of two cubic metres each. This was transmuted, by the magic of arithmetic, into a weight of two tonnes each. Just wait, I thought, until Soichiro Honda hears about his new 2-tonne trail bikes.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p57

[Biggles]

By the time we got to Bangkok, I had something else besides my shoulder to worry about- sunstroke. How do you get sunstroke while wearing a crash helmet? By exposing the base of your neck to the sun, that's how. I had been wearing only a singlet and the vicious sun had cooked my spinal fluid. It sounds worse than it was, actually; I just felt deathly ill for a few days and couldn't keep any food down. After I recovered, Charlie picked up a case of Bangkok belly.
The city itself was slowly disintegrating. Roads and footpaths were crumbling, the klongs or canals were stinking cesspits and as for the power lines... there was a bit of a thunderstorm when we arrived, and some of the powerlines had been blown together by the wind and were fusing, spitting sparks across the road and writhing in the air as they melted. Most street corners have their tangle of old, discarded wires aloft, ends waving in the breeze. Who knows which ones are live?
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p64

[Biggles]

Charlie's bike was still showing a slight oil leak at the head gasket and my shift drum stopper bolt had shorn through. A friend of Paul's got his father to make us a new one, far better than the old, and Paul's brother JP arranged for me to go to the hospital and have a nasty boil on my arm lanced. When we left, the local boys had become rather dissatisfied with their bikes. The Yezdis they were riding, locally built Jawas, lagged rather noticeably behind the Hondas in sophistication. We left them trying to devise a way of improving the rear suspension to XL standards. The Grand Trunk Road swallowed us on our way to Jammu and Kashmir. At a truck stop on the main road we finally managed to get a hot curry. Indians tend to be very solicitous of Europeans- they don't believe we can eat their curries. Charlie and I, being curry fiends, amazed this lot by going back for second helpings.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p75

[Biggles]

Peshawar, especially the military cantonment, was pretty and green. At the gate to the Khyber road, there's a sign that warns you that once past the gate you're on your own- the government takes no responsibility for you. During the hours of darkness nobody is allowed in at all. It's not terribly hard to see why they're so careful. All the male locals carry bandoliers and well-used 303 rifles, and they look tough. These are the Pathans of song and story, and they'd make it to President in any bike gang I've ever seen, without even riding a bike.
The road through the pass is surprisingly good, although infested by cars and pick-up trucks all carrying more passengers than you'd think possible. They take the boot lids off the cars and passengers sit there and on the roof-rack while the family of the driver travels inside. Everybody grins and waves, which takes the edge off the universal toughness a bit. Villages feature high walls and watch towers. The border town is called Tor Khan and consists of a number of mud huts collectively defying gravity. One of the more ragged looking edifices is the Tourist Hotel which, while it may not have running water, does have cold beer as well as a very entertaining proprietor.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p81

[Biggles]

We made it to the Mashad campsite and sat down to calm our nerves with a beer, our first encounter with Iranian drivers behind us. Iranians are the worst drivers in the world. They think nothing of pulling out to overtake a bus that's passing a truck that's passing another bus- on a blind corner. They are also unfamiliar with the use of the gears. On flat roads, they drive in top gear with the accelerator flat to the boards and they don't change down for hills. As a result they were passing us on the flat and we were passing them on the hills. This brought out the homicidal maniac in them, since it is apparently a deadly insult to pass a car on a bike. They would chase us and run us off the road. Consequently we spent a great deal of time in the dirt getting up the nerve to go back onto the tar. Every police station has a stone plinth outside with a particularly badly mangled car on it, presumably as a warning. Nobody takes any notice.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p87

[Biggles]

The fine weather broke towards the middle of January and we moved to Marrakesh and more blue skies. The Mols came with us, and it felt like a bike club run with the three bikes. Camp was made in the larger and cheaper of the two rocky Marrakesh sites and although hygiene left something to be desired, it was a relaxed sort of place and we settled in well. Marrakesh was like something out of the Thousand and One Nights. The old main square, the Djeema el Fna, was filled with conjurers, fire-eaters, snake charmers, dentists, acrobats, musicians and traders at all hours of the day. The intricate passageways of the souks (the markets), held fascinating workshops and good bargains- if you haggled carefully. We left the bikes outside in the care of the human parking meters, attendants with large brass plaques which they wore proudly and ostentatiously. You had to bargain with them, too, over the parking fees. Our most spectacular coup came in the campsite. An old bloke was selling warm, fuzzy, striped blankets, and he had one that was really lovely. His starting price was 350 dirhams, and he assured us that was not his 'rich tourists' price'. After an entire evening of dedicated haggling, he settled for 35 dirhams, a t-shirt, two pairs of socks, a shirt, a tie and... one of Annie's bras. He had a little trouble figuring out what this wispy nylon thing was, but he got the idea when we held it onto his chest. Then he was hugely amused.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p116

[Biggles]

America, land of contrasts! Things were quite different at Customs. Not only did the officer disdain to search my luggage, but as soon as he noticed that I was a motorcyclist- easily deduced from the crash helmet under my arm- he engaged me in a lengthy and interesting discussion of bike usage in the US. He then closed his station and went off to find out the easiest and cheapest way in which I might get my bike, which had come by air freight, out of bond. Ten minutes later, equipped with detailed- and unfortunately wrong- information, as well as the address and phone number of my first American friend. I boarded the bus into Gotham City. For $5 the airport bus is good value. You get to goggle out at the fascinating and scary concrete ribbons of the freeways, contemplate the towering housing projects and remember all the warnings about New York- while you're still safe. As soon as you step out of the bus at the Lower East Side Bus Terminal you're on your own. At 1:00am.  For me, this seemed about on a par with crossing Parramatta Road (Sydney's main traffic artery) at 5pm on a Friday afternoon. Death lurked everywhere.    
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p159

[Biggles]

In the evening, I bought one can each of six different beers and retreated to the room I shared with a swarthy Frenchman and two melancholy Danes. As I listened to tales of touring the US and Canada by BMW- this from the Frenchman, who'd shipped his bike over and spent eight weeks buzzing around- I sampled the brews. They were all awful, without exception. Pale, flavourless and nearly non-alchoholic, they all tasted the same. Bad sign.
One of the Danes explained his melancholia. He had, it seemed been mugged. His papers, money and travellers' cheques had been taken- in Miami, of all places. I'd always thought of Miami as a sort of geriatric ante-room to a morgue, but it seemed street crime was a problem. For the Dane, anyway. His embassy, fortunately had come to the rescue. They had replaced his passport on the spot and had lent him some money.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p161

[Biggles]

At my next petrol stop I was invited in for coffee and brownies and then, when I stopped to tighten the chain, the sidestand broke and the bike fell on my head. Fun all day! I slept in the campground in the Badlands that night, among the grotesque landforms that give the place its name. Spooky, with spires of soft rock reaching for the full moon, not a blade of grass or a bush on them.
The Harley shop in Rapid City was very helpful, and even managed to locate someone who would weld my sidestand back for a few dollars.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p175

[Biggles]

I started looking for a bike shop to service the XL. The Honda dealer's Service Manager was dubious. She indicated her crew of mechanics and said, "These prima donnas only like to put new bits on new bikes," something that the XL definitely wasn't. But she sent me down to Cycle Source, a small service shop run by the inimitable Jack Delmas. Jack is an ex-cop, and one of the friendliest, most helpful blokes I've ever met. His staff aren't far behind, either- Chris, on the spares counter, and Eddie, in the workshop, both helped me out. The shop was like a little home away from home. Eddie also got the bike running- and starting- beautifully- all at very reasonable rates. I celebrated by doing wheelies up the steep streets of San Francisco, racing the cable cars.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p181

[Biggles]

Exactly why we're hooked is hard to say. A lot of writers have tried to pin down the reasons and come up gasping for words. Others have come close. Robert Louis Stevenson might have had motorcycling in mind when he wrote: 'To travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive'. A little ahead of his time, perhaps, but as true today as it was then. Roger Hull, the bard of the American touring motorcyclist, puts it this way: 'It's the going. I mosey across the miles, mingle with the elements, merge with the macrocosm. See and feel for myself what others may have seen and experienced before me. A wandering cowboy, I... with an emotional genealogy which is suspected of linkage back to Cortez or Columbus or Marco Polo or to any other free spirit whose vision tended to focus on that which lay beyond what his eyes could see. Touring is a lonely feat; we are solitary seekers, wanderers sensitive to our physical surroundings, while we live mostly inside our heads.'
Therein lies the greater part of the magic: while touring on a motorcycle your body and your senses are open to an ever-changing battery of stimuli, and your mind in its solitude is the freer to savour them. The combined effect is spellbinding, and that's what keeps the touring rider coming back for more again and again.
Motorcycle Touring  Peter Thoeming p186

That's all for now, until I read another book.  There's still quite a few unread.