I’ve always loved out-of-season motorcycling. The earliest example I can remember was attending the Honda CX500 launch in the south of France in December ‘78. I seem to recall it was snowing back in the UK when we left, but warm and sunny in France. The same thing happened two months later with the launch of the Honda CBX at the Vallelunga race circuit near Rome. Happy days!

So it was with great anticipation that I opened the garage door of our South African house in mid-March, after nine months away, to find our four bikes nestling under dust covers and all charged up and ready to ride. It was dry, sunny and 24 degrees C outside and I was raring to go after a long, cold north-west British winter with no riding.

The Suzuki TL1000S fired up instantly, as did my V-Strom. Even the Yamaha TW200 farm bike fired up with a bit of encouragement from the kick-starter. But my wife’s Tiger 800XC responded with that clicking noise that lets you know your battery is lifeless. Like the others, it had been connected to a trickle charger, an Optimate that has served me well for years, but the 15-month-old battery was flat.

That meant that the V-Strom was the first to hit the dirt road, en route to the town of Knysna and the battery shop. It was bliss to be riding again, warm sun beating down, the sky crystal clear, traffic light. What a lovely change from the British northwest! I needed petrol, and the current price in South Africa is £1 a litre, which was another pleasant change! It was too nice a morning just to buy a battery, so I spent a couple of hours swinging through the two-lane N2 towards the town of George before heading home to rescue the Triumph.

The new battery cost about £45 and that soon had the triple barking beautifully. With the weather set fair, the Tiger and then the TL provided a few more days of sun-filled riding pleasure. Tyre pressures had dropped typically from 36 to around 30 psi in the nine months, but apart from adding air and fuel all three bikes were just as I’d left them. In truth, the only negative is that in our part of the Cape there are basically only two ways to go on tarred roads – east or west. And that’s a bit limiting, hence the popularity of adventure bikes in these parts. There are lots and lots of dirt roads, if that’s your thing, but it’s never really been mine: too dusty, too uncomfortable and, if I’m honest, just that faint fear of the front or rear end washing out on gravelly bends.

I’ve been toying with the idea of replacing my faithful 2002 Valkyrie in the UK as our main European touring bike. The Valkyrie is a firm favourite of mine: I’m on my third, and it’s a wonderful tourer. But last year’s trip to Norway highlighted the fact that the Valkyrie, and the Valkyrie alone, causes me pain in my right wrist, forearm, bicep and shoulder. I think it’s something to do with a proximal biceps tendon rupture a few years ago, and the angle of my arm and wrist while cruising and holding the throttle steady could well be the cause of my problems now. It’s fine for the first hour or so, then the arm starts to ache.

One option for a replacement is the new Triumph Tiger 900 GT Pro, which usefully weighs 100 kg less than the Honda, has a new version of the 800cc triple, and offers all sorts of mod cons like heated grips that were unheard of as standard in 2002. It shares the same riding position as the 800, so I figured a two-up, five-hour trip to visit friends near Cape Town would be a good test. The weather, however, had other ideas. Rain was forecast for the days we’d be travelling, so we resorted to taking our pick-up truck; we don’t have wet-weather gear down here, and I don’t enjoy getting wet.

It’s a good thing we didn’t take the V-Strom, which is another potential successor to the six-cylinder Honda. In January last year, we set out on the DL1000 for the west coast, north of Cape Town, only for the bike to die just over an hour into the ride. We made it safely home to swap the bike for the pick-up, and the problem was later traced to a faulty regulator that I got replaced. The V-Strom continued to provide reliable service for that and a subsequent visit to South Africa, but this week it let me down again, failing to re-start when I stopped for a while in Knysna. My local battery guy said the bike wasn’t delivering enough charge to the battery, so I nursed it a few miles to the same dealer who’d fixed it just over a year ago. He happened to have a brand-new regulator in stock but ran some checks with it and found that the new part wouldn’t solve the issue. He diagnosed a problem with the alternator (V-Stroms are renowned, it seems, for only two problems: the regulator and the alternator!) and he is currently trying to source a second-hand unit to save me a big bill.

Sunny weather has returned to our area for a couple of weeks, offering more warm riding opportunities that have been gladly taken, but we’ve just been hit by the first of three days of heavy rain, giving me time to ponder our next move in the world of European touring bikes for the summer to come.