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Norway is stunning but a little more August sunshine wouldn’t go amiss…

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By now, my love affair with the traffic-free Norwegian roads was losing its ardour. Yes, the roads are excellent and yes, they are a rider’s dream, but oh! The speed limits! And the drivers! The speed limit on most stretches of country road is 80 kph, or 50 mph. My speedo is in mph and the Garmin is set to mph, converting from metric, so I mostly thought in miles. The most a Norwegian driver seems willing to hit on those roads is 48 mph, with many opting for 45 or lower. And each time you enter a village with a posted lower limit you can see the brake lights come on as they brake just before the actual sign. Maybe that’s the correct way to drive, the way all right-thinking people drive, but I’m used to people driving at just over the limit – maybe 8-10% above. And easing off on the throttle when entering a lower-limit stretch, letting the engine braking take you down to the required speed. But these guys observe all the limits with a religious fervour. And since the roads often lack obvious, safe stretches for overtaking, you’re stuck behind a procession of camper vans for far longer than seems good. It can get a bit frustrating.

Given the terrain, it’s no surprise that Norway has its share of tunnels, some of them quite long. One even came with a large roundabout in the middle, with roads leading off it in two different directions. Now that was a first! They’re still building new tunnels, it seems, or at least improving the existing ones: on a couple of occasions, we had to join single-file processions along long, freshly tarred diversions to avoid major roadworks. It slowed progress a bit, up there on the snowline, but it was impressive to see the planning and effort behind the whole project.

Typical Norwegian country road, complete with roadside river. The surfaces are usually better than this. Photo courtesy of Tommy Oppegaard

The Røldal campsite was conveniently situated on our route and unpretentious, with great mountain views. Unlike so many campsites we’ve used in France and Italy, this one had no restaurant but we dined on locally procured beer and sandwiches in the reception area, which allowed us to charge our intercoms, phones and Kindles. Campsite pitches with electricity are all very well, but they don’t take a normal plug adapter, so reception areas and washrooms became our go-to places for recharging. The Kindles last for about 14 hours, which gives us five days’ use or more, but the phones needed charging every two days at least. The Sena headsets built into the Shoei helmets work really well and their batteries lasted about a day and a half, but we found that if we spoke less often we could make them stretch to two days, which we could live with.

That night’s campsite was at Smedsmo in Vågåvegen, about halfway to Trondheim, the next waypoint on our route to the Arctic Circle. It was unmemorable (as in neither one of us can remember anything about it, apart from the fact that it yet again required a tent-side meal of supermarket-bought supper) but it gave us a chance to have a fresh check on the weather forecast. Rain was predicted for the following evening and the day after, so we decided to skip camping and booked ourselves into a hotel in Trondheim. Along the way, we saw vast numbers of those typically Norwegian red wooden houses, with the cladding panels placed vertically rather than horizontally. With their white wooden trim, they’re wonderfully picturesque. Now, however, we were seeing more and more with turf on their roofs, many even with small trees and bushes growing out of them. One assumes that the earth provides great insulation.

The road from Vågåvegen to Trondheim was light on traffic, especially when we moved on to the motorway section, and got us into the city by late afternoon in time to play tourist. The Chesterfield Hotel is unpretentious, clean, comfortable, central, and cost £103 for two, including an excellent breakfast – we can heartily recommend it. Okay, the bar across the street was playing We Will Rock You loudly at 03:25, but we were both so tired we soon got back to sleep.

There are two main ways to see the fjords: from sea level by cruise ship or from the top by motorcycle, which is my choice every time!

Trondheim is a fabulous city with great architecture and lots to see, including an impressive cathedral and a beautiful fjord. The centre abounds in chic eateries, shops and bars, busy but not over-crowded with happy revellers. A stroll by the harbour introduced us to our first-ever £5 ice-cream cone, which was topped later that evening by a wonderful but horrendously expensive Thai dinner (more than £100 for two, albeit with a glass of beer and a glass of wine apiece).

Ice creams were delicious – at £5 apiece!

Over supper we looked at the 32-hour round-trip that still lay ahead to get us to and from the Lofoten Islands, plus the 350km trip across the islands themselves. We checked the weather for the area and found only rain for the next 10 days. Peter is a master of forecast-checking and she found that if we headed east into Sweden instead of north, we’d find ourselves in warm, sunny weather for the foreseeable future. Much though we wanted to see and experience the stunning islands for ourselves, the prospect of riding 2,000+ kilometres in rain for that privilege held no appeal. With deep regret, we messaged Per Arne Olsen of VRCC Norway, who had offered to give us some pointers on must-see places, and explained the change of plan. He replied to say he totally understood: the winds there were already howling at 35 knots, it was raining, and he planned to leave shortly anyway to escape the weather! Thus reassured, we headed for Sweden and some sunshine. It was a pity, given that the Lofoten Islands had been our target, but it pays to be flexible.

The stunning Lofoten Islands would never have looked this good if we’d pressed on, sadly. Photo courtesy of Paul Taton and Unsplash

Running out of road

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We camped the first night at the Kommer in Loon op Zand in the Netherlands. There was an excellent restaurant and bar just a short walk away, where we drank Belgian Leffe beer in the warm evening sun and watched some very serious wannabe golfers play on a crazy-golf putting course. These folk, mostly couples, carried special briefcases containing golf balls and who knows what else. We saw these little putting courses in several campsites along our route – must be a Continental thing.

Our second night was spent at a pleasant campsite near Hamburg, where we were beguiled slightly at check-in by the promise of a restaurant and a bar on site. As it turned out, the restaurant was adjacent to the campsite, not part of it, and was closed that night! Ever-resourceful, we shopped at the Co Op across the road and dined like kings by our tent on chicken wings, salad, beer and chocolate for a relative pittance.

The ride north through Denmark was flat and pretty dull, but we had a three-night break from camping while enjoying two-day stopover with old friends in the Jutland area. By the time we resumed our journey towards the northern Danish port of Hirtshals, my knee pain had vanished, and Peter had found a neat way of adding occasional back support by holding her fists against the small of my back for 15 or 20 minutes; that helped a lot.

The three-hour ferry crossing to Kristiansand via Color Line was smooth, easy and not bad value at £152. Finally, by mid-afternoon, we were in Norway. We’d taken the precaution of booking ourselves into a campsite for the first night, and duly pitched our new Tempest Pro tent close to a beach on a fjord in record time. The wind was strong and getting stronger, and we thought it prudent to check the weather forecast. The wind would continue, it said, to be joined by rain in the night and throughout the next day. Time for a re-think.

I don’t like riding in the rain. I’ve had to do it for most of my life, especially in the early years when a motorcycle was my only form of transport. Rain, snow, ice, whatever. But I don’t find it fun. Camping in the rain is no fun, either, in my book. Many, perhaps most, of the campsites we were to visit also offered small wooden cabins where you could sleep sheltered from the elements. They typically cost three times then price of a basic tent pitch and didn’t seem such great value, so we never tried them. Instead, we found ourselves a decent hotel 30 minutes away in Kvinesdal, booked ourselves in for two nights, packed up all our gear and abandoned the campsite. The Utsikten Hotel gave us warmth, shelter, a view of the fjord, comfort and food for the next 24 hours until the weather picked up and we could be on our way again. It also introduced us to the £22 hamburger and £11 glass of wine, but hey, this was Norway…

The ever-helpful folk on the Valkyrie Riders Cruiser Club UK group on Facebook had suggested we make contact with the VRCC Norway guys, and a helpful member named Tommy Oppegaard had produced five routes for us that he said together constituted the ultimate Norwegian motorcycle trip. He also offered three routes to get us back as quickly as possible from the Lofoten Islands to Gothenburg, to maximise our time up there. Our hotel lay close to the first route, which took us from Kvaviksanden to Lysebotn. This was what we’d been waiting for!

The smooth road out of Kvinesdal meandered along the edge of the fjord, offering wonderful vistas at every turn. That first morning of the holiday proper was made even more memorable by the lack of traffic – we came across no more than eight cars in the first couple of hours. The weather was warm and dry as we climbed up what became a seemingly endless series of hairpin bends. They were, if anything, more challenging than anything we’ve encountered in the Jura, Alps, Dolomites or Rockies. I thanked my lucky stars for the brand-new Bridgestone Exedra tyres that made rapid bend-swinging such a delight, and the new brake pads front and rear that helped slow us down. This was exhilarating stuff, with many of the corners needing first gear and huge handlebar input to keep the whole ensemble on track.

As we rose higher, it grew colder and started to drizzle, which soon turned to rain. For the first time, I felt pleased that I was wearing the Rukka gear and several layers underneath. I stopped to swap my summer gloves for my waterproof winter ones, again pleased I’d packed them. Peter was wearing her trusty Halverssons trousers and Scott waterproof over-jacket and was sitting pretty. Then we entered the clouds, and visibility became a real issue. That’s when we encountered our first mobile roadblock of camper vans, tip-toeing their way around the same bends, often at a snail’s pace.

The road started to descend toward the fjord, lost in cloud way below, and at one point the German camper van in front of us came to a halt when faced with an equally large camper coming up the other way. Neither van (small truck was closer to the truth) could move forward, so they both started to reverse. Now, the Valkyrie ain’t all that good at being reversed at the best of times but pointing downhill with a pillion and 60-odd pounds of luggage on board there is nowhere to go but forwards, so I nipped through a gap to the left of one van and the right of the other and left them to sort it out between them. They must have done, because when we came back up an hour later they were gone.

Came back up? Yes, that was a bit of a surprise, because when we finally got down to sea level at Lysebotn it became clear that the road ended right there, at the edge of the fjord (see title photo). We were both fairly taxed by the descent, with its blind hairpins and occasional camper vans. Peter said to me over the intercom: “We don’t have to go back up, do we?” I replied: “No, no. From here we go on to Dalen Hotel.” However, to my total surprise, there were only two ways out: by ferry to somewhere we didn’t want to go, or back up the mountain! So back up the mountain we went, laying the bike over hard, tugging on the bars, and praying we wouldn’t meet something large on one of the bends.

At lunch, back on level territory, we considered the route for the next few days. Tommy had undoubtedly picked out some wonderful roads, but our goal was the Lofoten Islands, and they were still 2,000 kilometres of riding to the north. We decided to cannibalise the route a little, incorporating some of the original roads but taking some shortcuts that brought us to a nice campsite at Røldal and onward the next day to Trondheim.

Norway: the ultimate biking country?

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Norway is a fabulous place to ride a motorcycle. I was 55 years into my motorcycling life before I found this out for myself, so, if you’re into smooth, challenging, twisty motorcycle journeys, then you owe it to yourself to go to Norway soon. It lived up to or exceeded all our expectations, including the fact that it’s crazily expensive. We just didn’t expect the weather in August to be so unpredictable.

Getting there from the UK is easier said than done. There used to be a ferry from Newcastle to Kristiansand, but that closed in 2006; and there was a ferry from Newcastle to Stavanger and Bergen, but that ceased in 2008. You could once take a ferry from Harwich to Esbjerg in Denmark, cutting out vast swathes of boring roads, but that too closed in 2014.

These days the only way to get from Britain to Norway on two wheels or four is to make the hard slog across very flat and, to be honest, dull bits of France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark – or you can cut out a chunk of that by taking a ferry from Hull to Rotterdam. That would have been good for my wife Peter and me, living just two hours west of Hull, but we opted for the Channel Tunnel because it gave us greater freedom to change dates depending on when Peter’s Schengen visa came through (to apply for a Schengen visa, you first need to have firm travel bookings).

There was last-minute scope for a re-think when chaos descended on the port of Dover and the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone a week before our departure. News reports of massive traffic jams and delays of up to 21 hours due to (apparently) a shortage of French border officials had me searching for a Hull-Rotterdam booking, but by then all the ferries were full. Our one concession was to change our mid-afternoon Tunnel booking for an early morning one, because the queues got worse as the day progressed. As it happened, the traffic at the Felixstowe terminal was only a little worse than we’d experienced in previous years, adding about an hour to proceedings, but we arrived early and got to Calais at more or less the intended time.

This was our first serious two-up trip with full luggage on the Valkyrie in three years, and the first since the completion of my two years of (happily successful) cancer treatment. Peter reckoned that I’d lost a bit of muscle mass in the process, which I had to concede was possibly true. I’d also been getting unrelated lower back pain over the same period, so the question was how my body would cope with a fully laden bike. It wasn’t so bad on the first day’s ride from Manchester to Kent; maybe this would work out. On day two, across the tedium of that part of France and Belgium, the back pain was more pronounced but survivable. Unfortunately, my helmet was doing my head in – literally. The Shoei Neotec 2 was supplied with a small sponge insert to cushion my skull against the hard ribs that live behind the main liner, and the sponge had shifted, but this was easily remedied. What else would intrude to spoil the ride?

We stopped off in Ghent because Peter reckoned it was worth seeing. Certainly, the old city centre was attractive, but getting out of it was a bit of a traffic nightmare due to roadworks and diversions. That was a mere foretaste of what was to come next day in Hamburg, which is undergoing a truly massive autobahn construction project. The ultra-narrow lanes meant that the Valkyrie with its Givi panniers was too wide to split between the cars, so instead I resigned myself to an hour or so of stop-start progress, sometimes reaching the dizzy heights of 5 mph. It was sunny and hot, and the limitations of motorcycle weight and the wrong riding gear became obvious very quickly.

The back pain of the previous day was getting worse and had now been joined by a sharp pain in my left kneecap whenever I put my left foot down, and a whole new set of pains in my right wrist, bicep and shoulder. The weather was hot, and my Rukka winter riding gear just added to the general discomfort. I found the weight of the luggage, albeit with only the lightest stuff like sleeping bags up high, was creating a sort of pendulum effect at very low speed, making the roadworks section tedious, difficult and painful. For the first time, I really did wonder whether my aging body would manage to get us all the way to the Arctic Circle and back. That afternoon, the jury was definitely out.

Prepping for a long road trip is no walk in the park

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A bike trip to Norway has long been on my bucket list. This year the stars aligned in such a way that might finally make it possible, spurred on by the realisation that Spain and Italy (the alternative) in July might be a tad too hot for comfort.

A look at the map confirmed that Norway would require a bit more planning than my 1976 trip to Italy aboard my Yamaha 350 with nothing more than a strapped-on overnight bag, some two-stroke oil, a tin of chain lube and some cash. The plotted route totted up to a shade under 5,000 miles, so it was time to make sure the Valkyrie was prepped for the journey.

Having sorted out the seized front discs earlier in the year, it seemed a good idea to check the rear brake pads, change the oil in the final-drive hub as well as the engine oil, and decide on a new rear tyre. Swapping the brake pads seemed easy enough, according to the videos on YouTube. Getting the old pads out was indeed easy, and they were clearly in need of immediate replacement, Norway trip or not. Having bought my new OEM front pads over the counter at Hunts Motorcycles in Manchester for what I thought was a very reasonable £21 a set a few months ago, I was surprised to find that the rear pads cost £48 a set – and were out of stock.

When they arrived, I consulted the videos again and noted that the twin pistons needed to be pressed back into the caliper as far as possible to accommodate the thicker new pads. Made sense. They went back into the caliper body just enough to allow the pads to be squeezed into place. The wheel rotated freely when I pushed the bike but a five-mile road test without touching the rear brake pedal revealed a disc that was white hot, so something wasn’t right.

Helpful fellow-owners on the Valkyrie Facebook group (a great source of advice) suggested that I should have removed the fluid reservoir cap before pushing the pistons back. I hadn’t, of course, so I removed the new pads, took off the cap, drained a bit of brake fluid with a syringe, and pushed the pistons fully back. This created enough pad clearance that the caliper could now be slid manually in and out on the pins. The disc stayed cool this time and the brake worked fine. Result!

Buoyed by my success, it was time to tackle the rear hub oil change. Directed again by the online gurus, I bought a length of clear tubing to get the oil into the awkwardly placed filler hole and realised that the only way to get a spanner on the filler cap was to remove the right-hand exhaust. Yes, buying a slimmer, dished spanner might have obviated that need, but accessing the filler hole would still be tricky, so off came the pipe, which also required taking off the engine crash bar. Draining and refilling the hub with 150ml of heavy gear oil was a doddle, and the engine oil and filter change was a familiar routine and simplicity itself.

Deciding to replace the rear tyre wasn’t a snap choice. The existing tyre had plenty of tread left and had covered only 4,000 miles, but I reckoned that adding 5,000 miles two-up with luggage might be unwise. Better to replace the tyre and keep the original. However, replacing the rear tyre made all those other tasks seem ridiculously easy.

My go-to guy for tyres these days is Steve at F&B Motorcycle Tyres in Sandbach, Cheshire. He obtained a new Bridgestone Exedra Max for me in less than 24 hours and offered to fit it the same day at a very reasonable all-in price. I settled down in a chair on his driveway to watch and offered help if needed – which it was, frequently, over the next three hours! To get the wheel off requires a large hydraulic jack under the sump. Then you remove both exhaust pipes, the engine bars (so the pipes can come off), the gear lever (to access one of the header-pipe nuts), the pannier brackets and the rear portion of the mudguard. The wheel nut had been over-tightened by the tyre-fitting company I used last time to more than 200 Nm, Steve reckoned; the recommended torque setting is 110 Nm.

The actual tyre replacement took a matter of minutes, Steve adding a dab of high-temperature moly grease to the gear splines while replacing the wheel in the hub. The process of bolting everything back together was hindered by the need to align a number of bolts that didn’t want to be aligned. The worst offenders were those going into blind retention nuts behind the mudguard, with some bolts needing 10 minutes of fiddling to get proper engagement. Finally, it was all done. Now all we needed was my wife’s Schengen visa. For the uninitiated, people from outside the EU and the UK need a visa to enter anywhere in the Schengen area. Any country can issue it, although it should be from the country you’ll be spending the most time in. Italy (still a possible destination for us later this summer) couldn’t offer a preliminary appointment until mid-September, and Belgium, France and Denmark weren’t much better, but Mrs Peter got lucky with Norway which offered a next-day appointment – 200 miles away in London. She went there with a stack of required documentation (return Eurotunnel booking, a couple of campsite bookings, two ferry bookings, marriage cert…) and endured the seemingly inevitable aura of suspicion that permeates all such offices. They duly processed her application but could offer no help as to when the visa might be forthcoming. Happily, it arrived while the Valkyrie was having its tyre fitted, which augurs well…

Local bike shop gets me out of a bind

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The Valkyrie was stuck. It wouldn’t move. The front discs were locked solid. The advice online was to hit the calipers with a mallet to free them up, which worked fine until I squeezed the lever again and we were back to square one.

My first reaction was to get a professional mechanic to sort it out: I’d never worked on brakes before, and it’s not the sort of job you want to get wrong. The only bike mechanic close by couldn’t look at it for three weeks, so I did what every self-respecting individual would do these days: I resorted to Google and YouTube. There was nothing specific on fixing Valkyrie brakes, but I found something for a similar Honda and set about the task.

The right-hand caliper came off with a bit of encouragement, and I duly followed instructions. I squeezed the brake lever to get the twin pistons out. One moved, one didn’t. The advice was to block the one that was moving with a piece of wood and get the other one out, which worked like a charm. The piston was covered in crud, so I cleaned that up, took out the two seals, cleaned out the lands (the grooves in which they sit), inserted new seals and reinserted the now-gleaming piston. This home mechanic stuff is easy!

My video instructor told me to block the clean piston and extract the remaining dirty one. Hah! The brake ever came back to the handlebar and pushed nothing out. Air in the brake lines, I guessed. More online research told me I needed to use compressed air to force the piston out, and that’s not something my humble garage possesses. I was about to head off on holiday and didn’t need the bike till I got back, so I took a break and on my return it was back to the professional, cap in hand: “Help!”

Steve of S&G Motorcycles in Middlewich is an accomplished bike mechanic. He asked me to bring him the calipers, and it took him just two hours to get the pistons out in his workshop, clean them up, insert new seals and then re-install the calipers on the Valkyrie in the comfort of my garage. I’d bought new disc pads, too, for the surprisingly affordable cost of about £21 a pair from Hunts, the Honda main dealer in Manchester.

You know all those warning/advice labels that come on bikes? Yeah, well I never bother reading them either. I’ve owned three Valkyries over a combined period of 15 years, and each one has an engraved message right there on top of the shiny aluminium front brake master cylinder lid: “Use only DOT 4.0 brake fluid.” I’ve seen it so many times but never registered the information, so I’d been to Halfords and bought 500 ml of DOT 5.1 brake fluid (the only one they seemed to stock, as it happens) in readiness for getting the bike back on the road. Steve, fortunately, knew better and had brought some DOT 4.0 fluid with him, so I watched with considerable interest as he bled the brakes back to normal operation. Again, not a job I’d done before. It was such a joy to get the bike back on the road, just in the nick of time for a planned trip to Ireland the next day.

The weather, which had been balmy by late March standards the previous week, had taken a turn for the worse and was promising -1C the following morning. Having seen how easy it is to find yourself sliding on black ice on Manchester’s motorway network, I didn’t much fancy a pre-dawn trip across North Wales at below-zero temperatures to catch the ferry, so with great reluctance the bike had to stay in the garage and instead we flew to Ireland for a few days. The hassle with post-Covid airport security delays, a miserable Irish car-rental agency and an unbelievable grubby and inhospitable Dublin airport made me resolve that in future we go by bike or not at all. The stuff that non-bikers have to put up with!

Still, the Valkyrie celebrates its 20th birthday this year with a mere 30,000 miles on the clock and will, all things being equal, take us on at least one European camping trip this summer. Can’t wait!

Suzuki TL gets back on the road with new paint

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When I take a bike apart, I usually rely on my memory to remember how it all goes back together. That works well enough if you strip it in the morning and rebuild it the same day, or even the same week. I once had to rebuild the engine of my Honda CB92 Benly three times in one day, because I keep leaving out important parts like a circlip and a piston ring, but I was only 17 and you have to learn somehow. Leaving the rebuild stage for 20 months, however, has its drawbacks, as I found when reassembling my Suzuki TL fairing.

The spray-painter in Knysna, Slig at Star Panelbeaters, hadn’t managed to squeeze my small job in before the Christmas break, which was fair enough. I was pleasantly surprised to get a call three days after Christmas to say the parts were ready for collection. It turned out that Slig had worked through the holiday to stay on top of his workload – which was hugely appreciated.

Before
After

The work was superb. Without so much as a VIN number from me, Slig had matched the 1997 green exactly and covered the gold TL1000S decal in a clear coat of polyurethane so that it looked like new. It has taken me many months to find that original decal, with a friend in Japan trying to locate one there to no effect. I eventually found online what may well have been the last one in the world.

I wasn’t so lucky with the decal for Electronic Fuel Injection on the tailpiece, though. The only one I could find was not quite the same size as the original. Slig covered the decal with masking tape, sprayed the panel, then added a clear top coat and the result looked like new.

Figuring out what went where wasn’t going to be easy. Attaching the new faux-carbon fibre air scoop was simple enough, but figuring out the relationship between the tube connecting it to the carbs and the strange piece of shiny black plastic lying nearby was tricky. My genius solution was to remove the right-hand fairing and see how that was put together. As a tactic, it worked pretty well, until I realised that there are five different types of Allen-head bolts holding the fairing in place – all looking more or less the same. It was only when I had one hole still to fill and the only remaining bolt didn’t fit it that I decided a more detailed inspection of each bolt was needed. It turned out that some bolts had slightly deeper shoulders than others – who’d have thought? Once I worked that out, the rest was plain sailing.

The TL was now back in one piece for the first time in almost two years. Time to fit the new battery. The beautiful V-twin fired up instantly, filling the rural valley with its deep rumble. The bike needed a wash, I knew, but that could wait. Time to ride!

The oft-lamented washboard surface of the dirt road (which had broken indicator stalks and the tail light on the Ducati, wrecked the mirrors on the V-Strom and left a few stone chips on the Rune) out to the nearest tarred surface had me crawling in first gear in some places, but eventually I was on Tarmac and could let the TL do its thing. The southern hemisphere summer was warm, the sky blue and the road empty, and the Suzuki quickly reminded me why I’d first fallen in love with it. The engine was smooth, its 125 bhp ample for my needs, its exhaust note exhilarating, and the handling was as sweet and steady as ever. Built in 1997, this bike pre-dated almost every modern electronic convenience and, to me, represents motorcycling at its elemental best. Eventually we made it home for a well-deserved wash and polish. It may be 25 years old this year, but it has covered only 8,300 miles from new and now with its newly painted plastic parts looked like new. For some reason, the TL hasn’t quite reached collector status yet, unlike the Ducati Sport Classic, so it will get ridden as often as the opportunity arises. Quite simply, I love it.

Back on the road in sunny South Africa

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‘Twas the week before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, not even a Tiger. Despite careful precautions taken 20 months earlier, the Tiger’s life support system had failed.  The same was true for the TL1000S, the V-Strom and the little Yamaha TW200.

In truth, the TL and the V-Strom hadn’t even been on life support. We’d high-tailed it back to our home Britain on 24 March 2020 before South Africa clamped down on all travel on the 27th. There were long queues at Oliver Tambo International in Johannesburg as people scrambled to leave – a sharp contrast to the post-apocalyptic ghost towns we encountered at Zurich airport and Heathrow as we passed through them.

With Covid transforming the world, I knew it might be some time before we’d be able to travel back to South Africa. Simple mathematics said that a new motorcycle battery in South Africa runs to about R900, whereas a smart battery charger costs about R1,600. So I decided it would be cheaper just to buy new batteries for two of the bikes when we got back, but hooked up the other four and our Nissan bakkie (pick-up) to trickle chargers.

As regular readers will know, I decided to ship two of the bikes to the UK last year, the Rune and the Ducati Sport Classic. Neighbours very kindly opened up the garage for the shippers, disconnected the chargers from the two bikes and left the others as they were. The fly in the ointment was the loose fit between the plug on the extension cord to the chargers, meaning that somewhere along the line the plug had slipped out a fraction, the electricity supply to the bikes was cut off and their batteries were totally dead. Deeply annoying, but not the end of the world. The bakkie battery was fully charged thanks to a separate feed, so at least we had transport.

A quick visit to two battery emporia in nearby Knysna procured four spanking new batteries, with the tiny battery for the Yamaha bizarrely coming out the most expensive at R999. Then it was simply a matter of installing the pre-charged sealed units in each machine, adding a lot of air to a lot of tyres, and I was back in business.

It felt truly wonderful to be back in familiar saddles on familiar roads after such a long break. The Triumph 800XC came first, pressed into service for a trip to buy some groceries. Next up was the V-Strom, which I bought second-hand in Dubai in 2009 and which has been a reliable workhorse ever since. I was struck by the similarities between the two bikes, despite their very different configurations: one a high-revving 800cc triple, the other a more sedate 1,000cc V-twin. But their riding positions, comfort levels, smoothness and effortless power made them seem like they were cut from the same cloth.

The Suzuki TL needed a bit more work. When we innocently popped down to South Africa for a month’s holiday that fateful March in 2020, I’d dropped off the left-side fairing and left-side tail-piece for respraying. The fairing had become seriously scratched when I dropped the bike while trying to bump-start it due to a serious lack of forward momentum and an awkward side-saddle bump attempt. The tail-piece had been rubbed back to the base plastic in  one spot by a tie-down when a local dealer trailered the bike to his workshop to free-up seized front disc brakes several years earlier. I wanted to return the bike to its near-pristine state.

The spray shop hadn’t even started the job back in 2020 when we had to flee in the Covid rush, leaving our daughter Nicky to recover the unpainted plastic and decals from the spray-painters. Now I had the chance and the time to bring the parts back and start the process again. This meant that getting the TL on the road would take an extra week or three, but for now it was just good to feel a summer sun on my back, a warm breeze in my face and enjoy what the two adventure bikes had to offer.

Buff envelopes deliver the right to ride – at last!

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In this age of instant communication, the concept of excitement when a letter drops on to the doormat must be alien to many. I still get excited, though, sad old man that I am. And the envelopes that excite me the most are those buff, A5-ish ones with the little plastic address window and the words Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency in the top left corner.

The strange attraction started when my driving licence was withdrawn for medical reasons a couple of years ago – as a precautionary measure. “You must stop driving from today,” the doctor said, so I did. The condition that led to this – a tiny tumour that appeared on a scan in a place where it shouldn’t be – was successfully eliminated within four weeks, but it was many months before the wheels of Covid-era bureaucracy reached the stage where my application to get my licence back was being actively reviewed.

I resorted to calling the DVLA in Swansea for updates. I called a couple of times a week, then several times, and finally every day. This may seem obsessive, but my doctor had sorted the problem the previous September and had confirmed the same to the authorities in March. There was no real reason why I couldn’t drive, or ride, apart from the need for that piece of plastic from Swansea. It was July, the sun was shining, and I wanted to ride. I spoke to several very pleasant and helpful Welsh people over the weeks. On one occasion, a gentle-voiced Welshman, clearly looking at my case on his screen, said: “Ah, Mr Rae, I see you spoke to us yesterday. What can we do for you today?”

During all these weeks I would check the post each day in case, just maybe, the licence had dropped into the box. Then, one day, a nice gentleman at the DVLA answered my call and said he had good news – the licence had just been approved! Yay! Hallelujah! I was free to drive from that moment onward, he told me, and the plastic licence duly arrived a few days later.

If you’ve followed the saga of the shipping of my Ducati and Rune from South Africa to the UK, you’ll be aware that this hadn’t exactly been plain sailing, either. Documents I’d supplied to register them here had subsequently been returned along with a request for more information in each case. So when I picked up the post last Friday and found another bulky, buff, A5-ish envelope from the DVLA, I was pretty sure it heralded more problems. The familiar paperwork inside seemed only to confirm this. Then I read the covering letter – and they’d approved the application for the Ducati! It was officially registered, and with the same plate it’d had when I first registered it in Reading back in 2008. The letter said that the V5C registration certificate would follow separately “in the next four weeks”. It actually arrived the next day.

So now, fully six months and one week after the Sport Classic and the Honda Rune were loaded on to a truck in Plettenberg Bay at the start of their long journey, at least the Ducati was legal to ride once again on public roads. Of course, it’s been raining for days now and the forecast suggest more of the same.

Today, however, three weeks on, has dawned bright and sunny. It’s cold but the sky is blue and the roads are dry so I fire up the Ducati and head down the M6 to Stoke to pick up an oil filter from the Ducati dealer. The Termignoni racing exhaust is making sweet music and it feels so good to be back in this particular saddle. It may be only 7 degrees C outside but its 21 degrees in my heart and 31 in my soul as I take in the autumn colours and get in sync with that unique Ducati vibe.

As I pull back on to my driveway 90 minutes later, the postman walks towards me with two buff, A5-ish envelopes bearing the DVLA logo in the top left-hand corner. The first one I open turns out to be confirmation that the Rune has been registered, finally. Oh joy! The second contains the new registration document. A Ducati ride and a road-legal Rune – all my Christmases have come at once, almost seven months to the day after the bikes started their journey. Then I try to move my faithful Valkyrie in the garage and find the front brake is seized and the bike is immobile. Into every life a little rain must fall…

At last – all road-legal in the UK, seven months on. This isn’t the UK, obviously, but Knysna Lagoon in the Western Cape.

Bogged down in a paperwork jungle

Posted on by roadriderblog

They say that anticipation is the greater part of pleasure. I’ve already written about my long-drawn-out anticipation of the arrival of the Ducati and the Rune in the UK. Would the reality live up to the dream?

I’ve owned the Sport Classic since I bought it new in January 2008, and the Rune since January 2016, so it’s not like we’re strangers. I’ve just spent a small fortune shipping them more than 8,000 miles – so of course they were going to be great to ride again. Even the all-too-short trip to the MOT centre, and the slightly longer trip back again, was an ample reminder of why I like these two very different bikes so much.

The Ducati for me always held the promise of my old 1974 GT750. It was, after all, designed specifically to be a 21st century version of that bike’s 750 Sport sibling, but with all the (many) glitches ironed out. It weighs only 181 kg and puts out about 95 bhp with its Termignoni racing exhaust system. It’s a basic bike – a great engine, two wheels, a seat, a tank and that’s pretty much it – and I see it rather as a latter-day Vincent. It gathers speed in what feels like a very traditional way, giving a visceral push towards the horizon without the exponential feel of a modern four. You either like the glorious feel of a sporty V-twin, or you don’t, and this bike does it for me. I plan to add new Pirelli Phantoms when I get the cambelts replaced soon and it’ll be ready to carve its way through the twisties once more.

Parenthetically, I think it’s nuts in this day and age to design an engine that needs new cambelts every two years, regardless of mileage, at a cost of almost £300 a time including labour and VAT. My old 1997 Suzuki TL1000S, still residing in South Africa in readiness for our next visit, was designed as a Ducati 916-slayer in its day, and it’s never needed that kind of expensive maintenance.

The Rune couldn’t be more different. Take the unburstable (and low-maintenance, by contrast) 1800 Gold Wing engine, tweak it a little, and dress it in one of the funkiest outfits ever to grace a production motorcycle, and you have a unique bike. It weighs 368 kg dry, 398 kg wet, and is fully eight feet long. It has presence. I was reminded of its considerable heft when I had to manoeuvre it into our newly prepared garage, which is approached by a short and slightly downward sloping driveway. Riding it in nose-first was not an option: no way was I ever going to reverse it out again. The trick is to ride it down the drive, turn hard right on to our neighbour’s drive, and perform a four-point turn to reverse it the last few metres into the garage. It takes all the strength in my shoulders and legs to keep the beast upright in those manoeuvres.

Out on the road, it’s wheeled emollient (a phrase I borrow with due credit from Car magazine’s description of the V12 Jaguar Series III XJ6 back in the late ‘80s, and eminently appropriate for both vehicles). The exhaust emits a pleasant burble that becomes a growl on acceleration but never gets raucous. The engine is about as smooth as they come. It develops 118 horsepower at 5500 rpm and 167 Nm of torque at 4000 rpm (or 123 ft lb in old money). That’s enough to move the machine down the road with impressive urgency, with a 12-second standing quarter time, made all the more satisfying by the total absence of vibration. It’s said to be capable of 123 mph or so, but the riding position means it hits a real sweet spot at about 60. That means you can chill out, savour the moment, and overtake pretty much any normal traffic with a flick of the wrist, all safe in the knowledge that you’re not likely to fall foul of speed cameras outside built-up areas. Its slightly outrageous appearance turns heads, for sure, but that’s not why I bought it – it just needs to turn my head, and it does that every time.

Sadly, turning my head is all either bike will be doing for a while yet. My attempts to register them as UK bikes have failed so far. Both applications have been rejected by the DVLA. In the case of the Rune, the issue was lack of proof of year of manufacture; with the Ducati, it was the absence of the original certificate of first registration in South Africa.

This Ducati rejection was a bit galling, because I had sent the original UK registration certificate from 2008 with my application. The same bike had merely travelled to Dubai, Abu Dhabi and South Africa before coming home again. However, the DVLA gave me the option of explaining by letter why I didn’t have the certificate of first registration from South Africa (it’s lying in a filing drawer in our house down there, still inaccessible due to Covid travel rules), so I’ve done that and sent everything  back to Swansea. The year of manufacture thing with the Rune was a bit galling too, because the Rune was made only in one year, 2004, although I believe some were made in 2005. If I said it was 2004, that should be good enough, in my book! If it were a 2005 bike, why would I claim it as 2004? The VIN plate on the headstock even proclaims 2004 in large numbers. The DVLA helpfully said they would accept a letter from Honda confirming the year of manufacture. A call to Honda’s UK HQ quickly confirmed that such a letter was indeed possible, for a fee of £30, but it would take up to six weeks. Five weeks later, I’ve just received a note to say the letter is ready and will arrive shortly. Then I can send off all the paperwork to Swansea again. First World problems…

When the Rune arrived on my driveway, straight off the boat, I changed the settings from kilometres to miles and was greeted by this number

Dream bikes arrive – just don’t plan on riding them anytime soon!

Posted on by roadriderblog

I’m 67 years old but I’ve been feeling a bit like a child counting the days to Christmas. For me, the long-awaited presents are my Honda Rune and Ducati Sport Classic, due to arrive in Middlewich after a journey that began 11 weeks ago on the Garden Route of South Africa’s Western Cape.

Regular readers will be aware of the ups and downs of the process, but my concerns over the arrival of the bikes didn’t end when the ship finally docked at London Gateway, the port on the Thames Estuary in Essex. Oh no.

First comes the tracker confirmation that the ship has actually berthed alongside the quay. Yay! I wait patiently for about 24 hours to give the shipper time to get the cargo off. The ship sets sail again about 10 hours later. The shipper confirms that the container is off the ship and that the bikes have been cleared through Customs. Double yay!

I’m thinking, ports are super-efficient, and the constant throughput of containers means they can’t have my bikes laying around there for long, so they’ll probably be on the road tomorrow – or, worst case, the day after. Hah! Not so fast. It seems that someone else’s cargo inside the same container hasn’t yet cleared Customs, so unloading the container has to wait until that has cleared, too. That takes eight days. Then the shipper says they can’t get a haulier to move the bikes the 200-odd miles from Essex to Cheshire until 5 July – which is a further 10 days away!

Look, freight isn’t really my field, although I did a stint in that industry as a PR adviser about 20 years ago, but I would have thought a shipper would know what was coming through and when, and have the requisite vehicles on hand to move the goods onward. A friend tells me there’s a shortage of HGV drivers in the UK right now, so maybe there’s a shortage of large van drivers too – thanks, Amazon, for creaming off the talent!

A driver and van is eventually found and booked, and now he’s delivered the bikes to our driveway. He specialises in motorcycle transport, which is a relief, and it takes him no time to unload the machines. I’m delighted, of course – I haven’t even seen these bikes since the start of the Covid lockdown in March 2020, when we had to cut short a trip to South Africa and high-tail it back to Blighty. And I haven’t ridden them since June 2019, due to such diverse factors as my health and the unrideable state of the dirt road to our house down there.

Anyway, here they are. I scrutinise every inch to check for shipping damage. The Ducati looks flawless but the battery is flat, so I connect a charger. The Honda actually fires up at the touch of the button, and the mellifluous sound of the 1,832cc flat six bellows out of those two massive exhaust pipes – awesome! There’s a very small new scratch on the rear mudguard, and the brushed aluminium pivot cover down near the right footrest has scratches that weren’t there before. Apart from these, though, it too looks unaffected by its long journey. Tyre pressure are low all round, but that’s easily put right.

I spend many hours washing and then polishing both bikes. The Ducati is easy, having little in the way of bodywork; the Rune takes the bulk of the time, because the weeks sitting on docks or in the container have made all that chrome look a bit dull – but that’s why God invented Autosol! That Honda gets polished better than I’ve ever cleaned a bike before, hard-to-reach spots and all, and ends up looking truly magnificent. The Autosol tube ends up almost empty.

There’s a bizarre-looking piece of bright orange webbed strap hanging between the header pipes on the right-hand side. The only possible explanation for its presence is that it had been used to tie down the bike at some point in its travels, although there’s no logic to its placement. Tying down the bike through that area makes no sense at all. Someone clearly couldn’t get the strap off again and so has cut it with a knife just below the pipes. Closer investigation shows that the material has in fact melted into the headers, and it takes some careful poking and scraping to detach it completely. Fortunately the point of melting is behind the headers, and they’re hidden in turn behind bolt-on chrome covers.

I’ve managed to get the two bikes insured on my Valkyrie policy using just the VIN numbers, thanks to a really helpful agent named Nathan at Carole Nash. However, they would be insured only for a trip to and from a pre-booked MOT test. It’s very tempting and totally legal to book them in for the tests some 50 miles away and enjoy the ride there and back, but the weather forecast is for rain showers and I don’t want to spoil all that gleaming chrome and paintwork, so I wuss out and book them into a great MOT centre, DC Lomas, just two miles from my house. They both pass with flying colours – the tester described them as perfect – and they make it home without catching a speck of dirt or water.

You’d think I could now apply to have them registered, but no. Again, not so fast! I have to wait until Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) issue a thing called a NOVA certificate for each bike. The bikes were landed and processed on 15 June; the NOVA certificates were issued on 15 July. You wouldn’t want to be in a hurry! Anyhow, with all the paperwork now to hand, I send everything off to the DVLA in Swansea. Not being able to ride the machines again until the DVLA issues their registration numbers is a pain: I’ve already paid in full for their insurance, MOTs, registration fees and 12 months’ road tax. It’s not like anybody is missing out financially, and the MOT engineer says the bikes are in perfect shape. Oh, and we have a mini heatwave… I’ll just have to be good and ride the Valkyrie!