Tag: Motorcycling

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.

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!

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

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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!

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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!

Anticipation is everything

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As I write, my cherished Honda Rune and Ducati Sport Classic are just over six hours away from arriving on British soil. Maybe. I know they left Cape Town on 31 May, about five days late and on a different ship. But I know from a helpful note from my shipper that they were due to arrive on MSC Argos at London Gateway port at 01:45 – two days ago.

An update last week from the UK shipping agent told me they were now due to arrive yesterday and would be transported by road to our house in Stockport (near Manchester). No! Wait! Did I not tell the South African shipper weeks ago that I’d be moving to Middlewich? Of course I did. I gave the new address to the UK agent and was assured that the bikes would be brought to my door. As you can see above, the garage is freshly painted, ready and waiting (a story in itself).

I’d been tracking the bikes on their journey, after a fashion. There are tracking apps out there that can pinpoint any ship anywhere on the planet, so I dipped into that world a few times. (This may come as a shock to a certain gentleman’s barber in Middlewich, into whose emporium I stuck my masked face a few days ago. “Do you take walk-ins?” I asked, the haircut being a spur-of-the-moment thing. “No, bookings only,” came the reply from the barber, an aging hipster with a full grey beard. “Can you use an app?” he asked, pointing at a sticker on his door advertising a service called Booksy. I assured him politely that I could, and left. Can I use an app?!!! Cheek! What age did he think I was? I found a friendly Middle Eastern barber shop a bit farther down the street and had an excellent haircut for a tenner, without having to declare my IT prowess. But I digress.)

It seems as though there are indeed services that can track ships in real time if you register and, I imagine, pay. I didn’t fancy the payment bit – this shipping process was already costing enough. One site suggested the MSC Argos was cruising around the Caribbean, which didn’t sound right, somehow. More detailed digging found that there was indeed a sailboat called Argos hanging around the sunkissed islands, but it was not my Argos. Another site told me that my Argos was heading for Las Palmas but was currently off the west coast of South Africa, steaming North at 18.2 knots. Given that it had supposedly left Cape Town a couple of days earlier, it certainly hadn’t got very far. Then I spotted a little note saying that data may be up to five days old.

Not being a total luddite (aging hipsters take note), I looked up London Gateway’s website and found a detailed schedule of all arrivals and departures. And there, on the list, was my ship! It was due to dock on the morning of 15 June at 02:00 from Rotterdam – a day later than the agent had most recently suggested, but close enough. Almost time to pop the champagne cork. A subsequent check yesterday told of a further delay; it was now not arriving till 14:45. Sounded like they’d missed the tide, or something technical like that. Thought I’d see whether Rotterdam has a similar schedule and, naturally, it does. This morning it shows 101 ships in residence and 168 recently departed. Bizarrely, the MSC Argos is not on either list. Hmmm.

When I worked in Hong Kong back in 2000, I had a client called LINE that specialised in optimising global cargo transport. I know from those happy days that container ships don’t alter their schedules or ports of call on a whim. It’s a hugely precise business. LINE even had software to optimise loading, telling crane operators where to plonk (a technical term) each container to ensure its ready accessibility for speedy removal at its destination. Clever stuff. So, knowing that businesses all over the UK and Europe are awaiting eagerly their just-in-time deliveries of rooibos tea, biltong, Stellenbosch wines and BMW 3-Series parts, I shall assume that the good ship Argos will indeed be berthing at London Gateway at 14:45 this afternoon. Then it’s a simple matter of the shipping agent processing the paperwork with HM Customs, a forklift driver loading the bikes very carefully on to a truck, and the Rune and Ducati should be here sometime tomorrow-ish. Oh, the joy of anticipation!

Back in the saddle

Posted on by roadriderblog

I’d be a 365-days-a-year rider if I could. I used to be, back in the days when a bike was my sole means of transport, in British rain, hail, snow or occasional sunshine.

Things changed. I let it happen. First came the company car, which was so warm, dry and convenient. Then came the crazy work schedule that made bike riding a luxury. You can get into a maelstrom of frenetic work in your 30s, 40s and even 50s that becomes the norm. Work, eat, sleep, repeat. Finding time to ride can get a little tricky.

But wait! Like a swimmer caught up in a rip-tide, you can break out of the cycle – eventually. I did, about five years ago, and it was truly great. I had amassed a small collection of bikes over the years and now I could make time to ride them.

Fate, however, can be cruel. Four of those bikes resided with me in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, an oasis of calm and relative civility in the Middle East. However, instead of rain, hail, snow and occasional sunshine came endless sunshine. Be careful what you wish for, they say – you may get it. In summer, the bikes gathered dust in a shaded car port as temperatures hovered in the mid-40s Centigrade with occasional forays into the low 50s.

That gets into the danger zone. I had to ride for an hour at midday in 47-degree heat from Dubai to Abu Dhabi for an urgent and unexpected business meeting. I could feel the blood get hot inside my head; my legs actually burned through my black jeans. When I eventually stopped, I felt faint and had to consume several bottles of chilled water before I felt even vaguely human – dizzy, but human.

Desert summers may be the polar opposites of British winters, but for motorcyclists the two have too much in common; they can be miserable. The solution came from spreading my humble stable of bikes between the UK and South Africa, where I also have a home, and forgetting about the Middle East as a biking base. The roads are generally too straight, too boring and too dangerous, anyway.

But life and work still keep me on the move between all three places, and this year that meant that my last spell of motorcycling was in Europe in July on my cherished Valkyrie. So, when I made it down to South Africa last week, my garage promised a feast of biking pleasure: the Honda Rune, Ducati Sport Classic 1000, Suzuki TL1000S and Suzuki V-Strom 1000 all sat there, batteries fully charged and raring to go.

Some unseasonably wet weather and the state of my local dirt road meant they stayed in the garage, sadly. The road is used by heavy logging trucks and becomes like a motocross track unless it is regularly graded. The surface is so rough that it has already fractured the rear light unit of my Ducati, created a couple of small stone chips on the Rune, and caused various bits of my Nissan bakkie (pick-up truck) to get loose or fall off.

When it rains, the red dirt conspires to latch on to every crevice, nook and cranny of your bike, compounding your misery. So, I had to wait five days until the graders appeared, the weather dried out and I could get back in the saddle – at last!

First up was the Rune, because it never fails to instil in me a wonderful sense of occasion. It growls in a civilised way; it oozes power, even though there are many more powerful bikes out there; and the riding position is nigh-on perfect if you are into the cruiser thing. It never fails to put a smile on my face.

Next up was the Ducati, now fully restored to pristine glory after its tank-slapping hissy-fit 18 months ago. The replica Termignoni silencer did its usual Ducati thing, sounding for all the world like a ‘70s racing machine. The contrast between the two machines couldn’t be more pronounced – one laid back and relaxing, the other bent forward and intense – but on this warm, sunny November day they both spelled fun.

The TL was next in line, but its Chinese battery – newly installed 18 just months ago – was devoid of life, despite being on trickle charge like all the others. So, it was on to the V-Strom, an excellent bike that somehow seems to exist in the shadow of its more glamorous siblings. It started instantly, as always, and felt like an old pair of boots as I sailed down the dirt road: smooth, comfortable and agile.

With its tall seat and totally upright riding position, it felt completely different to the low, laid-back stance of the Rune or the forward-leaning placement of the two sports bikes. Its 1,000cc V-twin doesn’t lack useful grunt, and it handles well on the road. Off-road, apart from over smooth-ish dirt, its weight hampers its ability.

Different bikes, different styles, but after a gap of almost four months, it felt great to be back in the saddle. Now I just need to find a decent battery for the TL…

All trussed up with nowhere to go

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The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry. Not wanting the Rune to get wet or even dirty, I had checked the weather forecast for the route between Cape Town and Plettenberg Bay and found that Friday and Saturday would be ideal – and so it proved: blue skies, up to 33 degrees C, cooling wind.

I hadn’t planned on being on the road after Saturday and so hadn’t checked the forecast for Sunday. Hah! Sunday dawned grey and wet, with low cloud and steady rain. It looked as if it would be dry from the town of George eastwards, so the last 90 minutes or so of the trip would be dry.

It’s been said there is no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing. There’s a lot in that, but almost all my waterproof bike gear is back in the UK where it’s needed most. There’s a two-piece Rukka suit that cost a fortune 13 years ago but has never let in a drop of rain, a pair of tall Gore Tex-lined boots and some Sympatek gloves. But they’re all 9,000 miles away.

I check out my available gear. TCX boots, waterproof but short, just above ankle height. Riding pants are from the iXS Desert range and therefore unlikely to be waterproof and offer no labels claiming to be so. We’ll have to see. Alpinestars mesh summer riding jacket and shorty leather gloves – you must be joking!

The temperature is due to max out at 21 degrees C but right now at 10 am it feels pretty cold. Ryan Neves, the salesman I’d dealt with from Motorcycle World, calls to say he’s on his way, which gives him an ETA of around 12:30. Maybe the rain will have eased by then. On cue, it stops, only to return with gusto 10 minutes later.

My only concerns about this whole 550km trip had been the last kilometre, which is where the tarmac of the N2 gives way to a dirt road down to Wittedrif. The authorities grade it fairly frequently but the heavy logging trucks that use it to haul timber out of the pine forests soon churn it up again. This past week, it’s been at about its worst ever, filled with ruts, potholes and severe corrugations at right angles to the traffic. I have two sports bikes that I usually ride up there in third, but last week they required first gear in places. Even our Nissan bakkie, which normally handles the surface with ease, squirmed and bucked.

It was down this washboard road that the Honda would have to travel, and then negotiate 190 metres of steeply sloping twin concrete strips to our house. The driveway was built to follow what I think had been an existing game path, and the curves of the concrete strips were designed to cater for the needs of the builder’s trucks; they do not follow a natural line for a motorcycle, let alone one more than eight feet long.

Now to even get to that challenge I had to ride through two hours of rain on a bike with no weather protection and in the wrong clothes. But, hey, that took me back to my earliest biking days in Ireland, where it was almost always colder and wetter and the gear even more inappropriate. So I sat on the covered deck at the excellent Gunners B&B with my Kindle, gazing at the rain and waiting for my battery.

I walked down the hill at 12:20 in readiness for Ryan’s arrival, to be greeted by the sight of a trussed whale in the place where I’d left the Rune overnight. They say a picture is worth a thousand words…

All trussed up

My benefactor Andre Pietersen and his wife Ena had feared for the bike’s safety and covered it in not one but seven blankets, rugs and curtains, secured with what looked like a mile of thick rope. They’d even parked their cars on the wide footpath to offer it further protection. And what protection! It took me seven minutes just to untie the rope. The blankets and the overhanging bush had even kept things dry. That’s Andre and Ena below.

Rune saviours

Ryan arrived shortly afterwards with his young son Migel, pictured below, and within minutes the brand new battery was in place. The Rune roared into life, normal service was resumed and my personal Groundhog Day was at an end. I thanked Ryan profusely for coming all the way from his home in Cape Town on a wet Sunday to help a stranded customer, and Andre and Ena for going to such trouble to help a stranger. The 1960s ads used to say “you meet the nicest people on a Honda” and 50 years later it still proves to be true.

Rune saviours 2

I set off for Bredasdorp 18 km away, so pleased to be back on the road that I could forgive the stinging rain through the arms of the mesh jacket. As I turned left toward Swellendam I saw two things of note: a petrol station on the right, and an automotive parts store in whose window was a wide range of batteries. Well, I figured, they probably didn’t stock a suitable bike battery, anyway, and were probably closed on a Saturday afternoon, like so much else. A glance at the digital bars of the fuel gauge showed two bars still lit, and the N2 main road wasn’t very far away, so I passed the petrol station and headed on through the rain. The bike seemed to handle wet roads with aplomb, and the trousers and boots seemed to be keeping the weather out. It turned out the iXS pants are indeed waterproof.

No petrol stations loomed out of the gloom as I headed north. The fuel gauge dropped to its final bar, which started flashing. The advantage of being stuck in a small town with nothing to do is that you have time to read the owner’s manual! On Friday night I had discovered that the Troubleshooting section had little of value to offer on the subject of not starting (“check that the battery is charged”) but also saw that when the final bar on the fuel gauge starts flashing you are on reserve. The tank holds 22 litres in total and the reserve is just over one US gallon. So I figured that I might have about 50 km of riding left, and as I’ve done many times before in such situations I cut my speed to 80 km/h to eke out the remaining fuel.

The road seemed interminable. With what I calculated was now 10 km of fuel left, I came to the N2 junction and saw a Norton Commando rider stopped by the side of the road. He told me there was a petrol station in Swellendam, which was the way I was heading anyway, so I slowed down some more and eased my way into the town. I spotted a Caltex station on the right and pulled in. The tank took 22 litres, so I must have been running on fumes! My luck was changing.

The rain stopped about 50 km later and when I reached George the air grew warmer and the sun came out. All was well with the world. I found the Rune could hold a steady 120 km/h (the speed limit) with ease if I moved back in the saddle and leaned into the wind just a little. The same stance allowed me to go faster, but I wouldn’t want to do that for hour after hour. The seat itself cause me to wriggle around from time to time, but to be honest most motorcycle seats have the same effect on me.

My only real gripe was the rear suspension. On poor roads, especially those with sudden dips, the impact went straight up my spine and transmitted a short but sharp pain to my neck. I’ve never experienced that before. On perfectly smooth roads the ride was just fine. They’d just re-tarred the previously terrible surface of the N2 going past George airport, but it was clear to me that while the surface appeared flat and smooth it still had mild undulations, as if the underlying material were more like an Irish bog than real hardcore. I’m happy to rent myself and the Rune out to road-builders as the ultimate test of flatness.

Despite the suspension issue, I reached the dirt road in Plett still feeling fresh. The sun had long since dried out my damp jacket and gloves and I was exhilarated by my five-hour trip. The Rune remained composed as I negotiated the ruts and bumps of the dirt road, leaving a cloud of reddish dust in its wake, and it even managed the concrete driveway without mishap.

Next morning, I was out there with hosepipe, bucket, sponge and chamois to remove the road grime and restore the Rune to its pristine glory. The drying, polishing and detailing process took longer than with any other bike I’ve owned, but the result made it all worthwhile. My reward came when I discovered that the municipality picked the next day to regrade the dirt road; it was by no means perfect, but it meant that the Rune could escape from the garage for a cruise up to the Crags and down to Keurboomstrand in the evening.

It’s early days, but my verdict is that the big Honda is the most awesome of the many bikes I’ve owned in a motorcycling life that spans 49 years (I started young, okay?). It’s not the fact that it impresses others; it enough that it impresses me, to look at and to ride. Next step is to weigh the pros and cons of buying a dual seat and passenger pegs so my wife can share the experience.