son could be made. No, it was the marketing behind these
bikes that pressed the grumpy button. For, it seems to me,
that the least important part of a motorcycle adventure
is the bike itself. To the extent that selling the adventure
bike lifestyle promotes the belief that all the excess of
these modern marvels is an essential, or even desirable,
requirement for a motorcycle adventure, the article failed
its audience. Whatever machine you spend your hard-
earned cash on it will always be subject to one of the great
truisms of motorcycle travel. The adventure is not about
the bike. It's never about the bike!
You don't need a specialised bike or any particular bike.
You just need a bike. It can be big, small, old or new, ex-
pensive or cheap, purpose built or ready for the knackers.
All that matters is that it is yours and you like riding it. If
it is reliable, that’s good. If not, you will just have to cope
and learn to fix it and that is also good.
If it’s cheap, then you won't worry too much if you must
abandon it some place when things turn bad. If it is expen-
sive you will just have to suck up the loss and start again.
And all of this is true because it doesn't matter how much
you spend on a bike, or what fancy label you give it, the
bike won't make the adventure for you. You must make
the adventure yourself.
All adventures have at their core sufficient physical or
emotional risk to unsettle us and we are all different in
our tolerance to these risks. For this reason, we make all
sorts of adventures and each demands something differ-
ent from us and our machines. So, when I list the import-
ant characteristics of a good adventure motorcycle I mean
only that these things matter to Team Elephant (Ed – Mike
& his wife, and riding partner, Jo) and our very specific
circumstances in the full expectation that few others will
have the same needs.
To set the scene, we are an older married couple who
travel two up. We ride long distances in foreign countries
where we generally don't speak the language, where the
culture is unfamiliar and where we spend our time in the
wider economy steering clear of tourist places. We ride
gravel roads, but no longer feel up to the very rough stuff
of our earlier years and gave up camping for our 65th
birthdays after 40 years of tenting. We always travel alone
and consider group travel to be the reason there are buses.
So, against this profile, what matters to us in a motorcycle?
What are the things I would like to see a test of “adventure”
motorcycles cover?
The first thing is that the bike is an acceptable invest-
ment risk. Don't take anything you aren't prepared to walk
away from without regret. If the bike gets dropped over-
TRAVERSE 40