board while loading onto a ferry or disappears from a cus-
toms bond store in Panama, it shouldn't be the end of your
world or even your journey. The more expensive the bike
the more effort needed for its security and you don't want
to be spending time worrying about the machine.
Take the smallest and lightest bike you can. When you
are fighting your way down a slippery cobble street through
heavy traffic you are never going to say, hell, I wish this
bike was 50kg heavier. If you are paddling through a soft
sandy corner churned to slippery powder you are never
going to complain about being able to get your feet flat on
the ground. When the bike goes down in soft sand in the
desert of Baja California and you face the challenge of get-
ting it upright with a broken ankle, you aren't going to be
thankful for riding a behemoth. As a general rule a sin-
gle rider doesn't need more that a 650cc single. A couple
can get away with a 650cc twin or, if they are camping, an
800cc machine at the most. Anything more is unnecessary
complexity and weight.
Don't worry about power. In more than 200,000km of
travel I have never once wished for more power than the
modest output of our old machine. The reason for this is
simply that when you are far from home, when there ar-
en't any rescue helicopters or a reliable ambulance ser-
vice, where you don't speak the language and where you
don't fully understand the conditions, you won't be doing
any fancy riding. Your first aim, always, will be to survive
and that means keeping within your limits and that of the
bike.
Gear ratios matter. We run fully loaded all the time at or
above the 460kg maximum specified by the manufacturer.
The gearing of our shaft drive machine was set by wise
engineers as a compromise to cover a wide range of cir-
cumstances. We only operate at one extreme of that range
and the factory first gear (you know, the special adventure
gearing) is just too high. This has been a real problem on
many occasions when we have been stuck in heavy traffic
in steep terrain unable to move fast enough to fully en-
gage the clutch. The first time this happened in the Riff
mountains of Morocco, the clutch was destroyed in an af-
ternoon. Another of our bikes is chain drive and doesn't
have the same problem. A simple sprocket change altered
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