the overall ratio and provides a first gear that reflects our
needs.
In the same vein, effective liquid cooling is important.
Make sure your bike can sit at idle in high temperatures
for an hour and maintain correct temperature. Not all
bikes can.
There is a raft of issues about maintenance and
repairability that are among the most important features
of a travelling bike going anywhere remote. Even in Aus-
tralia, most of the top end machines need to be shipped
back to a big city dealer for repairs. Life gets a lot tougher
in poor countries where there may only be one dealer lo-
cated in a capital city or no dealer at all. A make and mod-
el that is widely used in the place where you are travelling
makes a lot of sense. If you are in South America, for ex-
ample, a small Chinese bike of the type used by locals has
some real advantages.
In 2016 we spent an “interesting” week in a dusty desert
edge village in northern Peru waiting to get a new set of
tyres sent from a dealer in Lima on the intercity bus. A
puncture and blow-out on a straight desert road had ru-
ined an almost new rear. The layover was useful for us to
get to see part of Peruvian life that we would have other-
wise missed, but it would have been a real problem had we
been on a tight schedule. There was only one place in Peru
to get the 150 profile rear I needed for our bike. Had we
been riding a machine needing the 170 rear fitted to the
newest machines, life would have been much harder and
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