Triumph T140D takes on New Zealand adventure
Martin Teece rediscovered his sense of adventure by riding his 40-year-old, 100,000-miler Triumph T140D on a 5000-mile journey taking in the length and breadth of New Zealand
THE OLDER WE become, the more constraints we accept without question. We are given orders by older people when we are young, then become the order-givers to the young when we are older. But the orders we follow are sometimes subliminal, not verbal – they are just accepted protocol, like forming a queue. The rebels of the ’50s and ’60s have become the Middle Englanders of this decade. The rebel without a cause is now the target of cynical marketing. We become enveloped without thinking – trapped into a rigid framework of acceptability without questioning the boundaries of what we do and say. And yet young people are out there, crossing the world on Honda 125s and the like. So why not do it on old classics? Because we all accept subconsciously that you need an almost-new bike with the very latest maps loaded into your cutting-edge satnav system to have any chance of getting out of the UK.
I realised that to carry out a road trip on my bucket list that I really wanted to do, would involve a seachange in my thinking. It would mean stepping out of the comfort zone of modern motorcycling and into the big, wide world again. I had become restrained in my thinking, happy to see out my biking days in the cradle of unchallenged old-age mediocrity. The museum piece that my old Triumph had become would have to be a motorcycle again – to be resurrected and made capable of being left outside at night on its own, travelling in the rain and not being cleaned and cossetted when it got dirty. After all, I reasoned, if it breaks it can certainly be fixed – and if you don’t try you will never fail... but more importantly, you will never succeed.
My wake-up call came in 2019, which coincided with the 40th anniversary of my owning the same bike from new – a Triumph Bonneville T140D. The World Association Of Triumph Owners’ Clubs’ (WATOC) annual rally was be held in New Zealand that year – and I wanted to attend. Not only that, while I was there I wanted to ride the length and breadth of the country on a bike that had covered nearly 100,000 miles in my 40 years of ownership, but was about as original as Trigger’s broom. To the casual observer, it probably looks like it’s just had a few neat modifications – but in reality there’s bugger all original except the frame, wheels and crankcases! That’s immaterial, though – my dearest wish was to stand at the extremities of New Zealand’s north and south islands, carried there under the steam of that old bike, and know that I had thrown away the constraints that confine us and done something that people thought was crazy.
It wasn’t that crazy, though – I had a back-up plan in the form of my wife accompanying me on the trip, riding a modern Triumph Tiger 800. So we’d have transport if the journey did prove terminal for the T140D, and a second bike to help carry all the camping paraphernalia and modern comforts that people of our age need on such a trip.
Weeks of what we love to call ‘fettling’ would take place, and during that time journeys on the bike undertaken in the rain became longer and longer in duration as the realisation dawned that the normal barriers of conventional thinking could be challenged.
A trip to the Mosel in Germany, using motorways as well as A-roads, was planned in order to test the reliability of the engine – plus provide the chance to give the whole bike a good shakedown and rectify any issues that arose. It was undertaken accompanied by modern bikes and ridden at the speed limit of the roads we were on.
As it happened, the bike had problems with a broken header pipe, and while on the motorway the engine started to run on one cylinder when the HT lead decided that it didn’t like the coil and kept coming adrift. But it was better to find that out there and then, rather than never trying a high-speed run and having to fix it on the opposite side of the world.
Those old constraints were now looking eminently breakable – it was just other people’s thinking that was becoming harder to swallow. One chap even laughed in my face and said: “Why don’t you hire a BMW when you get there?” when I was having the MOT test done prior to shipping the bike out to
‘I WANTED TO DO SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE THOUGHT WAS CRAZY’
New Zealand. It just made me realise how small and narrow his mind had become with the conditioning of age.
Undeterred, I shipped the bike to New Zealand – and yes it attended the WATOC Rally, yes it broke down, and yes I fixed it. All in all, it covered just under 5000 miles in less than six weeks. The engine burnt two litres of oil, along with two-and-a-half litres of petrol additives. I stood and looked out at the Pacific meeting the Tasman Sea, watched sperm whales dive on their way to their hunting grounds hundreds of feet deep in the ocean, and stood upon the Southern Alps – and the feeling of freedom I had as a youth returned.
I also snapped the rear subframe off the bike on the gravel road called the ‘Forgotten World
Highway’ – and had it repaired in four hours the next day before continuing on with the journey. Due to my over-enthusiasm with the throttle, the clutch was replaced at a service halfway through the adventure, after covering 2500 miles. The worn-out footpeg rubbers were also replaced. I carried on, touching Burt Munro’s legendary Indian along the way, before finally parking my bike at Bluff, the town at the southerly end of the South Island, for the inevitable photograph with Mount Cook in the background. The sense of achievement was indescribable.
After the bike had returned from New Zealand and some more work had been carried out – replacing a broken headlight and indicators, rear mudguard, and rear subframe (broken in a different place) and a bloody good service – I continued to ride the bike for the rest of the year. This included a 70-mile anniversary ride and an Iron Butt Saddlesore ride in October, in which the aim is to cover 1000 miles in 24 hours – we went to Scotland and, using a mixture of motorways and A-roads, completed the whole thing in 23 hours. Not bad for an old T140! But it’s no big deal – you just have to realise that all things are possible.
So if you own a classic bike, don’t end up sitting in a nursing home regretting what could have been – make a pledge with yourself now to make the next 12 months the very best year of riding your bike ever. Cast aside convention – and when someone asks if you want to join them on a classic bike trip, the answer’s simple: when do we go?
‘THE FEELING OF FREEDOM I HAD AS A YOUTH RETURNED’