’Dam hipsters
Lee goes in search of the Street Cup’s spiritual home on the cool and cultured streets of Amsterdam
IT’S BEST TO address this from the get-go… With the new Street Triple R about to join the RIDE test fleet, the Street Cup’s days are numbered. But before I bid farewell to it, I need to dig deeper to experience the best of what the laid-back Triumph has to offer. I’ve already done a lot of varied miles on it – everything from commuting to a weekend motorcycle festival –and it’s done every job perfectly well. But it doesn’t feel as though it’s ever fitted in properly.
It’s a cool-looking café-racer-style bike, designed for urban use. So understandably my typical twisty country roads aren’t going to bring out the best of it. It stands to reason that the only way to enjoy the real Street Cup is to take it to where it belongs. Just a ferry crossing away is Amsterdam; a chilled-out Dutch city steeped in history (though infamous for other reasons…) and as it happens, my favourite place on earth.
The mixture of Amsterdam’s hectic city centre and ultra-cool Noord district ought to highlight everything good about the hip Street Cup. Stena Line operates a sevenhour ferry crossing from Harwich to Hook of Holland, which leaves about 90 minutes of riding to get into Amsterdam centre. It involves – for me at least – less riding than getting to than many British riding destinations.
The overnight crossing aboard the Stena Hollandica ferry is impossibly smooth and the time flies by as I get well fed at the restaurant and a grab few hours sleep in the cabin. A quick buffet breakfast in the morning and I’m ready to hit the Dutch roads. Chugging along the
“It’s a coollooking café racer bike...”
Dutch motorway is pleasant, not least because Europeans actually know how to work the lanes of a motorway.
Before long, I rock up outside my hotel. Bags dropped off and I’m back out on the Street Cup, headed through the city centre and into the tunnel under the river. As I resurface, the tightly packed scenery of the centre has been replaced with industrial warehouses and heavy machinery and walls adorned with street art of… err... varying quality. I’m definitely in the Noord district.
What was once only docklands and surrounding villages, isolated from the centre, the Noord is now becoming a hipsters’ paradise. The industrial area houses a diverse range of businesses, residences and trendy hang-outs. And I’m headed for one of the trendiest of them all. Café Cueval - which is an old boatyard now operating as waterfront café-cumup-cycling project, selling food, local craft beer and expensive furniture made of old boats. A hipster paradise indeed.
Out here, among the beards and shoes-no-socks dress code, the Street Cup looks perfectly at home and parked outside the café gates, it blends in with the retro surroundings easily. It looks at home out here. The Noord’s waterfront is more or less a gallery of street art on epic proportions. There’s everything from quickly-scrawled tags to amazing 80ft-high full-colour murals, making riding from café to café an experience in itself.
In this placid district, cruising through pretty villages and negotiating T-junctions and cycle lanes becomes easy. The Street Cup deals with it all as smoothly as a moped, but with the presence of a proper-cool motorcycle, turning the occasional head and raising smiles from other riders to boot.
Heading back towards the centre of the city, the pace changes dramatically. There’s a constant flow of traffic from all angles and oblivious tourists walking into the road at every turn. But again, the Cup takes it all in its stride. I’m moving at such a low speed, that even its infuriatingly-bad brakes don’t hinder it. Crossing the bicycle-lined bridges over the many canals and passing between rows of misaligned buildings is fun. Admittedly, by now I’ve completely lost my bearings, but I couldn’t care less. This is great. I’m seeing loads of cool stuff as I wobble around the network of streets and I don’t feel like a lost tourist. That’s all down to the Street Cup. Were I riding a big tourer or sportsbike, it just wouldn’t feel the same.
The Cup is discreet enough to leave outside a café here without a worry, but it always garners approving looks from passers-by. And the low-down grunt from the parallel-twin is a blessing when pulling out into the car/scooter/bicycle/tram/ tourist-infested chaos of the city centre.
So is this what the bike’s about? Does it belong here, looking cool and bombing around between the Dutch canals, lop-sided houses, and odd-smelling coffee shops? Yes. It absolutely does.
“It blends in easily with the surroundings ”