BACK TO NATURE THE ENFIELD WAY
I have a confession to make. I love Royal Enfields.
Like many love affairs, it started with too many glasses of wine one night and, five months later, fellow idiot Paddy Minne and I found ourselves on two Enfield Bullet 500s in Delhi in the summer of 1998, just about to ride the 7,000 miles back to the UK.
So when Ed Adams and Sam Pelly of Legendary Motorcycle Adventures phoned to see if I fancied a few days riding one around Andalucia, it took me about half a second to say yes.
Sam’s a top photographer and Ed’s a former SAS officer and Aikido master. They they set up LMA to reflect Royal Enfield’s ethos of a return to simple motorcycling fun. Their base for the tour was a 200-year-old villa in the mountains owned by Diana Padgett, a freewheeling former hippy who in the late 1960s had driven a VW camper van from the UK to Afghanistan.
And so to the road with Ed, Sam and our little gang: me; Nick, who back home rides a Kawasaki ZX-9; Finn, who has a Triumph Scrambler and BMW R 1200 GS; and Triumph Bonneville rider Emily.
At lunchtime, we parked the bikes in a glade, walked through the woods to a wide river, plunged into its frigid embrace to cool off, then picnicked on a grassy bank and dozed in the sun. It was like being children again, far from the cares of adulthood.
The next day we took the road to Ronda, which is spectacularly sited on a 400ft deep gorge spanned by an arched bridge, with views across rolling farmland and the white villages with their terracotta roofs for which Andalucia is famous.
That evening, we rode for half an hour along a rocky track, camped by a river, ate and drank like kings around the campfire, sang old songs of love and hope, and fell asleep in our swags under a fat moon and a million stars.
And the next morning we hugged each other, were driven to the airport, and returned slowly and sadly to what passes for the real world. But not before vowing that we would return together to recapture this magical synergy of motorcycles, friendship, food, wine, music and laughter.
Legendary Motorcycle Adventures’ five-day Andalusian Odyssey is £1,800 full board, excluding flights. It also does tours in Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily, Spain to the Sahara and Great Britain.
See www.lma.life for further details.