It takes all sorts
One man’s meat is another’s poison, so the saying goes, which can be applied to motorcycling too.
Unless you are reading this because it’s the only distraction available in a dentist’s waiting room, I assume you are interested in motorcycles or motorcycling. Not necessarily both, however, because most of us have a definite leaning towards either the machinery itself or the use of it. For example, some enthusiasts reading about the BSA Empire Star which won a Brookland’s Gold Star in 1937 – leading to the eponymous clubman racer – would be fascinated by the tuning which made it so fast, while others would be more interested in how racer Walter Handley was persuaded to make the attempt.
Similarly, some people read about adventurous motorcycling primarily to learn about the places and peoples visited, whereas others pay more attention to the motorbikes’ preparation and problems (or otherwise). I confess to being in the second camp, feeling that no matter how interesting the places and people are, once they have been visited and described, further travellers are tourists rather than adventurers.
In any case, present-day motorcycle travelogues tend to differ little from ordinary holiday programmes, simply because modern bikes are generally so capable and trouble-free. I’m currently enjoying a series of YouTube videos – entitled Itchy Boots – posted by a young Dutch woman named Noraly, who entertainingly describes her epic motorcycle trips to little visited regions. She’s mostly used Royal Enfield Himalayan trail bikes, and while the videos must be excellent publicity for these machines, we don’t learn much about them. They’ve evidently always started on the button and proved boringly reliable, despite being ridden through incredibly inhospitable terrain. So the video about machine preparation focussed on obvious modifications like extra fuel tanks, rather than any particular mechanical precautions, and an episode hinting at bits falling off only referred to the failure of a selfie-stick!
Perhaps less predictably, even reports of trips made in days when motorcycles were much less competent and reliable are often equally reticent about the mechanical side of things. I’ve just been reading about an ultraambitious globe-circling expedition undertaken by two young Hungarians between 1928 and 1936. Now, before I started reading, I anticipated such a trip would involve an incredible amount of planning and machine preparation, but not a bit of it. The author – Zoltan Sulkowsky – spends a paltry two paragraphs out of his 400-page tome writing that he and his friend Gyula Bartha decided to buy a Harley-Davidson and sidecar, which Zoltan then had to learn to ride.
Even for readers more interested in travel than motorbikes, some of the detailed descriptions probably now fall a little flat. Angkor Wat in Cambodia for instance was virtually unknown at the time, but has subsequently received blanket coverage in television travel programmes. What is more notable by presentday standards is the travellers’ non-PC observations on the cleanliness, honesty, appearance, and helpfulness of the various ethnic groups they encountered. And another sign of the times is the casual mention of things like ‘armed rebellion and small-scale revolution in Canton’, and there is even a photograph of the resultant bodies littering the street.
Fascinating stuff, but I would definitely have liked more information on the actual motorcycling side of things. There is little mention of tyres, fuel, lubricants etc, and problems on the road are mostly skirted round. In Korea, for example, Zoltan and Gyula often enlisted the local population to ‘push, shove and carry’ their motorbike into the next village. Sometimes this involved taking the motorbike apart and hanging the pieces from poles for men to shoulder. Not overly grateful, the Hungarians recorded that ‘such simple people had no idea how to handle such a large machine,’ and they had to show ‘each and every one …. how to lift the machine and place it back on the ground.’ Frustratingly, we are not informed how much dismantling was done and what problems were encountered with worn and lost nuts and so on.
But, as I’ve realised, everything has to be considered in the light of the prevailing technology. Just as modern motorcycle travelogues say little about the machinery and its use because there isn’t much to report, older ones appear reticent because there was little choice. As Zoltan noted – the state of contemporary roads (where there were any) would have simply made it impossible to use a car, so you either rode a motorbike and accepted the consequences, or you stayed home. It was that simple, and perhaps there’s a moral there for the next time we wonder whether to go for a ride when the skies look stormy!
Some people read about adventurous motorcycling to learn about the places visited, whereas others pay more attention to the motorbikes’ prepartation and problems.