Dual springs at the back, drum brakes that never seemed to work properly, and a big two-stroke pipe with one of those old-school chrome heat guards that seemed to transfer a broad hot threat into something more like a branding iron.
The engine capacity had been bent into the heat guard bright work. If the bike tipped on your uncovered leg it'd be known that you were packing 80 cubic centimetres of Japan's finest.
It had a clutch. Like real race bikes did. I was nine, and it was as cool as hell.
Wanna know how I got these scars?
So when I was nine, dad handed over $550 for a 1975 Yamaha MX80. It was two stroke, but still pretty quiet, and had a hinged seat that would flip-up to reveal the tool kit and oil tank, because pre-mixing fuel is obviously for peasants. It would happily flog around the paddock all day long, and needed nothing but juice, a wet chain, and the occasional carb-cleanout. We could push it the half-kilometer up the road and ride it on the old service track beside the railway line almost the whole way to the next town, and if the train was coming past, we'd race it. Of course. Two up, it'd match it with pace and smoke output. You should know at this point that it was a steam train.
Yes, Drysdale is a magical place.
The faithful little beast died a slow death.
It started with one kick, then two. Then you'd have to kick it over repeatedly until you were almost at idle speed anyway.
The brakes didn't brake, and the clutch was broken. If you pushed off with your feet a bit you could still shift it into gear. The process became more complicated when the compression got so bad you could only get it going from push starting it. And then one day, it didn't run anymore. Just like that.
Dad was a farmer, and could fix almost anything with fencing wire and combo pliers. But the little bike was out of his league. Either that or he finally got sick of the noise.
That bike was awesome right up until the day, the very minute that I rode my mate John's KX 60. 15 years younger than mine, and probably three times as fast, I just couldn't understand how something with a smaller engine could be so much faster.
I wanted more, but it wasn't in the budget.
There was a GS125, which was a poor excuse for a paddock bike. That didn't last.
A GS500 got me on the road, and it wasn't a bad learner bike. For one, I didn't look like an ape when I was riding it, like my equally tall mate Steve did on his GPZ. It wasn't really fast, although it was pretty fun to flog down the GO road on a summer afternoon. Midweek, of course, when the beaches aren't full of Mebournians. There was this one corner, closer to Lorne that Torquay. I only think of it because I saw it in a magazine over here (Malaysia) advertising tours and I recognized the spot immediately. Long left, that was broken in the middle by a short bridge. The turn tightened left, then you had to change direction real fast, sit the bike up for a second, and then a tight right-hander, with the Southern Ocean smiling at you through the gaps in the armco.
I don't remember the corner being downhill, but there it was, plain as day. I do remember slamming down gears and having the rear wheel snake about behind as I tucked left, and not feeling one ounce of fear. No, that was reserved for another right hander just out of the Skeene's Creek turnoff, where Steve removed his indicator (and a bit of paint) from his GPZ one day. I very nearly repeated the process on Melbourne Cup Day-Off about nine months later. Out of a left, slight downhill, big sinkhole right in the braking zone. Oh, and a really, really obvious, scary looking ocean at the bottom of a considerable cliff.
The downhill made me nervous, the sinkhole made me unsettled, and the ocean made me freeze up.
The fear factor. I could have gotten around it faster if I'd just looked at the apex instead.
I don't know why they advertised that corner in particular, because I can tell you where the tourists all wind up. It's past Lorne, but I couldn't tell you how far. The road's a fair margin wider, because the big buses stop there so people can take photos of the koalas. Which they do, while walking backwards onto the road to catch the perfect angle of the little fat furry fellas. There's no braking quite like the oh-look-there's-an-asian-with-an-SLR-in-my-lane kind of braking.
The GS went to an old friend, or perhaps a friend from an old life. Now it's painted black, which could mean that he did and could just as easily mean he did not fix all the oil leaks.
I had a Yamaha Win briefly. 100cc (that is, 0.1 of a litre) single cylinder, four speed, four stroke, which spells "slow" in any language. It'd sit on 85 ok. It hit a hundred, once.
Mrs Welsh and I were in Kep, a sleepy coastal town down south of Cambodia. We'd done about a thousand kay through Vietnam, crossed the border at Prek Chak - with a slight in wait no-man's-land while the guard went to retrieve the Officer-in-charge from the bar - and spent two days in Kep waiting for the blood to return to our butt cheeks. To say that Vietnam has some shocking roads is like saying Genghis didn't mind a fight. The seat on my Win suited something else. A wall, perhaps, or a sewer.
We had a flight to catch and bikes to sell, and we could take a direct route to Phnom Penh, or go via Kampot, which I had suspected would be a much better quality highway. Some Cambodian highways are in fact very good, as are some Vietnamese ones. Picking the right road makes a big difference to the trip.
So we asked a local, which in South East Asia results in bad information about 78% of the time. The 12% is Myanmar. They're really helpful over there.
So we ask him, is the direct road good, or should we take the longer way back because we're in a hurry and a bit over the "suspension" that my bike and Jem's scooter had, or rather did not have whatsoever.
No, they said, lying through their teeth, the direct road is fantastic. Easy. No problems.
There was also no roadsigns, no tarmac, almost no traction, and thick chocking dust every time you got near a truck. Oh, and all of the trucks in Cambodia.
Liars.
Hours later we finally pop out onto the Kampot-Phnom Penh highway, which told me that
a) the locals were wrong
b) the road was perfect and
c) we have been running almost parallel to a billiard table-like utopia that we would have taken had we detoured the mere 30 kilometres to Kampot like we were going to in the first place.
Mrs Welsh has come to the same conclusions, and as a result is
a) angry
b) tired and
c) riding as fast as her not-that-ancient scooter will possibly go. Which according to my wheezing, melting Win was about 105.
Thankfully the red mist cleared before she ran out of gas, and when we stopped at the bowser we realised my key had vibrated clean out of the ignition barrel. It took a few minutes to work out that it didn't really matter, because like every good Win still kicking between the Bodge and Siam, you could start it with a screw driver, the end of a spoon, or probably a hundred other things, and any spare keys you might have, including the one for your hotel room. That, and the Win didn't sound quite as sweet anymore.
$35 at a mechanic down by the Russian market got a new piston, bore, and valve guides installed. He even ran it in for me, winding up the throttle stop and having his wife tip water onto the cylinder head so it didn't over-heat and cook the new rings during the bedding in process. Stellar.
The bike didn't fare as well in Cambodia, but ripping down a mountain pass just south of Loc Lac it was in its own. With my bag strapped to the tank, hunched forward to the bars, I attacked the corners. The little single blasted out its tune, hard on the gas early in the corner. The pass opened up to a long straight across the top of a massive dam wall. We held it wide open, roaring past a tour group parked up on their CB250s. They smiled. We smiled more. We'd overtaken many just like them. They were pillion passengers, and had no idea what they were missing out on.
#nobeard #stillcool
I have a Yamaha Nouvo, automatic, 110cc scooter. I've knocked it off the stand once, lost the keys twice, and it's come home in the back of a ute three times. It also towed my busted XR250R through KLCC, with a 100kg (probably) mate Tim steering the stricken Honda, so I can't really complain.
The Honda is the best bike I've ever owned, but it owes me a small fortune and is still in bits. I don't want to talk about it.
Jem has a bike now too, a KLX150. A few motor mods to the toy Kwaka and it followed me on the XR most of the way around Malaysia. It's got real hand guards and a full sport exhaust, probably Chinese made and perfect, to match the bigger piston I installed. It's got a little steel rack we had the spare tubes strapped to on the trip. It's got a ding in the fuel tank, and a broken tail light lens where Mrs Welsh did an 8-point cartwheel down a muddy hill behind Ampang. On that bike, today, I had a revelation.
I was cutting through the traffic, making progress. The bike sounded good - it'd been a while since I'd ridden anything with a clutch. The bigger piston, but standard camshaft, means that most of the power is down low, so you don't need to rev it. You just give it big gulps of throttle early and it gets by just fine.
It was cool. And I was cool.
The scratches didn't matter. We took the E12 back, high above KL, with that fantastic view of the twin towers. When the traffic banked, as it always does, we rode over the kerb to make the next turn. Under the Jalan Kutching bridge, where my scooter failed two years back just hours before my flight to a football tournament. Open it up down Jalan Parliamen, past the grassy fields and trees lining the botanic gardens. The air's a bit cooler there. The bike doesn't care.
I thought of Tim. He's riding the same green beast that I am though jungle tracks in East Timor. I bet his bike doesn't care either. And that's cool.
In this world, particularly in our western countries, everything is being wrapped in cotton wool. Some of that is necessary. Some of it is suffocating.
Motorcycles don't care. Motorcycles are cool.
Yesterday I saw a DTM, horrible knock-off Chinese dirt-come-street bike (motard, for the initiated) being flogged around KL. The bloke had ditched the exhaust and routed it under the bike, Paris-Dakar style. It sounded crap. And it was cool. He knew it.
Two days before that I saw a bloke riding a Hayabusa around the narrow suburban streets that wind around the traffic jams. He was riding a bike that was still the world's fastest within the decade past, and was built before ABS and traction control had seen its debut on Japanese bikes. And it was pouring rain. Cool.
Harleys, you know, I really do hate them, but they're still cool. My mate with the postie bike? Cool. My other mate who bought a dirt bike, stuck road tyres on it and never got it dirt again? Still cool. Fast, too, really, really fast. And then the other mate, ex-motocrosser, who brought his old BMW R75 out on Melbourne Cup Day-Off ride, and rolled around at the back of the pack? Yeah. He's cool.
I'll never work out what it is, and I'm not sure I want to anyway. I don't think it's the danger, although there's definitely a lot of that. I don't consider myself to have a death wish. It's not out of rebellion, although motorcycling is rebellion personified on so many levels. There is just something endlessly appealing about the fantastic thing that is to have two wheels and an engine.
It's tremendously complicated, but beautifully simple.
It's cool. When I'm riding one, I'm cool. And I'm so certain of it all that I don't even care if I'm wrong.
