Rules to Ride by

“You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other.  In a car you’re always in a compartment, and because you’re used to it you don’t realize that through a car window everything you see is just more TV. You’re a passive observer and it is all moving by you boringly in a frame.

On a cycle that frame is gone. You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming. That concrete whizzing by five inches below your foot is the real thing, the same stuff you walk on, it’s right there, so blurred you can’t focus on it, yet you can put your foot down and touch it anytime, and the whole thing, the whole experience, is never removed from the immediate consciousness.”

-       Robert Pirsig, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance pp14”

Couldn’t have put it better than Mr Pirsig has.  In my mind what distinguishes an overland bike ride from any other means of travel is its intimacy.  The lack of any shell besides the clothes you have on to shield you from the elements puts you in intimate contact with the surroundings.  If it rains you get wet, in the tropical sun you burn, and when that 6 tonne bus overtakes you at 100 miles an hour you literally counter steer to not get sucked in to his backwash. Get caught in the rain and remember you are working at a 60 mile an hour wind chill factor all the time and the only way not to end up cramped frigid is to be on Mike’s BMW with its fancy wind deflectors.

Riding is also immediate in that what can happen can happen very quickly. Up the Malaysian peninsula the picture can be deadly monotonous on these well made, perfectly surfaced highways.  The problem is that such road conditions are not conducive to riding slower.  A proton saga pulling out without checking, a cow pulling out without checking, a sudden pothole – and innumerable other unexpected things can change the situation immediately.

Be sure of this – its not the proton, or the cow or the pothole that blottos the rider. It’s his reaction.  What appears to distinguish the good rider is that he or she manages to make the correct quick response to the change in the situation while keeping form. No mad grab for the front brake, no full lock change in direction, no wandering off at high speed off the road map. Staying on the bike is a matter of the rapid yet calm response. 

In view of the number of things that can go wrong in our little expedition, I thought of putting down on paper some “Rules to Ride By” in the hope that clear minded consistency will minimize the need for rapid calm responses.  We haven't had a good start. We’ve already broken the first most important rule that all experienced riders seem to agree on –

1)  BRING THE SAME MODEL BIKE.  

There are lots of reasons for this – same performance means more likely to stay together, parts interchangeability means less parts to bring, having both bikes from Suzuki would have made sponsorship a cinch.  As it is Mike has a BMW GSA1200 and I have a Suzuki Vstrom 1000.  They have similar weight and power and according to the wife they’re both just as ugly but that’s about where the similarities end.  So having done with that let’s hope we can keep the rest of the rules

2)  NO RIDING AT NIGHT.  

We took our time coming back in the last leg of this trip and eventually left Segamat just about 1700 to get home. It stormed and on unlit trunk roads with slick slippery oil coated tarmac and the wife on the back rule #2 has been made. Its hard to see where the road ends and where wildlife begins, and hard to see the dividing line from traffic in the opposite direction.  The wind chill was freezing and it did not help to realize this time there was no sunshine to look forward to that could dry us out. 

3) ALL RIDING DAYS ARE EARLY DAYS.

The Long Ride has been organized so that we cover about five riding days a week, usually with at the most two days’ stop except in some exceptional places like Darjeeling, Agra, Kashgar or Samarkand.  The truth is that there will be some places that are very difficult to leave at any time of the day.  The Old Smokehouse in Camerons is one of those places, but it’ll probably always be just a few hours away, unlike some of the places we’ll go to where there is just no likelihood that we will ever see again.

No matter how hard it seems we should get on the road as soon as daylight permits and get on our way.  Late starts tend to get us later and later, riders are less alert after lunchtime, and too much coffee tends to lead to the quick but un – calm response.  Be done with most of the day’s riding by lunch and start looking for a place to hunker down.

4) BE OPEN TO LOCAL KNOWLEDGE

George is the gardener who is partly responsible for the very gardens that made it a difficult place to leave!  We should allow for the serendipitous moment that is the distinctive of all adventures.

While most dates and distances have been studied as part of trip preparations, they should not be fully locked in.  we had initially intended to take the Gua Musang Road from Camerons to the Karak highway and then to Kuantan, but a late start (see rule #3) meant we needed to look for a shorter way to the east coast.  A quick chat and our very helpful hotel staff recommend a newly minted road from Ringlet direct to Kuala Lipis, cutting the distance by about half. (Thank you George and Vivien from the Smokehouse!)