Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2008 1:20 am
boring the life out of a glass eyeball?
I haven't seen that one before.
I haven't seen that one before.
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SV-Wolf's Bike Blog
Page 57 of 123
I haven't seen that one before.
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:04 am
Saturday 31st May 2008
For three days now, I’ve been unable to speak a word.
Mnnnnnmmmnmnnnmmmm. Mfffff!
In some ways, it has been quite entertaining. In other ways it’s bloody painful.
I’ve torn some muscles in my back, and every time I try to say something my chest goes violently into spasm: so, instead of words, what comes out of my mouth is a kind of noisy explosion – something between a loud grunt and a fully vocalised retch. This is accompanied by an involuntary forward lunge of the upper part of my body.
It’s very dramatic!
A couple of pedestrians certainly thought so when they stopped me in the street two days ago and asked me for directions. I’d taken some pain killers that morning and had temporarily forgotten about my condition. So, when I suddenly lunged and retched at them in reply, I was almost as taken aback as they were. To judge by the looks on their faces, they clearly thought they were in the presence of the town lunatic. I count myself lucky, in fact, that they didn’t wrestle me to the ground and call for the men in white coats to come and take me away.
And it wouldn't have been so bad if I had left it there and walked on.
But feeling like a total plonker over all this, naturally I wanted to explain myself - well, you would, wouldn’t you? All I achieved, of course, was a lot more painful lunging and retching. In the end, I had to shrug my shoulders helplessly and leave them standing there, now utterly convinced I had recently escaped from the local bin.
Ah well! Win some, lose some! I expect that's the end of that. If they do see me again, they will probably cross over onto the other side of the street.
To make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, I've taken to carrying a notepad with me. It has several messages written in it. Here are four of them:
“Sorry. Can’t talk – ripped a muscle.”
“Do NOT try to make me laugh.”
“Say what the hell you like; I’ll get you back later!”
“bastrd!”
It’s interesting, but whenever I meet with friends these four messages seem to cover my entire communication needs. It has got me seriously wondering about the kind of relationships I form.
But the spasms are improving rapidly. I can now whisper quietly without suffering any violent reactions. And as long as I don’t talk, cough, sneeze, laugh or breathe, I’m fine.
There is one thing more to add to the list, though, a rather unfortunate thing: I’m fine …as long as I don’t take a ride on the bike.’ Yeah, hrumph! It means that I have now been barred from all two-wheel activity for most of the last ten weeks. Half the summer has gone by with only a few rides to show for it. I suppose this is the price you have to pay sometimes for getting your kicks on a bike. Some motorcyclists regard speeding fines as a kind of ‘fun tax’. The only 'tax' I have paid recently has been an annual one, in the form of torn muscles.
Yeeeeeerarrrrrrrrgh! Just got up quickly from the PC, to get a drink - and forgot myself.
Never let it be said that SV-wolf’s bike blog does not bring you scintillating, up-to-the-minute, real-life drama. If you want action, guys, you know where to find it!
Friday 6th June 2008
Ouch! Still healing slowly. Haven’t felt up to blogging for the last week, but I guess I need to put an end to this story:
The muscle got torn on the afternoon of Wednesday 28th May while I was in the middle of the off-roading course. (All coming clear, now?)
The truth is, I was in a bit of a state even before I left the house that morning, and for the usual reason. I’d eaten out the evening before at a Chinese restaurant and despite my best efforts to convey the idea of ‘no mushrooms’ to the waiter, I had failed miserably. I was now trying to cope with the effects of a bad allergy reaction. Notice, by the way, how I am beginning, subtly, to shift the blame for my injury onto the Chinese. I feel no guilt about this. It’s what everybody is doing nowadays. And in any case I’m still feeling p1ssed off with them for making me fill in all those forms for the Himalaya trip. But I mustn't get too p1ssed off. Like everything else that is even slightly energetic, getting p1ssed off can be exquisitely painful right now.
Come Wednesday morning, the 28th May, I woke with a headache, a dirty mouth and an unpleasantly fermenting, Chinesey kind of feeling in my belly. In the big, bad world beyond my bedroom window, it was wet, grey and sh1tty-looking. I was late, of course, and as I knew from bitter experience, that meant everything I tried to do from that point on would go horribly wrong. It is a kind of law of nature, as inevitable as gravity. And yes, it did! And how! By the time I left the house I was flapping about like a wounded chicken. If I hadn't already paid a large, non-refundable deposit to do this course, I would have rung up and postponed it there and then.
But there is something about riding a big bike that is instantly soothing. The moment you throw your leg over the saddle, all that lovely, easy-going power beneath you calms your nerves, restores your manhood (or whatever...) and settles you comfortably into the ride. Who needs happy pills when you can ride a Suzuki or a Triumph or anything else on two wheels? A hundred yards down the road I passed the berk from the hostel who'd tried to get heavy with me a couple of weeks ago. But by then I felt nothing towards him but the milk of human kindness. He was, after all, a pedestrian: a mere mortal (in the two-wheeled scheme of things).
The advertising material 'Trailworld' puts out is heavily branded so when I got to the address and found myself in a small business park on the outskirts of St Albans, I was surprised and just a little confused to find not a single sign or notice or display board anywhere to tell me I had arrived. I thought, at first, I must have come to the wrong place. All around me were large warehouses with lorries backing up against their entrances.
In the wide forecourt ahead of me, I saw a fork-lift truck driver wearing earmuffs and loading a pallet of 'Unsulphured Apricots' onto a lorry. 'I'm looking for Trailworld', I yelled at him. Without turning round, he shouted back a set of world-weary directions using a tone of voice that suggested he was used to speaking to idiots: “Rahnd the corner; over by the fence” was all I heard. He’d obviously been asked this question before.
It turns out that they guy who owns Trailworld also owns a distribution company and he runs his off-roading outfit out of his main warehouse. All the dirt bikes and bike gear were lined up inside this huge space and overlooked by stacked crates of sugar-free jam, dandelion coffee and Alpro Soya Milk. It was an odd set up.
The only people from Trailworld in the warehouse when I arrived were Kev, one of the mechanics, who was cleaning and stripping down a line of bikes – nine of them – which had been out the day before, and Barry who was leading today’s trip. Everything else appeared to be in total chaos.
Barry turned out to be a cheerful soul, completely incapable of taking anything or anybody very seriously and never lost for something to natter on about. When I arrived, he was busily fiddling round with his bike's electrics. “Keeps cutting out, mate.” he announced. “Hope we’re gonna be all right for today. Bloody wet out there. Bike’s taken against the wet recently.”
He kitted me up with some surprisingly well-fitting gear and introduced me to my bike, a Honda XL350. I’ve never ridden a trail bike before or worn off-road clothing, so it was all a bit of an alien experience - I kept thinking back to my first day in the school changing rooms back in 1964. The bike felt comfortable but the stubby gear lever proved difficult to manage at first, especially with the boots I'd been given which had about as much feel in them as a couple of pieces of salted cod.
Barry had been out early that morning and in his opinion it was one of the wettest, muddiest, slipperiest days of the year so far. Several of the lanes, the hollow ones, he said, were underwater. So, OK! all right, I thought, I had expected to get thrown in at the deep end – but not literally.
"You're gonna have fun," he said, "It's diabolical out there." And as it turned out, he wasn’t wrong.
The riding group was a small one - much smaller than I had expected. Actually, it was just Barry and me. No-one else had booked. And that, as it turned out, was both good and bad. It was good because I got loads of one-to-one tuition and bad because it meant there was nowhere to hide when I made a total pillock of myself. During the course of the day, I learned a helluva lot about off-roading and in return, provided Barry with a great deal of entertainment.
I thought it was your bike that was meant to put a grin on your face, not your fellow riders. But Barry didn't see it like that. I suspect, in his eyes, the world had been made purely for his amusment - and somehow, it never seemed to let him down. His sense of humour was deeply infectious.
Off-road riding – ‘green laning’ – is a bit of a political hot potato in the UK at the moment. Walkers groups (principally 'The Ramblers Association')have been lobbying parliament for years to ban motorcycles from the countryside. They have recently had some success in getting many of the traditional by-ways reclassified as footpaths, making it illegal to ride a motorcycle down them. As a regular walker and user of green lanes myself, I understand the frustration of having your peace and enjoyment shattered by a crowd of unnecessarily noisy nutters tearing up the lanes on bikes. I understand it, but I still think those that complain are a load of wankers.
I get thoroughly pee’d off by the self-righteous attitudes of walkers (bloody middle-class again - everything comes back to property with them!) who think they should have exclusive right to the use of the countryside (horse-riders excepted, m'lady!). There are a lot of people on this small island - Hertfordshire, in particular, is one of the most densely populated, non-metropolitan areas in the world - and we all need to get along together and share the amenities that exist. I'm not against making some lanes no-go areas for bikes. Some lanes are just not suitable and I have no problem with the idea of walkers having areas of the countryside to themselves. But to ban bikes outright, everywhere, which is what these smug bastards would like, is just plain egotistical. So... OK, OK, I've just heard myself. I'm getting agressive about the middle class again.
Walkers and off-road bikers have now reached such a state of mutual antagonism that they can hardly speak to one other any more. Some walkers give you a filthy look or get agressive whenever you pass them on a bike and some riders (who really ought to know better) now go out of their way to annoy walkers whenever they can. And it doesn't end there. The picture gets more complicated once you introduce horse riders and cyclists into the picture. Horses, I'm told, are often more frightened of pedal cycles in confined spaces than they are of motorcycles, so there you have another area of hostility. In fact, what you have is four groups of green-lane users each of which is hostile to at least two of the others and just about everyone is hostile to the bikers.
It doesn’t matter what you like to do in Britain, you will always find someone who is offended by it and someone else ('outraged' of Tunbridge Wells) who wants to ban it. Trying to ban things that other people enjoy doing is a national pastime. It's amazing that we are not a police state by now.
Well...!
The green lanes still open to motorcycles are relatively short in my part of the world so to make up a day's ride you have to string them together with bits of road (back-road preferably). So, that's what my day consisted of: alternating lanes and roads.
In some ways riding the roads on a trail bike was scarier than riding the lanes. Riding on tarmac, without any mirrors, indicators or clocks was an 'interesting' experience for a road rider like me – especially when we ventured out onto the occasional major highway. Not having a regular clear view of what was going on behind me was disturbing. Going through speed cameras without knowing what speed I was doing, was downright nerve racking. And as for having no indicators…!
The habit of using indicators is so deeply burned into my brain that no-matter how hard I tried to remember that I didn’t have any on this bike, I still kept reaching for the switch whenever we came up to a turning. That wouldn’t have caused any anxiety except that Honda has cleverly located the XL350’s cut-out switch exactly where the indicator switch should be on a road bike. Fortunately, I was incompetent enough to keep missing it and managed not to cut out the engine while I was leaned over on a corner.
But riding the lanes was great. It took about an hour before I began to trust the bike to pick its own way over whatever surface we were riding on. Once I had developed a bit of confidence and realised that I didn’t have to avoid the gravel any more, loud whooping noises started emerging spontaneously from inside my helmet. I had a helluva good morning. By lunctime though I was really tired - totally knackered to be exact. I wasn’t used to this level of concentration and effort. And rumbling on beneath the surface of my good mood I was still feeling grossly Chinesed out.
We had a good lunch at a pub in Walkern. Barry giggled helplessly at my futile attempt to get several pints of river water out of my boots and then held forth non-stop for the rest of the meal break on the joys of off-roading. This guy is a lost soul as far as the rest of the universe is concerned. When he landed this job he must have thought he had died and gone to heaven (Though having said that, I have a strong suspicion that nothing in Barry's world is ever anything but sunny side up.) And what does he do for relaxation? At weekends he goes off-roading with his mates over in Wales - just for a change. Lucky man!
After lunch, the weather got greyer and the lanes got a lot trickier. Many of the tracks were heavily waterlogged. We rode up several rivers that shouldn’t have been rivers and sloshed our way through a number of fords. We tackled grassy and gravelly lanes and stony ones too, all increasingly narrow and increasingly rutted. I'd fallen off the bike twice during the morning (without doing any damage), but by the afternoon I was getting the hang of things and getting just a little bit cocky about it, too. Humm! I was just beginning to think of myself a bit of a pro when we ventured into south-west Herts and into chalk country, where a steep, slimy, wet chalk hill just outside Whitwell had been waiting patiently for me all day long.
We were rounding a corner in between two lines of birch trees at a fair speed when we hit the hill suddenly. Barry had warned me about it, but it had come up sooner than I had expected. The level surface went suddenly into ruts and I got instantly stuck in one of them. I tried to change down quickly, but by then I was bouncing/slithering downhill fast and I kept missing the stubby little lever with my boot. I feathered the brakes as much as I dared, but that hardly slowed me down at all. Inwardly, I started panicking. Instead of looking ahead I began to fixate on the ground directly in front of me.
Half way down the slope, I found my way out of the rut and up onto what I thought was a level earthen bank. The plan was to brake, slow down and get the bike into second gear. Big mistake! The bank was very much shorter than I had supposed. Just beyond a low rise, it tilted steeply to the right and disappeared back into the nearest rut. I dropped back down without having had time to slow or change gear, placed the wheel badly and before I knew it was flying off the bike. I landed hard and awkwardly onto my left shoulder.
I felt the muscle go. Bugger! Did that hurt! It was the same muscle that I had torn when I came off the Enfield in India ! The fall winded me and all I could do was sit down beside the bike for ten minutes thinking that the world had imploded. Barry came haring back up the hill and hopped around cheerfully, keeping up a stream of conversation and asking whether I could move my fingers. I had a very definite idea of what I wanted to do with my fingers right at that moment, but it would have been far too painful.
Once I was able to stand up again, I got back on the bike and rode the rest of the way down the lane and into Whitwell village to buy a carton of apple juice. The liquid and carbohydrate in the fruit juice dealt with the shock and the adrenalin dealt with everything else. Pig headedness rather than good sense was in control now and I decided to finish off the ride on the lanes, rather than go back to St Albans on the roads - much to Barry's immense joy.
We did about five more lanes and had a ten minute break while Barry put a new tube into my punctured front tyre with me trying to lean the bike on its side-stand. We got back to the Trailworld warehouse about an hour later, me gritting my teeth and Barry no doubt happily planning his next ride. By then I'd started to stiffen up and it took me an age to change, and another age to get on the SV. But thank god for adrenalin: it got me through the 40 minute ride home without too much difficulty; it kept me focussed while I put away the bike; it kept the spasming and pain at bay until about three seconds after I closed my front door behind me. And then…
But you already know the rest.
For three days now, I’ve been unable to speak a word.
Mnnnnnmmmnmnnnmmmm. Mfffff!
In some ways, it has been quite entertaining. In other ways it’s bloody painful.
I’ve torn some muscles in my back, and every time I try to say something my chest goes violently into spasm: so, instead of words, what comes out of my mouth is a kind of noisy explosion – something between a loud grunt and a fully vocalised retch. This is accompanied by an involuntary forward lunge of the upper part of my body.
It’s very dramatic!
A couple of pedestrians certainly thought so when they stopped me in the street two days ago and asked me for directions. I’d taken some pain killers that morning and had temporarily forgotten about my condition. So, when I suddenly lunged and retched at them in reply, I was almost as taken aback as they were. To judge by the looks on their faces, they clearly thought they were in the presence of the town lunatic. I count myself lucky, in fact, that they didn’t wrestle me to the ground and call for the men in white coats to come and take me away.
And it wouldn't have been so bad if I had left it there and walked on.
But feeling like a total plonker over all this, naturally I wanted to explain myself - well, you would, wouldn’t you? All I achieved, of course, was a lot more painful lunging and retching. In the end, I had to shrug my shoulders helplessly and leave them standing there, now utterly convinced I had recently escaped from the local bin.
Ah well! Win some, lose some! I expect that's the end of that. If they do see me again, they will probably cross over onto the other side of the street.
To make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again, I've taken to carrying a notepad with me. It has several messages written in it. Here are four of them:
“Sorry. Can’t talk – ripped a muscle.”
“Do NOT try to make me laugh.”
“Say what the hell you like; I’ll get you back later!”
“bastrd!”
It’s interesting, but whenever I meet with friends these four messages seem to cover my entire communication needs. It has got me seriously wondering about the kind of relationships I form.
But the spasms are improving rapidly. I can now whisper quietly without suffering any violent reactions. And as long as I don’t talk, cough, sneeze, laugh or breathe, I’m fine.
There is one thing more to add to the list, though, a rather unfortunate thing: I’m fine …as long as I don’t take a ride on the bike.’ Yeah, hrumph! It means that I have now been barred from all two-wheel activity for most of the last ten weeks. Half the summer has gone by with only a few rides to show for it. I suppose this is the price you have to pay sometimes for getting your kicks on a bike. Some motorcyclists regard speeding fines as a kind of ‘fun tax’. The only 'tax' I have paid recently has been an annual one, in the form of torn muscles.
Yeeeeeerarrrrrrrrgh! Just got up quickly from the PC, to get a drink - and forgot myself.
Never let it be said that SV-wolf’s bike blog does not bring you scintillating, up-to-the-minute, real-life drama. If you want action, guys, you know where to find it!
Friday 6th June 2008
Ouch! Still healing slowly. Haven’t felt up to blogging for the last week, but I guess I need to put an end to this story:
The muscle got torn on the afternoon of Wednesday 28th May while I was in the middle of the off-roading course. (All coming clear, now?)
The truth is, I was in a bit of a state even before I left the house that morning, and for the usual reason. I’d eaten out the evening before at a Chinese restaurant and despite my best efforts to convey the idea of ‘no mushrooms’ to the waiter, I had failed miserably. I was now trying to cope with the effects of a bad allergy reaction. Notice, by the way, how I am beginning, subtly, to shift the blame for my injury onto the Chinese. I feel no guilt about this. It’s what everybody is doing nowadays. And in any case I’m still feeling p1ssed off with them for making me fill in all those forms for the Himalaya trip. But I mustn't get too p1ssed off. Like everything else that is even slightly energetic, getting p1ssed off can be exquisitely painful right now.
Come Wednesday morning, the 28th May, I woke with a headache, a dirty mouth and an unpleasantly fermenting, Chinesey kind of feeling in my belly. In the big, bad world beyond my bedroom window, it was wet, grey and sh1tty-looking. I was late, of course, and as I knew from bitter experience, that meant everything I tried to do from that point on would go horribly wrong. It is a kind of law of nature, as inevitable as gravity. And yes, it did! And how! By the time I left the house I was flapping about like a wounded chicken. If I hadn't already paid a large, non-refundable deposit to do this course, I would have rung up and postponed it there and then.
But there is something about riding a big bike that is instantly soothing. The moment you throw your leg over the saddle, all that lovely, easy-going power beneath you calms your nerves, restores your manhood (or whatever...) and settles you comfortably into the ride. Who needs happy pills when you can ride a Suzuki or a Triumph or anything else on two wheels? A hundred yards down the road I passed the berk from the hostel who'd tried to get heavy with me a couple of weeks ago. But by then I felt nothing towards him but the milk of human kindness. He was, after all, a pedestrian: a mere mortal (in the two-wheeled scheme of things).
The advertising material 'Trailworld' puts out is heavily branded so when I got to the address and found myself in a small business park on the outskirts of St Albans, I was surprised and just a little confused to find not a single sign or notice or display board anywhere to tell me I had arrived. I thought, at first, I must have come to the wrong place. All around me were large warehouses with lorries backing up against their entrances.
In the wide forecourt ahead of me, I saw a fork-lift truck driver wearing earmuffs and loading a pallet of 'Unsulphured Apricots' onto a lorry. 'I'm looking for Trailworld', I yelled at him. Without turning round, he shouted back a set of world-weary directions using a tone of voice that suggested he was used to speaking to idiots: “Rahnd the corner; over by the fence” was all I heard. He’d obviously been asked this question before.
It turns out that they guy who owns Trailworld also owns a distribution company and he runs his off-roading outfit out of his main warehouse. All the dirt bikes and bike gear were lined up inside this huge space and overlooked by stacked crates of sugar-free jam, dandelion coffee and Alpro Soya Milk. It was an odd set up.
The only people from Trailworld in the warehouse when I arrived were Kev, one of the mechanics, who was cleaning and stripping down a line of bikes – nine of them – which had been out the day before, and Barry who was leading today’s trip. Everything else appeared to be in total chaos.
Barry turned out to be a cheerful soul, completely incapable of taking anything or anybody very seriously and never lost for something to natter on about. When I arrived, he was busily fiddling round with his bike's electrics. “Keeps cutting out, mate.” he announced. “Hope we’re gonna be all right for today. Bloody wet out there. Bike’s taken against the wet recently.”
He kitted me up with some surprisingly well-fitting gear and introduced me to my bike, a Honda XL350. I’ve never ridden a trail bike before or worn off-road clothing, so it was all a bit of an alien experience - I kept thinking back to my first day in the school changing rooms back in 1964. The bike felt comfortable but the stubby gear lever proved difficult to manage at first, especially with the boots I'd been given which had about as much feel in them as a couple of pieces of salted cod.
Barry had been out early that morning and in his opinion it was one of the wettest, muddiest, slipperiest days of the year so far. Several of the lanes, the hollow ones, he said, were underwater. So, OK! all right, I thought, I had expected to get thrown in at the deep end – but not literally.
"You're gonna have fun," he said, "It's diabolical out there." And as it turned out, he wasn’t wrong.
The riding group was a small one - much smaller than I had expected. Actually, it was just Barry and me. No-one else had booked. And that, as it turned out, was both good and bad. It was good because I got loads of one-to-one tuition and bad because it meant there was nowhere to hide when I made a total pillock of myself. During the course of the day, I learned a helluva lot about off-roading and in return, provided Barry with a great deal of entertainment.
I thought it was your bike that was meant to put a grin on your face, not your fellow riders. But Barry didn't see it like that. I suspect, in his eyes, the world had been made purely for his amusment - and somehow, it never seemed to let him down. His sense of humour was deeply infectious.
Off-road riding – ‘green laning’ – is a bit of a political hot potato in the UK at the moment. Walkers groups (principally 'The Ramblers Association')have been lobbying parliament for years to ban motorcycles from the countryside. They have recently had some success in getting many of the traditional by-ways reclassified as footpaths, making it illegal to ride a motorcycle down them. As a regular walker and user of green lanes myself, I understand the frustration of having your peace and enjoyment shattered by a crowd of unnecessarily noisy nutters tearing up the lanes on bikes. I understand it, but I still think those that complain are a load of wankers.
I get thoroughly pee’d off by the self-righteous attitudes of walkers (bloody middle-class again - everything comes back to property with them!) who think they should have exclusive right to the use of the countryside (horse-riders excepted, m'lady!). There are a lot of people on this small island - Hertfordshire, in particular, is one of the most densely populated, non-metropolitan areas in the world - and we all need to get along together and share the amenities that exist. I'm not against making some lanes no-go areas for bikes. Some lanes are just not suitable and I have no problem with the idea of walkers having areas of the countryside to themselves. But to ban bikes outright, everywhere, which is what these smug bastards would like, is just plain egotistical. So... OK, OK, I've just heard myself. I'm getting agressive about the middle class again.
Walkers and off-road bikers have now reached such a state of mutual antagonism that they can hardly speak to one other any more. Some walkers give you a filthy look or get agressive whenever you pass them on a bike and some riders (who really ought to know better) now go out of their way to annoy walkers whenever they can. And it doesn't end there. The picture gets more complicated once you introduce horse riders and cyclists into the picture. Horses, I'm told, are often more frightened of pedal cycles in confined spaces than they are of motorcycles, so there you have another area of hostility. In fact, what you have is four groups of green-lane users each of which is hostile to at least two of the others and just about everyone is hostile to the bikers.
It doesn’t matter what you like to do in Britain, you will always find someone who is offended by it and someone else ('outraged' of Tunbridge Wells) who wants to ban it. Trying to ban things that other people enjoy doing is a national pastime. It's amazing that we are not a police state by now.
Well...!
The green lanes still open to motorcycles are relatively short in my part of the world so to make up a day's ride you have to string them together with bits of road (back-road preferably). So, that's what my day consisted of: alternating lanes and roads.
In some ways riding the roads on a trail bike was scarier than riding the lanes. Riding on tarmac, without any mirrors, indicators or clocks was an 'interesting' experience for a road rider like me – especially when we ventured out onto the occasional major highway. Not having a regular clear view of what was going on behind me was disturbing. Going through speed cameras without knowing what speed I was doing, was downright nerve racking. And as for having no indicators…!
The habit of using indicators is so deeply burned into my brain that no-matter how hard I tried to remember that I didn’t have any on this bike, I still kept reaching for the switch whenever we came up to a turning. That wouldn’t have caused any anxiety except that Honda has cleverly located the XL350’s cut-out switch exactly where the indicator switch should be on a road bike. Fortunately, I was incompetent enough to keep missing it and managed not to cut out the engine while I was leaned over on a corner.
But riding the lanes was great. It took about an hour before I began to trust the bike to pick its own way over whatever surface we were riding on. Once I had developed a bit of confidence and realised that I didn’t have to avoid the gravel any more, loud whooping noises started emerging spontaneously from inside my helmet. I had a helluva good morning. By lunctime though I was really tired - totally knackered to be exact. I wasn’t used to this level of concentration and effort. And rumbling on beneath the surface of my good mood I was still feeling grossly Chinesed out.
We had a good lunch at a pub in Walkern. Barry giggled helplessly at my futile attempt to get several pints of river water out of my boots and then held forth non-stop for the rest of the meal break on the joys of off-roading. This guy is a lost soul as far as the rest of the universe is concerned. When he landed this job he must have thought he had died and gone to heaven (Though having said that, I have a strong suspicion that nothing in Barry's world is ever anything but sunny side up.) And what does he do for relaxation? At weekends he goes off-roading with his mates over in Wales - just for a change. Lucky man!
After lunch, the weather got greyer and the lanes got a lot trickier. Many of the tracks were heavily waterlogged. We rode up several rivers that shouldn’t have been rivers and sloshed our way through a number of fords. We tackled grassy and gravelly lanes and stony ones too, all increasingly narrow and increasingly rutted. I'd fallen off the bike twice during the morning (without doing any damage), but by the afternoon I was getting the hang of things and getting just a little bit cocky about it, too. Humm! I was just beginning to think of myself a bit of a pro when we ventured into south-west Herts and into chalk country, where a steep, slimy, wet chalk hill just outside Whitwell had been waiting patiently for me all day long.
We were rounding a corner in between two lines of birch trees at a fair speed when we hit the hill suddenly. Barry had warned me about it, but it had come up sooner than I had expected. The level surface went suddenly into ruts and I got instantly stuck in one of them. I tried to change down quickly, but by then I was bouncing/slithering downhill fast and I kept missing the stubby little lever with my boot. I feathered the brakes as much as I dared, but that hardly slowed me down at all. Inwardly, I started panicking. Instead of looking ahead I began to fixate on the ground directly in front of me.
Half way down the slope, I found my way out of the rut and up onto what I thought was a level earthen bank. The plan was to brake, slow down and get the bike into second gear. Big mistake! The bank was very much shorter than I had supposed. Just beyond a low rise, it tilted steeply to the right and disappeared back into the nearest rut. I dropped back down without having had time to slow or change gear, placed the wheel badly and before I knew it was flying off the bike. I landed hard and awkwardly onto my left shoulder.
I felt the muscle go. Bugger! Did that hurt! It was the same muscle that I had torn when I came off the Enfield in India ! The fall winded me and all I could do was sit down beside the bike for ten minutes thinking that the world had imploded. Barry came haring back up the hill and hopped around cheerfully, keeping up a stream of conversation and asking whether I could move my fingers. I had a very definite idea of what I wanted to do with my fingers right at that moment, but it would have been far too painful.
Once I was able to stand up again, I got back on the bike and rode the rest of the way down the lane and into Whitwell village to buy a carton of apple juice. The liquid and carbohydrate in the fruit juice dealt with the shock and the adrenalin dealt with everything else. Pig headedness rather than good sense was in control now and I decided to finish off the ride on the lanes, rather than go back to St Albans on the roads - much to Barry's immense joy.
We did about five more lanes and had a ten minute break while Barry put a new tube into my punctured front tyre with me trying to lean the bike on its side-stand. We got back to the Trailworld warehouse about an hour later, me gritting my teeth and Barry no doubt happily planning his next ride. By then I'd started to stiffen up and it took me an age to change, and another age to get on the SV. But thank god for adrenalin: it got me through the 40 minute ride home without too much difficulty; it kept me focussed while I put away the bike; it kept the spasming and pain at bay until about three seconds after I closed my front door behind me. And then…
But you already know the rest.
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 9:55 am
Oops...I mean sorry to hear you got banged up....
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 1:23 pm
Hiya blues.blues2cruise wrote:
Oops...I mean sorry to hear you got banged up....
Well its good to know I can always rely on good old TMW for the sympathy vote.
cheers
dick
Posted: Wed Jun 11, 2008 6:30 pm
It's your fault for writing such humourous stories. 
By the way....regarding a statement you made
By the way....regarding a statement you made
Ummmmm...have you looked at your calendar lately? We are still about a week and a half away from the first day of summer.Half the summer has gone by with only a few rides to show for it. I suppose this is the price you sometimes have to pay for your motorcycling pleasure.
Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 3:24 am
Sorry to hear about your fall...hope you heal up soon, man.
I can't count the hours I spent as a teenager, in the woods on an ancient Honda 125 enduro bike. Great stuff -- makes road-riding downright EASY, at least from a standpoint of bike control. Most roads don't have a mud-hole, followed by a river-crossing directly followed by a 30-degree climb, all on dirt, with no place to build a head of steam.
Ahh, good stuff...
I can't count the hours I spent as a teenager, in the woods on an ancient Honda 125 enduro bike. Great stuff -- makes road-riding downright EASY, at least from a standpoint of bike control. Most roads don't have a mud-hole, followed by a river-crossing directly followed by a 30-degree climb, all on dirt, with no place to build a head of steam.
Ahh, good stuff...
Posted: Thu Jun 12, 2008 4:48 am
Listen, just don't get technical with me, blues, OK?blues2cruise wrote:
Ummmmm...have you looked at your calendar lately? We are still about a week and a half away from the first day of summer.
LOL.
(The single guy has to stir up some sympathy from somewhere!)
Thanks for the get well message.
You too, noodle
Cheers
Posted: Fri Jun 13, 2008 10:36 am
Get well soon mate
Posted: Sat Jul 05, 2008 11:57 pm
Neither Tuesday 1st July, nor Friday 4th July
As everyone on this forum seems to have been celebrating some sort of national day recently, I’ve decided that I need to celebrate something too. So I am going to celebrate the fact that the United Kingdom is unique in the world in not having a national day. Unlike the rest of you, we Brits do not have an annual opportunity to secretly cherish the knowledge that we are special and better than everybody else.
But what the hell! Most Brits know they are special and better than everybody else anyway and hardly need a national day to celebrate it.
Usually, I’m pretty immune to all things jingoistic, but I feel that this grand British non-institution is worthy of acknowledgement.
So raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen. I do believe the jowly British establishment is to be congratulated on refusing to rub our faces in a lot of patriotic doo doo once a year - a dear relief to all rational island folk (like me) who are thereby spared this degrading experience - unlike the poor sods living in less enlightened parts of the world (i.e. the rest of you)
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Three cheers for Her Majesty the Queen!
...Oh my god!
.....................Did I really say that?????
............................................I’m think I’m going to be sick!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As everyone on this forum seems to have been celebrating some sort of national day recently, I’ve decided that I need to celebrate something too. So I am going to celebrate the fact that the United Kingdom is unique in the world in not having a national day. Unlike the rest of you, we Brits do not have an annual opportunity to secretly cherish the knowledge that we are special and better than everybody else.
But what the hell! Most Brits know they are special and better than everybody else anyway and hardly need a national day to celebrate it.
Usually, I’m pretty immune to all things jingoistic, but I feel that this grand British non-institution is worthy of acknowledgement.
So raise your glasses, ladies and gentlemen. I do believe the jowly British establishment is to be congratulated on refusing to rub our faces in a lot of patriotic doo doo once a year - a dear relief to all rational island folk (like me) who are thereby spared this degrading experience - unlike the poor sods living in less enlightened parts of the world (i.e. the rest of you)
Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah!
Three cheers for Her Majesty the Queen!
...Oh my god!
.....................Did I really say that?????
............................................I’m think I’m going to be sick!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Posted: Sun Jul 06, 2008 1:47 am
June 14th
Having spent several bikeless weeks rotting comfortably on the sofa with an injured back, I've now managed to drift completely out of touch with physical reality. Instead of washing down the Daytona, washing the dishes regularly or mending the garden fence, I’ve devoted my time to floating on a sea of books, videos, and good old-fashioned day dreams – all travel stuff and mostly bike related. The last few weeks have been some of the most adventurous of my life. With the help of Amazon.co.uk and my credit card I've ridden over most of the five continents, had a number of narrow escapes, took several nasty spills, met loads of fascinating people, learned a great deal about other cultures and enjoyed an exceedingly good laugh. It's been great.
So, when, last weekend, I ran out of material to stuff my imagination with I prodded my ribs, raised myself gingerly from my couch, took the train up to London and headed straight for Long Acre and Stanford’s bookshop. It was a painful trek but it was worth it.
Stanford’s! - Santa’s grotto for grown-ups. What a place! The floor, on each of its three levels is covered in a giant map; On the ground floor: the World; in the basement: London; and on the first floor: the Himalayas. Every adventure you ever wanted is right here waiting to be had. This is my kind of shop.
Stanford’s was founded in the Mid-Victorian era when the British Empire was expanding rapidly and wily old Edward Stanford realised there was a growing market for maps, travel literature and guide books. Today, the shop claims to carry the largest stock of maps and travel books anywhere in the world. If Stanford’s don’t have it, then it probably doesn’t exist. The shop is an Alladin's Cave for travellers of all kinds, from serious adventurers to armchair fantasists. A great many famous British explorers in the last hundred and fifty years, pith helmets firmly planted on their heads, have pottered about among its shelves in the search for geographical enlightenment.
And it’s a great place to hang about in and listen to other people's conversations. As I was poring over shelves full of books on Central Asia I heard a group of lads discussing arrangements for what sounded like a pretty wild climbing expedition to one of the disputed territories in the Caucasus. A sturdy husband-and-wife team across the room in the East Asian section were arguing over a how long they were going to spend looking at the pottery army near Xian in central China (family life, eh!). Nearer at hand, two guys in motorcycle gear were picking their way through maps of South-East Asia and debating the merits of immodium tablets. Practical souls, bikers, don’t you think?
Apart from my forthcoming trip to the Himalayas, there are three big bike trips I still want to do before I pop my clogs. First I want to spend some time exploring North America; second, I want to do a trip around the Baltic, and third (and this is the big one) I want to travel across Europe, Turkey, The Caucasus, Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. Whether I’ll manage to get into China remains to be seen. It is helluva difficult for single travellers on bikes to get visas at the moment. Sam Manicom, a favourite travel author of mine, tried and was told yes, he could ride his bike across the country, but he would have to have a minder and it would cost him £100 a day. Sigh!
But you never know. Things could change…
I’d travelled up to Stanfords, to find a book on… Afghanistan. OK, so I’m a lost soul. I’ve been in love with the idea of visiting Afghanistan for about thirty years, ever since they closed the border.
I’ve been talking on the web to those who have travelled in the region recently. I’ve been reading visitors’ accounts and travel books, reports by aid workers and local indymedia articles, and every one of them appears to agree on one thing: the country is not as dangerous or as volatile as the media, government agencies and the military would have us believe. And that’s hardly surprising, is it? War, including civil war, is always a local, intermittent and partial thing, even in its most intense phases.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m no hero. I do seem to have a very high pain tolerance but I am highly intolerant of the idea of pain - or any unpleasant consequences to my precious bodily parts - so I’m not planning on taking any unnecessary chances.
Last year, Afghanistan started to open up again for the first time since the seventies and the first serious tourists began to return. In the early months of that year, a couple of French bikers were spotted travelling through Bamiyan (where the giant Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban.) Lonely Planet, seizing the opportunity, hurriedly wrote and published a guide book. After that, mad Westerners and parties of Taiwanese tourists began to arrive in small charabancs, to bump their way over the broken ‘roads' of the magnificent Badakhshan region.
More recently, the ‘security situation’ has started to ‘deteriorate’ again (as the blandly euphemistic official language would have it). The Taliban are resurgent in the south down near Kandahar and in the west around Herat, but even now, Kabul and the north of the country are relatively safe so long as you keep your ears open for the news.
When I tell friends that I want to go to Afghanistan, they shake their heads and say, ‘Why there?’ It’s just a lot of rocks and broken down towns and squabbling warlords.’ It is pointless telling them they have got it very, very wrong, and that they shouldn’t watch so much television.
Here’s Elizabeth Chatwin (Bruce Chatwin’s wife) describing the effect the country had on her:
"I was smitten. Afghanistan has been my yardstick ever since for judging every country I go to – beauty of landscape, of people, of hospitality."
Here is Jason Elliot who, at the age of 19, caught a plane from London to Peshawar and spent a summer living among the Mujahidin at the height of the Soviet invasion.
“…I was captivated as much by [Afghanistan’s] harsh and breathtaking beauty as by the mystifying tenacity of its people. Yet among the kindly Afghans who agreed to shelter me it was impossible to recognise the violent, drug-crazed mercenaries the Soviets claimed to be fighting.”
Here he is writing on his experience of the Mujahidin:
“I knew them instead as men of restraint and dignity whose profound attachment to freedom expressed itself neither in fanaticism nor in the fearlessness in battle with which they were said to be born, but in a quiet and painful incredulity at the presumptuousness of their invaders. These were the Mujahidin: ordinary Afghans. They were farmers, businessmen, merchants, university teachers, shepherds, or soldiers who had fled the army; rich and poor, educated and illiterate.”
Elliot not only had the balls to get himself out there, but took with him an almost supernaturally acute awareness of the natural and social environment - he also just happens to be one of the most graceful, moody and poetic travel writers I’ve ever read.
The Taliban, of course, are a foreign import and a very different kettle of sheep’s brains. Mostly, they appear to be recruited from among the most poverty stricken and illiterate communities. It would be very interesting to know who is really pulling their strings.
Afghanistan has always been part of the British consciousness so it is not so alien to me as some other parts of Asia. It has all kinds of imperial associations, and indeed the British, like all the other conquerors who have callously blasted they way through its unfortunate towns and valleys, have left behind them a significant contribution to the gene pool.
Central Asia, on the other hand, is a kind of blank space on my mental map of the world, a vast civilisation and culture completely unknown to me until I started reading up about it a couple of years ago – and it is vast: Kazakhstan, the largest of the five independent ‘Stans,’ is the sixth biggest country in the world having a land area almost exactly half that of the USA. ‘Stan’, I have discovered, simply means ‘land’ in Farsi (Persian), and the most common word in Central Asia for England is ‘Inglestan’ (When I think that the UK has the worst child poverty in the developed world, the word resonates quite accurately in my mind) .
But it is all very well dreaming of travelling to Central Asia - if I am ever going to make it a reality I need to start doing something about it apart from reading loads of books. Trouble is, there is not a lot you can do when you are confined to sitting on a sofa for most of the day.
But there was one thing: I could learn some Russian. I’ve been shouting my mouth off to people for months, telling them that I’m going to learn Russian. The plan is that if I shout loudly and arrogantly enough, I’ll eventually have to do it because then it would be too embarrassing not to. Now I had an opportunity to put some time and money where my mouth was. So I got back onto Amazon, ordered the Michel Thomas CD course and sunk my teeth into the most magnificently odd and down-to-earth language I have ever come across. It truly is!
I've always loved the sound of Russian and have wanted to learn it every since I was a kid. It is an Indo-European language - a first cousin to English - so I've always fondly imagined that it souldn't be that difficult - should it? Pronounciation aside, the two languages have a lot of vocabularly in common, (I’ve always been impressed by the fact that the word for ‘brother’ in Russian is brat – which is reassuring, and something that most English speakers will relate to.)
Difficult or not, it’s a lingua franca for the whole region. I wouldn't need an extensive knowledge of it, just enough to be able to say things like: ‘I need a mechanic’ or ‘your roads are terrible, point me to the bar’ or, (if the worst comes to the worst,) ‘do NOT make me laugh.
The alternative would be to learn a few phrases of the dozen or so local languages in that part of the world: Georgian, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen (and something called Karakalpak for god's sake!) That could all get quite problematic. In an emergency, would you remember how to say, “Sorry, it's against my religion to eat sheep’s brains,” in Kazakh, for example, or “What do you intend to do with that cattle prod?” in Tajik. Much might depend on your fluency and presence of mind.
Of course, I could just shout more loudly in English as some of my countrymen would advise, but it is not the best way to win friends and influence people - especially on their own turf.
I guess, Russian it is.
June 28th
While I was standing in the newsagent today, I started leafing through the pages of Motorcycle Sport and Leisure. It’s the only motorcycle monthly I look at these days. It’s a bit unusual for a British Bike mag – not the usual "lightbulbs" [<- ! Do you believe this?] and bums, hormones and crotch rockets kind of stuff you usually get (not that I object to that, totally) but full of good bike-related information and features with an emphasis on touring.
As I skimmed through its pages I suddenly fixated on a short but deliriously positive review of the Daytona 955i by Chris Pearson. There was also a travel article by some guy who rode his Enfield round Scotland. So I had to buy it. It had obviously been written with me in mind.
And just to show you I’m not biassed in any way about my Daytona, here is a quote from the article.
“Held together by a mix of tubular alloy and hefty keel plates, the Triumph is capable of holding its own in all but the heat of track-side competition, certainly on the road little can be had to beat the Daytona, particularly if a little luggage is needed on the trip. The beefy power plant and stable manners make the 955i into one of the best sports tourers too, able to maintain silly speeds for equally silly periods of time, quickly turning the road ahead into the past. In use the Daytona, whatever the variant, does its job in a simple manner, it holds the road and goes like stink.
As with all of the modern Triumph range, the brakes are nothing short of awesome, quite how the team at Hinckley manages this act, using only proprietary parts, may never be known, but the anchors do work and work well.”
I’d agree with all that.
That’s my baby…
Monday 30 June
Took the SV for a ride today. First time since I wrecked my back. Whooo Hooooo! Now we're talking!!!!!
Tuesday 1st July
Put the Daytona on the charger all day to make sure the battery was OK for her big day at the dealers tomorrow. It was still charging when I looked last thing before going to bed. Hmmmmmm!
Wednesday 2nd July
Rose triumphantly early this morning and (joy, oh joy!) rode the Daytona over to ‘On Yer Triumph,’ the dealers in Aston Clinton, to get her bars straightened and the rest of her checked over after her humiliating experience at the hands of a couple of tea leaves last month.
Chris Pierson was right. How could there ever be a better road bike than the Triumph Daytona 955i? Flying her home back along the dual carriageway between Aston and Hemel Hempstead I couldn’t imagine an experience on two wheels that could ever be better than this. Perfect handling, gorgeous engine. What a beauty! A rich rosy glow of satisfaction flowed up through my torso to the top of my head, spreading a grin across my chops and lighting up my eyes. My throttle hand tingled with excitement. (I’m a simple soul, really.) The Daytona and I were one bright, jubilant ball of mph. (Sometimes I find it hard to distinguish between the bike’s sunshine yellow paint job and my own happy mood.)
At precisely 11.17 this morning (GMT) I got back to the house, hurried down into my converted cellar, filed away the dealer’s paperwork and made a note of the details on my PC. Then I sat there quietly, staring dreamily at the wall and just savoured the moment. For the first time in two months: 1. I was fit enough to ride. 2. I had two beautiful bikes both singing sweet songs to me. What more does a man need? (We won’t go into that.)
Early in the afternoon, I took the train up to London to pick up my stamped passport from the new Indian visa office behind of Victoria station - and notched up another level of excitement for my Himalaya trip – only nine weeks to go now!
Then in the evening, I dashed over to Letchworth, the neighbouring town to hear a talk by Lois Pryce. I’d met Lois at the BMF bike show 18 months ago after she had returned from her solo Alaska-to-Tierra-del-Fuego trip. She’s a very funny, very gutsy lady. This time she was talking about her most recent trip straight down through Africa. Unlike Ewan Thingy and Charlie Whassisname, she didn’t take the easy route, and she didn’t take a travelling circus with her either. She did it on her own, with minimal gear and through some of the most dangerous regions to be found anywhere in the world (the Congo and its neighbour, the so-called ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’).
I asked her why she decided to risk travelling through totally lawless regions like the Congos and Angola. She did try to explain, but basically, I decided she was nuts – in the way that only the most interesting people ever are.
She mentioned that her husband Austin, who is also a biker/travel writer, was keen on going to Afghanistan and Central Asia next year. That gave us something to talk about and I told her of my planned Central Asian trip. She got quite excited about it, bless her! Then she signed her book for me. “Happy trails in Central Asia,” she wrote on the title page. Well, that’s that, then: there’s no backing out now, is there? How would I explain it to the grand-children?
Thursday 3rd July
As I rode into work today I thought back to yesterday’s moment of rapture at having the Daytona back in working order, and a sort of sour nostalgia rose up into my craw. The reason? When I had tried to fire her up earlier that morning I discovered that my newly charged battery was as flat as a pancake. Groan! Either there is a nasty short in the Daytona’s electrics (which I have suspected for some time) or the battery is dying some slow and meaningless death. I decided that it must be the battery because the other was too terrible to contemplate. Just to be sure, I took out the battery and put it on the charger.
Then I got out the SV and went off to my labours.
Saturday 5th July
Sent off the last of my paperwork for the Himalaya trip today. Cannot wait to get out there and meet my 500cc Royal Enfield Bullet.
I went along to the cinema to watch ‘Mongols’ last night, by the way. Has anyone seen it? I thought it was a pretty good film, but was a bit doubtful about the main theme. Well why did Genghis Kahn and his Mongol armies perpetrate such vicious genocides, and pile up mountains of skulls outside the cities they sacked and destroyed? Well, poor ol' Genghis was just suffering from an unhappy childhood - apparently.
Is there hope, then, for any of us?
Having spent several bikeless weeks rotting comfortably on the sofa with an injured back, I've now managed to drift completely out of touch with physical reality. Instead of washing down the Daytona, washing the dishes regularly or mending the garden fence, I’ve devoted my time to floating on a sea of books, videos, and good old-fashioned day dreams – all travel stuff and mostly bike related. The last few weeks have been some of the most adventurous of my life. With the help of Amazon.co.uk and my credit card I've ridden over most of the five continents, had a number of narrow escapes, took several nasty spills, met loads of fascinating people, learned a great deal about other cultures and enjoyed an exceedingly good laugh. It's been great.
So, when, last weekend, I ran out of material to stuff my imagination with I prodded my ribs, raised myself gingerly from my couch, took the train up to London and headed straight for Long Acre and Stanford’s bookshop. It was a painful trek but it was worth it.
Stanford’s! - Santa’s grotto for grown-ups. What a place! The floor, on each of its three levels is covered in a giant map; On the ground floor: the World; in the basement: London; and on the first floor: the Himalayas. Every adventure you ever wanted is right here waiting to be had. This is my kind of shop.
Stanford’s was founded in the Mid-Victorian era when the British Empire was expanding rapidly and wily old Edward Stanford realised there was a growing market for maps, travel literature and guide books. Today, the shop claims to carry the largest stock of maps and travel books anywhere in the world. If Stanford’s don’t have it, then it probably doesn’t exist. The shop is an Alladin's Cave for travellers of all kinds, from serious adventurers to armchair fantasists. A great many famous British explorers in the last hundred and fifty years, pith helmets firmly planted on their heads, have pottered about among its shelves in the search for geographical enlightenment.
And it’s a great place to hang about in and listen to other people's conversations. As I was poring over shelves full of books on Central Asia I heard a group of lads discussing arrangements for what sounded like a pretty wild climbing expedition to one of the disputed territories in the Caucasus. A sturdy husband-and-wife team across the room in the East Asian section were arguing over a how long they were going to spend looking at the pottery army near Xian in central China (family life, eh!). Nearer at hand, two guys in motorcycle gear were picking their way through maps of South-East Asia and debating the merits of immodium tablets. Practical souls, bikers, don’t you think?
Apart from my forthcoming trip to the Himalayas, there are three big bike trips I still want to do before I pop my clogs. First I want to spend some time exploring North America; second, I want to do a trip around the Baltic, and third (and this is the big one) I want to travel across Europe, Turkey, The Caucasus, Afghanistan, Central Asia and China. Whether I’ll manage to get into China remains to be seen. It is helluva difficult for single travellers on bikes to get visas at the moment. Sam Manicom, a favourite travel author of mine, tried and was told yes, he could ride his bike across the country, but he would have to have a minder and it would cost him £100 a day. Sigh!
But you never know. Things could change…
I’d travelled up to Stanfords, to find a book on… Afghanistan. OK, so I’m a lost soul. I’ve been in love with the idea of visiting Afghanistan for about thirty years, ever since they closed the border.
I’ve been talking on the web to those who have travelled in the region recently. I’ve been reading visitors’ accounts and travel books, reports by aid workers and local indymedia articles, and every one of them appears to agree on one thing: the country is not as dangerous or as volatile as the media, government agencies and the military would have us believe. And that’s hardly surprising, is it? War, including civil war, is always a local, intermittent and partial thing, even in its most intense phases.
But don’t get me wrong, I’m no hero. I do seem to have a very high pain tolerance but I am highly intolerant of the idea of pain - or any unpleasant consequences to my precious bodily parts - so I’m not planning on taking any unnecessary chances.
Last year, Afghanistan started to open up again for the first time since the seventies and the first serious tourists began to return. In the early months of that year, a couple of French bikers were spotted travelling through Bamiyan (where the giant Buddhas were destroyed by the Taliban.) Lonely Planet, seizing the opportunity, hurriedly wrote and published a guide book. After that, mad Westerners and parties of Taiwanese tourists began to arrive in small charabancs, to bump their way over the broken ‘roads' of the magnificent Badakhshan region.
More recently, the ‘security situation’ has started to ‘deteriorate’ again (as the blandly euphemistic official language would have it). The Taliban are resurgent in the south down near Kandahar and in the west around Herat, but even now, Kabul and the north of the country are relatively safe so long as you keep your ears open for the news.
When I tell friends that I want to go to Afghanistan, they shake their heads and say, ‘Why there?’ It’s just a lot of rocks and broken down towns and squabbling warlords.’ It is pointless telling them they have got it very, very wrong, and that they shouldn’t watch so much television.
Here’s Elizabeth Chatwin (Bruce Chatwin’s wife) describing the effect the country had on her:
"I was smitten. Afghanistan has been my yardstick ever since for judging every country I go to – beauty of landscape, of people, of hospitality."
Here is Jason Elliot who, at the age of 19, caught a plane from London to Peshawar and spent a summer living among the Mujahidin at the height of the Soviet invasion.
“…I was captivated as much by [Afghanistan’s] harsh and breathtaking beauty as by the mystifying tenacity of its people. Yet among the kindly Afghans who agreed to shelter me it was impossible to recognise the violent, drug-crazed mercenaries the Soviets claimed to be fighting.”
Here he is writing on his experience of the Mujahidin:
“I knew them instead as men of restraint and dignity whose profound attachment to freedom expressed itself neither in fanaticism nor in the fearlessness in battle with which they were said to be born, but in a quiet and painful incredulity at the presumptuousness of their invaders. These were the Mujahidin: ordinary Afghans. They were farmers, businessmen, merchants, university teachers, shepherds, or soldiers who had fled the army; rich and poor, educated and illiterate.”
Elliot not only had the balls to get himself out there, but took with him an almost supernaturally acute awareness of the natural and social environment - he also just happens to be one of the most graceful, moody and poetic travel writers I’ve ever read.
The Taliban, of course, are a foreign import and a very different kettle of sheep’s brains. Mostly, they appear to be recruited from among the most poverty stricken and illiterate communities. It would be very interesting to know who is really pulling their strings.
Afghanistan has always been part of the British consciousness so it is not so alien to me as some other parts of Asia. It has all kinds of imperial associations, and indeed the British, like all the other conquerors who have callously blasted they way through its unfortunate towns and valleys, have left behind them a significant contribution to the gene pool.
Central Asia, on the other hand, is a kind of blank space on my mental map of the world, a vast civilisation and culture completely unknown to me until I started reading up about it a couple of years ago – and it is vast: Kazakhstan, the largest of the five independent ‘Stans,’ is the sixth biggest country in the world having a land area almost exactly half that of the USA. ‘Stan’, I have discovered, simply means ‘land’ in Farsi (Persian), and the most common word in Central Asia for England is ‘Inglestan’ (When I think that the UK has the worst child poverty in the developed world, the word resonates quite accurately in my mind) .
But it is all very well dreaming of travelling to Central Asia - if I am ever going to make it a reality I need to start doing something about it apart from reading loads of books. Trouble is, there is not a lot you can do when you are confined to sitting on a sofa for most of the day.
But there was one thing: I could learn some Russian. I’ve been shouting my mouth off to people for months, telling them that I’m going to learn Russian. The plan is that if I shout loudly and arrogantly enough, I’ll eventually have to do it because then it would be too embarrassing not to. Now I had an opportunity to put some time and money where my mouth was. So I got back onto Amazon, ordered the Michel Thomas CD course and sunk my teeth into the most magnificently odd and down-to-earth language I have ever come across. It truly is!
I've always loved the sound of Russian and have wanted to learn it every since I was a kid. It is an Indo-European language - a first cousin to English - so I've always fondly imagined that it souldn't be that difficult - should it? Pronounciation aside, the two languages have a lot of vocabularly in common, (I’ve always been impressed by the fact that the word for ‘brother’ in Russian is brat – which is reassuring, and something that most English speakers will relate to.)
Difficult or not, it’s a lingua franca for the whole region. I wouldn't need an extensive knowledge of it, just enough to be able to say things like: ‘I need a mechanic’ or ‘your roads are terrible, point me to the bar’ or, (if the worst comes to the worst,) ‘do NOT make me laugh.
The alternative would be to learn a few phrases of the dozen or so local languages in that part of the world: Georgian, Azeri, Uzbek, Kazakh, Tajik, Kyrgyz, Turkmen (and something called Karakalpak for god's sake!) That could all get quite problematic. In an emergency, would you remember how to say, “Sorry, it's against my religion to eat sheep’s brains,” in Kazakh, for example, or “What do you intend to do with that cattle prod?” in Tajik. Much might depend on your fluency and presence of mind.
Of course, I could just shout more loudly in English as some of my countrymen would advise, but it is not the best way to win friends and influence people - especially on their own turf.
I guess, Russian it is.
June 28th
While I was standing in the newsagent today, I started leafing through the pages of Motorcycle Sport and Leisure. It’s the only motorcycle monthly I look at these days. It’s a bit unusual for a British Bike mag – not the usual "lightbulbs" [<- ! Do you believe this?] and bums, hormones and crotch rockets kind of stuff you usually get (not that I object to that, totally) but full of good bike-related information and features with an emphasis on touring.
As I skimmed through its pages I suddenly fixated on a short but deliriously positive review of the Daytona 955i by Chris Pearson. There was also a travel article by some guy who rode his Enfield round Scotland. So I had to buy it. It had obviously been written with me in mind.
And just to show you I’m not biassed in any way about my Daytona, here is a quote from the article.
“Held together by a mix of tubular alloy and hefty keel plates, the Triumph is capable of holding its own in all but the heat of track-side competition, certainly on the road little can be had to beat the Daytona, particularly if a little luggage is needed on the trip. The beefy power plant and stable manners make the 955i into one of the best sports tourers too, able to maintain silly speeds for equally silly periods of time, quickly turning the road ahead into the past. In use the Daytona, whatever the variant, does its job in a simple manner, it holds the road and goes like stink.
As with all of the modern Triumph range, the brakes are nothing short of awesome, quite how the team at Hinckley manages this act, using only proprietary parts, may never be known, but the anchors do work and work well.”
I’d agree with all that.
That’s my baby…
Monday 30 June
Took the SV for a ride today. First time since I wrecked my back. Whooo Hooooo! Now we're talking!!!!!
Tuesday 1st July
Put the Daytona on the charger all day to make sure the battery was OK for her big day at the dealers tomorrow. It was still charging when I looked last thing before going to bed. Hmmmmmm!
Wednesday 2nd July
Rose triumphantly early this morning and (joy, oh joy!) rode the Daytona over to ‘On Yer Triumph,’ the dealers in Aston Clinton, to get her bars straightened and the rest of her checked over after her humiliating experience at the hands of a couple of tea leaves last month.
Chris Pierson was right. How could there ever be a better road bike than the Triumph Daytona 955i? Flying her home back along the dual carriageway between Aston and Hemel Hempstead I couldn’t imagine an experience on two wheels that could ever be better than this. Perfect handling, gorgeous engine. What a beauty! A rich rosy glow of satisfaction flowed up through my torso to the top of my head, spreading a grin across my chops and lighting up my eyes. My throttle hand tingled with excitement. (I’m a simple soul, really.) The Daytona and I were one bright, jubilant ball of mph. (Sometimes I find it hard to distinguish between the bike’s sunshine yellow paint job and my own happy mood.)
At precisely 11.17 this morning (GMT) I got back to the house, hurried down into my converted cellar, filed away the dealer’s paperwork and made a note of the details on my PC. Then I sat there quietly, staring dreamily at the wall and just savoured the moment. For the first time in two months: 1. I was fit enough to ride. 2. I had two beautiful bikes both singing sweet songs to me. What more does a man need? (We won’t go into that.)
Early in the afternoon, I took the train up to London to pick up my stamped passport from the new Indian visa office behind of Victoria station - and notched up another level of excitement for my Himalaya trip – only nine weeks to go now!
Then in the evening, I dashed over to Letchworth, the neighbouring town to hear a talk by Lois Pryce. I’d met Lois at the BMF bike show 18 months ago after she had returned from her solo Alaska-to-Tierra-del-Fuego trip. She’s a very funny, very gutsy lady. This time she was talking about her most recent trip straight down through Africa. Unlike Ewan Thingy and Charlie Whassisname, she didn’t take the easy route, and she didn’t take a travelling circus with her either. She did it on her own, with minimal gear and through some of the most dangerous regions to be found anywhere in the world (the Congo and its neighbour, the so-called ‘Democratic Republic of the Congo’).
I asked her why she decided to risk travelling through totally lawless regions like the Congos and Angola. She did try to explain, but basically, I decided she was nuts – in the way that only the most interesting people ever are.
She mentioned that her husband Austin, who is also a biker/travel writer, was keen on going to Afghanistan and Central Asia next year. That gave us something to talk about and I told her of my planned Central Asian trip. She got quite excited about it, bless her! Then she signed her book for me. “Happy trails in Central Asia,” she wrote on the title page. Well, that’s that, then: there’s no backing out now, is there? How would I explain it to the grand-children?
Thursday 3rd July
As I rode into work today I thought back to yesterday’s moment of rapture at having the Daytona back in working order, and a sort of sour nostalgia rose up into my craw. The reason? When I had tried to fire her up earlier that morning I discovered that my newly charged battery was as flat as a pancake. Groan! Either there is a nasty short in the Daytona’s electrics (which I have suspected for some time) or the battery is dying some slow and meaningless death. I decided that it must be the battery because the other was too terrible to contemplate. Just to be sure, I took out the battery and put it on the charger.
Then I got out the SV and went off to my labours.
Saturday 5th July
Sent off the last of my paperwork for the Himalaya trip today. Cannot wait to get out there and meet my 500cc Royal Enfield Bullet.
I went along to the cinema to watch ‘Mongols’ last night, by the way. Has anyone seen it? I thought it was a pretty good film, but was a bit doubtful about the main theme. Well why did Genghis Kahn and his Mongol armies perpetrate such vicious genocides, and pile up mountains of skulls outside the cities they sacked and destroyed? Well, poor ol' Genghis was just suffering from an unhappy childhood - apparently.
Is there hope, then, for any of us?