- I love the GS, have had the best rides of my life teasing the beast through the Alps. It is the Swiss Army knife of motorcycles, able to do well on both the paved and the unpredictable. It is the bike you’d most want at the end of the world. The GS series (650 through 1200) is hugely popular: worldwide one out of three BMWs are the dual purpose breed; in the US the GS accounts for 25 percent of sales. BMW created this niche, and despite competition from KTM and Buell and Ducati, BMW still owns it.
I will own one someday, despite the obvious handicap. I live in Chicago. In the Midwest, we don’t have off-road opportunity. Dirt? It’s called real estate, private property. Oh, there are fire roads up in Wisconsin, but, really. I’d ridden the earlier GS through the Alps, and the new R1200GS on a long outing in Death Valley (that trip was my first off road experience). I’d watched two riders, including the guide, drop bikes, puncture valve covers, leak oil—the usual fun. We’d had our share of MacGuyver moments, doing spot repairs, pirating parts. It was terrific fun. I'd continued my education with a weekend of dirt riding at Gary La Plante's Dirt Ranch in Temeculah, California. As a result, I have a preposterous and possibly deadly, self-confidence about my ability to ride motorcycles. But still, I’d had a weekend of dirt riding at Gary LaPlante’s Dirt Ranch in Temeculah. I have a preposterous, and possibly deadly, self-confidence about ability to ride motorcycles.
Deon Meyer and Peter de Waal, our South African hosts, report that the first part of the ride is easy. We will follow a narrow dirt road through the Ysernek Natural Reserve, the only pine forest in South Africa. We will share the road with logging trucks and very wide Land Rovers. We will see baboons, buck, tortoises, cobras and vistas beyond belief.
It is just that, a meandering path through sunlight and shade, on hard-packed African earth. We climb a convoluted path to a peak overlooking the entire continent. We pose for photos with our bike. I know it’s almost a cliché, that other riders keep images of themselves in front of road signs. This is the first time I’ve understood the feeling behind the impulse.
When the editor from the upscale Robb Report, who for reasons having nothing to do with protecting the innocent, I will call Jeff Buchanan, stands beside his bike for the beauty shot, I shout out encouragement. “Clench ze buttocks.”
“What?”
“Clench ze buttocks.”
Do these leathers make my butt look big?
No, but you better check the label to see what they’re made of. There’s a baboon over there, and that red trim…
|
|
|
- Now the real test begins. The road turns into switchbacks and we ride in dust. I’m in the second pack. A wide green Land Rover charges past without slowing. I have a moment of drawn breath and scrotal retreat as I try to recall the width of the panniers. We clear, but when I come around the next set of switchbacks I see a bike in the ditch, handlebars smashed, front tire exploded. Forced into the ditch, Deon had tried to ride it out. The bike got jammed, he’d catapulted end over end, racking up skid marks on the top of his helmet.
Deon, when I approach, says in a perfect imitation of Meryl Streep. “I bought a farm in Africa.”
He is all right; he’d arrange another bike. The sweep van might be able to fix this one.
It raised the fundamental question about this category of bike; they are huge. The gas tank holds 7.3 imperial gallons of gas, about 72 pounds positioned just below your belt. Imagine a pit bull sitting on your thighs. Nice doggie. The oversize tank gives the bike a cruising rang of 465 miles, i.e. a point of no return somewhere around 240 miles from last known help. What they say about 4-wheel drive (four wheel drive lets you get stuck places two wheel drive can't even reach) applies to this type of bike. That's the whole idea..." Editors at lunch discuss times, when riding alone they’d dropped GSs, broken ribs and waited 4 hours for help, how, when help never cam, having to lever the bike upright.
BMW has tried to make the Adventure bombproof, wrapping the flathead opposed pistons in a steel cage, reinforcing the luggage. I put the design to my own test.
Following Mark Tuttle from Rider, I position myself right on the edge of his plume of dust. Wake surfing. I see the road change color, see the rider ahead of me wobble, then recover, and before I can say, Sand. I am swallowed by the reddish grit. The handlebars twist, go into tank-slapper mode, once, twice, three times and I am down. I keep my legs tucked inside the protective cage and emerge unscathed. The bike shows almost no sign of damage—a busted handgrip, a slight tear in one of the saddlebags. Oddly, the brake light switch has become unnerved, losing a tiny part that somehow cuts out the ABS. At lunch a BMW waves a Schraubenzieher (what we call a screwdriver, but what translates as screw puller) at the switch, speaks rapid German, and reestablishes the power assist feature (but not the ABS).
Feeling that I have not given the protective gear a full test, I conduct another spontaneous self-demolition. About 100 yards from camp, I get thrown sideways by something in the trail, pitch onto a rock. Again, the bike is unscathed.
As I popped pain pills from a Pez dispenser, I asked more experienced riders for advice. In a way, it mimicked the conversation about taking the rider out of the equation. Lachlan-James Harris boils down enduro riding to a simple formula: Stand Up. Look Up. Open Up.
I think I need to have that printed, upside down, on the front of my t-shirt.
Stand Up: Standing up lowers the center of mass to the foot pegs, lets the bike move between your legs, the suspension handling recovery. The least bit of tension from your legs and the front tire can knife in. Standing also gives you a better look at the road, one that perversely, you have to ignore.
Look Up. The bike, for reasons to subtle and swift to explain, goes where you look. Choose a line and stick to it; a bad line is better than no line. Peter tells me that as the riding gets more technical, you have to look farther ahead, at the exit. If you look down, you bog down.
Open up: This is the counterintuitive trick. Keep the power on. You are riding the gyroscope—the force of the wheel spinning on its axis is an invisible ally, strong enough to ignore or delay the input from obstacles. Uncock your wrist, let the rear wheel slow, and you are a sitting duck, ready to be pulled down like Saddam’s statue, by angry gravity.
The three rules work on a 125 c.c dirt bike, or a 400 c.c. dual-purpose, and it works on this 564-pound behemoth (564 lbs, including a full tank of gas).
Indeed. This is one of those digressions that an editor will kill, (Not at MotoSavvy! Ed.) but here goes anyway. How do you work up to a bike like this? Is it the Paul Bunyan method, like a farm boy do you go out to the barn and pick up the calf every morning, growing as it grows, until you and Babe The Blue Ox are exhibits in a FH-Better Living Through Steroids Museum? Jeff, the Robb Report guy, laughs and tells about a friend who trains draught horses. “You do go out the barn. And on the last day that you can, you pick up the colt and throw it to the ground. For the rest of its life it will remember you as being strong enough to throw it down—even when it towers over you.”
I wonder if it’s too late to use that tactic on my kids? And I suspect that the Adventure is using that tactic on me. Now when I see it, I have fear/respect in my eye.
With this bike, size matters. Take seat height. The low setting is 35 inches. I am inseam challenged, a mere 30 inches between crotch and solid footing. The press release for the R1200S, for example, extols the fabulous 52-degree lean angle, the slice and dice of a racetrack. But the lean angle that concerns me (and similarly short legged) is the first two or three degrees. Long before our toes touch, the Adventure is on its way over. Almost every rider new to the bike has a soft landing. What’s the answer? Platform motorcycle boots? Air bags on the bottom of our feet, triggered by lean angle or sphincter pinch or loud profanity? Beg BMW to make a Shetland pony version of the Adventure?
Around the campfire, 100 kilometers into the valley of the Baboons (Bavianskloof) we traded stories. “There was a moment today, where the two lead riders had gone so far ahead the dust was gone, where the bikes behind me were no longer visible, where the air was clear and you were 100 miles from the nearest human and this feeling like loneliness welled up and filled the valley and DON’T F@*K UP, starting to wonder if you missed a turnoff, and the air was so clear, and you started to relax….and’
“That’s the GS experience in a nutshell.”
|
|
|
- Another editor asks if this was the point in the campfire where we compare scars. “I’ve got this vasectomy…oh never mind.”
Okay, I’m over the top. But the next day, I recite the three rules like Luke Skywalker channeling Obiwan. Trust the force, Luke. I’m looking ahead, picking up textures. As we ascend mountains there are rocks exposed by run off, rippled like molars. I hear the clang of a skid plate. As we ford swift running rivers, I can’t even see the bottom. The bike pushes up a bow wave that wraps watery arms around my neck. I look ahead to the exit, the group of riders looking over their shoulder at me. I give it the gas and…
Hey mister, that’s me up on the jukebox. Arnold the German photographer catches the moment in a motordrive. If it doesn’t run with this article I’m suing. Ewan MacGregor, eat your heart out.
|
|
- READERS REVIEW - LET US HEAR YOUR COMMENTS - CLICK HERE
|
|
|
|
|
