Motorcycles
Warning: This page is a bit long, and may be boring for those who don't ride motorcycles
(or even for those of you who do).
This is one of my dream bikes. It's a Ducati Monster.
How it all started - innocently enough. Remember, kids - Just Say No.
My first motorbike was a Kawasaki GTO 110. I bought it second-hand for the princely sum of $780 way back in 1982. At that time you could hang an L-plate on a bike and use it as your learner bike. My best friend Daniel taught me how to ride it in the carpark, before I rode it home. He drove behind me to prevent the cars from honking at me. I thought it was a real nice bike. "GTO" just sounded so cool.
It was only a few days later that I realized the fuel tank leaked. It had been patched with some goo, but that soon gave way. Leaked petrol onto my trousers all the way to ACJC. Well, not all the way. I ran out of petrol halfway and became stranded on the PIE. The Lord is good, and a classmate (Chung Kai) just happened to be driving by and saw me (I still marvel today at the "coincidence" - this is in a city of 3.5 million people). He bought me some petrol in a Pepsi bottle, and I was able to make it to school. Of course nobody wanted to sit next to me that day because I smelt like a refinery, but I wasn't in a very sociable mood myself, so that was OK. Only later did I find out about the reserve switch below the fuel tank.
I replaced the fuel tank but that was hardly the end of my troubles. The government announced that L-plate riders would not be allowed on the roads any more, because too many of us were being killed. Instead, all motorbike training was to be carried out at driving centres under strict supervision. Great. I rushed to register myself for the last few riding tests before the new rules came into effect, but did not realise that I needed to bring my motorcycle log book. I took that as a sign from God that I was not to ride a motorcycle (yet). I sold the bike the next day for $150. A few days later, I passed by the shop and saw that someone had bought it - for $500. Welcome to the real world of business.
It was to be two years later, in med school to be exact, that I bought my second motorbike. It was a real junkheap. Don't even know the model - it was a Suzuki scrambler, 185 cc. Had a nice-sounding engine, though. "Prraaaaaaaap-prap-prap-prap". I paid $200 for it and rode it that very night to the NUS Jam & Hop. Thought I was very cool and offered a ride to Marie, a girl classmate I had my eye on. She hesitated before refusing. That was when I discovered what the general public thinks about people who ride motorcycles. Oh well, at least I had my motorcycle to keep me happy.
And it did. I enjoyed riding that old bike to and from campus and all around for a couple of years. Gave me a great sense of mobility and freedom. I could go on and on about it, but I won't. I suppose that period would be what one would call "those halcyon days". I can still hear the buzz of that engine sometimes, and feel it as well, between my legs.
The day came when the bike needed a repair job that would cost more than it was worth, so I sold it for $100. I'm that way with bikes. I don't get sentimental about them, I don't maintain them very well, but I really have fun with them while I have them. Thank God I'm not that way with people (I think).
OK here's a photo to break the monotony of the text. This was my third bike:
Picture taken along Malaysian highway on the way to Ayer Hitam.
It was a Yamaha RD125. Rather legendary bike, apparently, and I had lusted after one even at the time I bought my Kawasaki GTO. Daniel had asked me before he saw the first bike: "Is it the one with the indentation in the fuel tank for your legs?" and I had to sadly shake my head. Well, this one had those indentations. I bought it during my housemanship for about $2500, and had it painted cherry red all over. Some careless taxi driver knocked me down, the petrol spilled out of the fuel tank, and that was the end of the paint job. At least I had had a few days to admire the paint job before this happened. The picture above shows the bike with the secondhand fuel tank and side covers which the taxi driver kindly paid for. My fractured rib I left alone to heal by itself.
On hindsight, the bike was quite a menace. I crashed at least 3 times riding that bike. And it was not because I was speeding or anything like that. The bike was just not very forgiving of your mistakes. It was also not very powerful - I remember the bike wheezing its way up the Benjamin Sheares Bridge (? 20 degree incline) at barely 70 km/h, with the throttle at maximum.
I sold this bike eventually to a good friend of mine, who had contracted the motorcycling madness as well. He paid $2000 in cash for it, but left the bike with me for safekeeping because he had not gotten his licence yet. To cut a long story short, that bike got stolen whilst in my safekeeping, but our friendship survived (he took the news rather well, actually - "Naw, I don't believe you...") and we remain good friends to this very day. This, despite me later recommending a bike dealer to him who sold him a junk heap disguised as an XR200. He finally wised up and bought a Bandit 400 without first consulting me, and it's been with him ever since.
Fooling around in a carpark. Please, always wear a helmet when you ride.
My fourth bike, a Kawasaki KMX125, was bought on impulse, whilst I was still riding around on the RD125 (well, RZ125 actually, according to the logbook). Someone had put an ad in the newspaper, and I went to try out the bike during my lunch break without really intending to buy, but ended up paying a deposit to the owner with a silly grin on my face. The bike was light, pickup was great, and although I thought the handling was strange initially, it grew on me and soon became second nature. I have never crashed on this bike. In fact, it became routine fun (that's like saying "honest lawyer", isn't it?) to lock the rear wheel and screech to a halt with the tail sliding all over the place. This bike inspired great confidence and is very forgiving of mistakes. No wonder it's the number one learner bike in England. It also taught me the meaning of the word "powerband". To think that for the first few months I was just puttering around below 5000 rpm not realizing the power that lay beyond 6000 rpm. Didn't want to thrash (trash?) the engine, you know. Then one day I needed to overtake someone in a hurry on the expressway, and almost did a wheelie when I revved past 6000 rpm. Before long I was wringing the guts out of the engine and spinning along happily at 100 kmh everywhere (you didn't read this here).
The wonderful day came when I got my class 2A licence (this allows you to ride bikes up to 400cc) and went drooling around all the bike shops looking at all the big bikes that were suddenly available to me. Took me about 2 days, but finally settled on a secondhand Suzuki GSX400FW ($3000), which had a half fairing I really liked. It also had a nice broad fuel tank which made you feel you were sitting astride a rocket. The only other real contender was a Suzuki GSX400F ($7000) with a luscious full fairing, but it was not within my budget then. I was doing my time in Tekong (Singaporeans will know what I mean) and was being paid a pittance. In the end, my then-girlfriend (now my wife) helped me pay half the cost of the bike to avoid taking out a loan. Now is that love or what? It's not that I needed the transport - at this point I was the embarrassed owner of 3 bikes - the RD125, the KMX125 and the FW400 - and completely broke.
Singapore has strict helmet laws. Oops.
This cool biker chick is half-owner of the bike. She's now my wife. (Note the cool paint job)
The Suzuki earned me 2 speeding tickets within a few months, which gives you an idea what it was like. Well, actually it was quite heavy and clunky and VERY NOISY (compared to the KMX, at any rate) but it could pour on the power if you revved it hard. It was also very heavy (did I mention that already?) and I tipped it over once doing a very slow U-turn near the zoo. Luckily only the animals were around to see that happen. I didn't know that besides laughing hyenas they also had laughing elephants and kangaroos, too. Ah, well.
The high point on that bike was a trip to Cameron Highlands. This is a mountain resort in Malaysia, and accessed only by very narrow winding roads with huge gorges ready to swallow tour buses and such. In fact, the place is notorious for buses falling off the cliffs and landslides and things like that. This being my first real bike tour, and armed only with a hand-drawn tourist brochure, I misjudged the time required to cover the distance. Basically this meant that it was almost dark when I started on my way up the mountain, and VERY DARK soon after. My lonely headlight was soon all that stood between me and the edge of the road waiting to swallow me up. "Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path". Think I know the meaning of that illustration now. I learnt how to lean into corners that night, trying to make haste and reach civilisation and sometimes out of sheer necessity to avoid shooting off into a ravine. One particularly frightening moment came when a small branch protruding into the road brushed my face as I turned a corner. I shrieked out loud and wobbled wildly, thinking I had been grabbed by a demon or something. These things go through your mind when you're riding hard in the dark trying to reach civilisation. Stopping was not an option because I had no camping equipment (not that I would dream of camping overnight in a creepy mountain jungle - so much for the image of a macho biker).
I only realized then that I was shivering, not just from the coldness of the night and mountain air, but also from the strain of trying to see far enough ahead to keep up a good pace.
Once in a while a lorry or tour bus would thunder by (my prayers being answered each time that it would not thunder OVER me) and I would desperately try to keep up, because the larger vehicle's headlights provided far more illumination than my feeble non-halogen/krypton candle-like headlamp, but those were maniacal drivers and I soon lost them each time. Well, they had the advantage of four wheels and experience, I guess. Yeah, yeah, and I didn't have guts, but I'm alive, OK?
Just as I lost sight of yet another lorry and thought that the road would never end (it sure seemed a lot more than the 46 km posted on the signboard at the foot of the mountain - but then so did that 24 km route march, but that's another story), I turned a corner and...
GLORY HALLELUJAH!
...I saw a brightly lit settlement nestled in a small valley. What a feeling! Civilisation at last! You could hear Handel's Messiah being sung by a choir of angels in the distance. I rode wearily into town, checked into a guesthouse, and went upstairs to change and shower. That's when I discovered Rule No. 2 of Motorcycling Touring: Never wear tight underwear, especially on a sports tourer, no matter how sexy it makes you feel. There were raw, weepy areas where the tight elastic bands had cut into my groin on both sides. Oh well, live and learn. You can bet I never violated Rule No. 2 again. What's Rule No. 1? I'll let you find that out for yourself.
After I had licked my wounds (figuratively, of course - I never attempt the anatomically impossible), I went downstairs for a great dinner. Later I walked around, but there was not much else in that town except a cheesy Karaoke Lounge, which I skipped. I found out later that the village was named Ringlet, and was not the main town of Cameron Highland, which was a few km further up. I found out even later that my wife's grandparents had fled to that very same village during World War II and lived quite comfortably there, relatively unharrassed by the Japanese, and living off the land.
The next morning I had a very pleasant tour of the extremely scenic countryside, bought a few preserved flowers for my wife-to-be, then started off home. I was testing out my new-found cornering prowess, leaning hard into each corner and marvelling at the wonderful stickiness of the tires, when the inevitable happened. There was a patch of sand, you see, and the front tyre lost its grip, and I started sliding and... you know. I remember thinking as I went down and my right shoulder was scraping the road: "OK, this is it. It had to happen one day. Wonder who's going to bring my body back to Singapore?"
Miraculously there were no broken bones. My guardian angel always has to work overtime. After hurriedly moving my bike off the road to make way for a busload of gawking tourists ("Ooooh! Aaaaaah!") I sat there looking at the bike and contemplating my next move. The right outer cranckcase cover had been sheared off, and the handlebar was all twisted. The sole of my right riding boot was flapping open, and my denim jacket was pretty much torn up. I seriously considered abandoning the bike (and motorcycling) there and then and hitchhiking back to Singapore. Was this a message from God: "STOP RIDING!"? Or was that simply my girlfriend's voice in my ear? Being my usual thick-skinned, hard-of-hearing self, I thumbed the starter button and (Praise the Lord!) the engine started, even with the motorbike lying on its side. The right side of the motor had some delicate little gizmo spinning round and round, which had miraculously not been damaged. I think maybe it was an alternator thingamajig or something.
Anyway, I heaved the bike back upright and tiptoed the rest of the way down the mountain, with the handlebars facing about 15 degrees right of centre. It was quite tricky, I can tell you. Oh, did I mention that the front brake lever had broken off as well, leaving only about an inch worth of leverage? I relied mainly on the rear brake and engine braking on the way down.
There was a town a few miles north of Cameron Highlands with a few small bike repair shops, but none of them had any spare parts for a 400cc bike. They straightened out the handlebars for me, though, and changed the brake lever. I decided then to cut short my trip and try to make it back to Singapore that night. I almost ran out of petrol on the North-South highway, but remembered about the reserve switch. The needle must have been at "empty" for about 100 km before I found a petrol station. Talk about running on a prayer. To cut a long story short, I did make it home by about 11pm that night, even managing to squeeze in a very hearty Chilli Crab etc dinner at Johore Bahru. Yum!
The only other notable incident with this bike was when a bunch of ants decided to build a nest in the handlebar clamp area when I left it overnight at Changi Jetty. Yecchhh! Gives me goosebumps just thinking about it. I bought a can of insecticide and nearly emptied it spraying those ants dead.
I finally sold that bike to a secondhand bike shop for $1900 when it started giving more trouble than it was worth to repair, starting with holes in the exhaust pipe, and progressing on to a dead alternator that refused to charge up the battery. The last time I went to the bike shop, it was still there, sitting sadly in a dusty corner. I still had my trusty Kawasaki KMX125 to get around on.
The zenith of any Singaporean motorcyclist's life has to be the day he gets his Class 2 licence, which allows him to ride bikes of any displacement. Suddenly, the sun shines brighter, you are Superman and you can reach for the stars etc etc ad nauseam. That happy day finally dawned for me, and I was utterly spoiled for choice. I didn't know where to start looking. Should I get a ZX-11 (drool!)? A Honda Magna? Or a gentlemanly Honda Sabre 750? A (gasp!) Yamaha VMax? A Harley was not in the running, because I was prejudiced by many Cycle World articles and "letters to the Editor" citing the inferior power and handling and technology of Harley Davidsons. More on this later. And GoldWings were not motorcycles, they were cars on two wheels, so they were out, too.
While I was occupied by this happy dilemna, the opportunity came to take a trip up to Kuantan with a group called Cycle East / Two Wheelers, led by a colourful character named Rodney Yeo. Since I did not have a big bike at that point, I rented a Harley Softail Springer from him. Some things you just gotta do once in this lifetime. I did not regret it.
Malaysia has strict helmet laws, too. Oops again. That's my buddy behind me airing his bum as usual.
That bike had T-O-R-Q-U-E. All you had to do was aim it where you wanted to go, and twist that throttle and you sort of rumbled there in extra quick time. Overtaking was a cinch. All you felt was a muted growl somewhere below you while you were accelerating. At cruising speed you could hardly hear the motor (wearing good ear-plugs helped, of course). And the comfort, oh, the comfort. I bungied my backpack to the pillion seat, which made it into a nice lumbar support, and combined with the bucket seat, I just went on and on and on. My riding buddy was on a Kawasaki Zephyr 750, and he usually went faster than me, but every now and then I would overtake him as he was airing his bum. The first few times I stopped to see if something was wrong with his bike, but each time he just waved me on, indicating with graphic sign language that he was just taking a respite from his saddle. The only ache I noticed when we reached Kuantan was in my knees.
It was scary at first manouevreing (?sp) $35,000 worth of heavy motorcycle iron, but once you got used to it, it was actually quite light-handling. And the suspension and stability were very good. There was one point when I went very wide on a corner and just sort of glided over all the gravelly bumps on the road shoulder. And there was one stretch of heavily gravelled road where everyone had to tiptoe through trying to maintain their balance while I just rode as though it were a paved road.
There were a few crazy characters on that trip. There was a roadracer who passed me on his FZ1000 at what must have been about 300 kmh - with his girlfriend as pillion! There were also 2 Ang-Moh's (Caucasians) - one on a chopped Intruder and the other on a VMax, who celebrated their conquests of the night before with bra and panties draped on their respective motorcycles for all the world to see the next morning.
That ride converted me to the allure of big V-twins. And completely revised my notions about Harley Davidsons. I've yet to own one (I still think that they're basically over-priced status symbols in Singapore), but I'm not prejudiced against them anymore, and I haven't ruled out owning one myself, once I've grown a beard and a pot-belly.
Which brings me to my next bike, a Honda XLV750R. A what, you say? This is basically a shaft-driven V-twin engine derived from the Honda NV750 cruiser crammed into what passes as an off-road chassis. From what little literature I found on this bike, it was produced in France as an experiment in big V-twin off-road bikes, and was actually the prototypical fore-runner of the Africa Twin. It's aesthetically very beautiful, with very tasty bits here and there, and runs smoothly. It's also very powerful and torquey.
Did I mention you should wear a helmet when riding?
I first spotted it at an obscure bike shop in some industrial estate a few days before my Class 2 test. I asked to hear the engine and immediately fell in love with it. When I had passed my test, I went back to see it, but it was gone, having been sold a few days before. It was only a few months later, after I had sold off the FW400, that I saw an ad for it in the classifieds. I rode down to the bike shop (incidentally, this was the same guy who sold the junkheap XR200 to my friend) and it was the same bike! I bought it a few days later. I thought it was the only one of its kind in Singapore, until I spotted a similar bike a few months later, except that this one was painted a horrible red, white and blue.
Recently I was chatting with one of my patients who rides an Africa Twin, and somehow I mentioned the bike. He said that he knew the previous owner of the bike - except that the guy was now dead. Got killed in a dirt-biking accident (on another bike).
Eventually the XLV started giving problems as well - leaky rusted exhaust pipes, frozen rear suspension. Much as I hated to (yah, sure), I traded it in for a Suzuki DR750 (aka DR BIG - I'm a 6' 200 lbs doctor, so I like the moniker). I had seen this bike previously in the bike shop, but had thought the styling was too "spacey". I like it now.
Kids, don't try this at home. Wear a helmet, at least.
It had a huge lump of a motor, displacing 750cc in one single cylinder. You can imagine the prodigious torque and engine braking. I could get to my office in 20 thumps of that mighty motor, or so it seems. It runs out of breath pretty quickly (beyond 5000 rpm), but low-down torque is awesome. Since the gearbox was very clunky, I usually started off in second gear, switched to third gear once I'm off, and remained there until I reached my destination! My clutch plates suffered, but rather that than my left foot.
That was my last bike. I sold it because I have hardly any time to ride nowadays. One day when I've retired and gotten rid of my kids, I'll buy a Harley Floating-tail or BMW R1600 GS and ride around the world.