We buy motorcycles for different reasons. Sometimes we want to go as fast as we can. Sometimes we want to cruise. Sometimes we want to split traffic like a bastard. Sometimes we just want to bask in our own awesomeness reflected back at us from a shop window. Sometimes we’re vain, sometimes we’re determined and sometimes we’re just plain crazy. This is all us, at different times and sometimes all at the same time! We’re complex creatures and are continuously evolving and changing, every minute of every day.
​
This is why no single motorcycle ever made is the perfect machine that will satisfy all our desires for all eternity. No such motorcycle will ever be made.
In the absence of the perfect motorcycle, we buy the one that seems to tick most of the boxes that are important to us at that time.

I change bikes often and have ridden many bikes. But I always struggle to figure out whether I’m faster on one bike or another. Because the “feeeel” of every bike is different. Some bikes give an exaggerated sense of speed while others feel slower than they actually are. Big Twins and small i4s are perfect examples. Big twins rev lazily and feel slow due to the lumpy turning of the engine. You’re lulled into a feeling of “everything’s under control” till you look down at the speedo or arrive at a corner a lot quicker than you were expecting to. Small, revvy inline 4 engines are the exact opposite. They feel really fast because they rev to eternity and scream loudly. You feel like you’re taking off from the lights like a rocket only to look down at the speedo and see you haven’t even broken the suburban speed limit while the cars in your mirrors are big. On the Monster, a normal takeoff from the lights with average throttle feels totally nonchalant till I look in my mirrors and see the cars are tiny, blurry dots. It takes a while to get your head around this.

​I went from a CBR600RR to a Monster 1200S and got asked recently which one I’m faster on. It set me thinking. The funny thing is that despite being half the engine size, the CBR600RR is the one that is all about speed. Corner speed to be exact. Everything about that bike is built for cornering excellence. The suspension (once I spent 2 Grand on it!) was fantastic at high speeds and high lean angles even with aggressive braking and acceleration. The bike felt light as a feather and completely composed on its chassis, no matter what you throw at it. You could change lines mid corner, even while fully leaned over. For such a nimble bike, it was extremely stable. This gave me a lot of confidence to charge corners at speeds higher than I’d ever done before. It was gutless exiting the corners though and that was frustrating at times.

​The Monster is the exact opposite in this regard. It’s all about hard corner exits on this bike. Bloody sensational, front wheel in the air, corner exits to be exact. Not that it does corner entries badly, it doesn’t. But if I could enter a corner on a CBR600 and exit it on a Monster 1200S, that would be the holy grail of contemporary motorcycle cornering for me!
But like I said, we buy bikes for different reasons at different times in our lives. If going as fast as I can everywhere and all the time was my overriding aim, I would never have replaced the CBR. But the Monster is a lot more than speed. It has substantial presence and the looks have grown on me. It has a real quality feel to it and it makes me want to sit on it and make brrmm brrmm noises in the garage. The super comfortable riding position and hypnotic V-twin pulse allows me to relax and cruise if I want to, without feeling like “what the? This shit makes no sense at all” like I did on the CBR. And lazy entry into corners, knowing I have truckloads of torque to enjoy while exiting, is also relaxing compared to the CBR, where the pressure was on to nail the entry on every corner and maintain high corner speed or it wouldn’t really be a satisfying experience. I don’t really know if I’m much slower overall on the Monster through a series of bends but the experience is a lot less intense and I’m noticing the scenery a bit more. 

​Looking back to my Tuono V2, on the face of it the Monster should be a very similar ride. In some ways it is and in many it isn’t. Serious torque propulsion kicks in on the Monster at 4K while on the Tuono, going by my seat-o-pant-o-meter, comparable torque would only build over 7K. While this may not seem much, it does change how you ride the bike. The Tuono was nowhere near as good a city commuter as the Monster. It had extra wide handlebars with weak and somewhat snatchy low-end throttle response which made manouvering through tight spaces at low speeds a chore. But the Tuono was most certainly a better touring and all-round bike. It’s probably the most comfortable bike I’ve ever owned, for extended time in the saddle. I was doing a lot more touring then than I do now and had other, more suitable bikes for the commute.

Was I faster on the Tuono or the CBR or the Monster? Who knows. Without objective timing under similar conditions, or feedback from riders I regularly ride with, one would never know. But the CBR “felt” the fastest while the Monster and the Tuono “feel” about the same, for whatever its worth.

​Does this mean I’ve spent a fortune on a bike that I’m actually slower on compared to a bike 1/3rd the price? Possibly. Does this make me any less satisfied with my purchase? Nahh! Because what I do know for sure, is that I was having fun on the CBR and I’m having a blast on the Monster. And fun comes in different packaging – speed, adventure, daring, relaxation and the all-encompassing yet hard to define “how it makes you feel”.

And that’s what it boils down to folks. As long as you’re having fun on a bike and it “feels” right to you, it’s the right one. And you can’t put a price on that.

As I lay prone on the floor of my bedroom, unable to move or breathe, 8 hours before my flight to America was due to depart, partying in Las Vegas was the last thing on my mind. About 30 seconds earlier, I’d been the happiest man in the world. Heading over to America on a boys trip to Vegas, to be followed by motorcycling around the beautiful mountains and deserts of South-West America. What was not to like?! Then I bent down to pick up a pair of undies to throw in my bag and TWANG! Something just gave way in my lower back and the pain knocked the wind out of me. I fell face forward unable to support myself. 30 seconds later, as I tried to move my right leg an inch to the right, I stifled a scream and knew this was serious.

I was still there at 3AM, asking my wife to bring me a cup large enough to hold the substantial amount of urine that had collected in my bladder and was now threatening to burst its banks.
​

I didn’t want to be the guy that got taken to hospital for a muscle strain but by 4AM, unable to move and dreading having to shit in that position, I gave up. The ambulance arrived and the medics were extremely sympathetic. They helped me stand, which was bloody painful but a huge relief. I couldn’t even scream as I didn’t want to wake up the kids sleeping in the next room. They took me to the hospital where I was the butt of many jokes as my tragic story of the boys trip to Vegas that was not to be was told and re-told to every nurse within a hundred metres. Random nurses walked up to me and asked “So where were you off to?” before stifling a laugh and hurrying away. Yeah very funny. Giz the morphine and piss off. Which is what they eventually did. ​

I left Marsh’s place around 10AM on the 4th and returned around 5PM on the 7th. I covered 1200 miles over the next 4 days, over half of it through magnificent mountain roads.

There are many fantastic mountain roads (or canyon roads as the murkins call em) near LA. I did the Angeles Crest Highway, a superb piece of tarmac that climbs high into the pine forests of the San Gabriel Mountains and then descends into dry, desert canyons twisting and turning in neat, predictable corners on a fantastic bitumen surface. I missed my Monster. The V-Strom, while a capable all-rounder, was too soft, heavy and floaty to really attack corners. Dat top box is practical but.
​

I headed through the desert to Mojave where a ferocious wind picked up from the east, forcing me to ride tilted at a 30 degree angle to make northerly progress in a straight line. The friendly native American girl at the fuel station in Mojave took pity on me and gave me some route advice to try and keep the wind on my back. She musta said “stay safe” at least 10 times before she let me go, while trying to convince me to “party” in Mojave before moving on. Mojave is a dusty dump in the middle of the desert so you’d have to do some pretty serious drugs to even get in the mood to party there but apparently there’s no dearth of drugs in America, especially on Native reservations.
​

Yosemite. I’d dreamed of visiting this place ever since I’d first seen pictures of it in a rock climbing magazine as an impressionable 19 year old rock climbing wannabe. I’d built it up in my mind as this mythical land of adventures that there was no way the real thing was going to match up. But it did. And more. Yosemite. The place is just magic. One of the most powerful places in all of nature. If you can look past the tourists and the noise and the commercialisation, the silence and the stillness in Yosemite valley, in the shadow of the giants, is breathtaking. As I lay in a meadow, all alone, looking up through fields of wild barley at Half Dome in the brunt of the setting sun, I connected. 
​

Suddenly I didn’t care how far I needed to ride that day, where I was going to sleep and whether I had “ticked off” all the big attractions of Yosemite. Then I walked to the base of El Capitan, the genesis of big wall rock climbing in the world. ​

I rode through the park at night, beautiful gloriously twisty roads that were so much nicer to ride when the tourist traffic was gone. I’d been so mesmerised by Yosemite that I’d forgotten about my fuel situation and was shocked to notice the fuel light flashing at me in the middle of nowhere. I was strangely calm though, a night in the open in Yosemite seemed almost inviting. It was freezing of course, with sub-zero nightly temperatures so just as well that I did manage to find fuel at the park exit at Wawona and then found a cosy cabin to sleep in at around 9:30PM at Fish Camp, a few Ks out of Yosemite’s southern entrance.
​

The next day I needed to end up somewhere within a couple of hours from LA so that the day after I could meet my cousin, then ride back to Marsh’s place to return the bike and then go to the airport to catch my flight at 11PM. So I headed south, meandering through scenic back roads, avoiding the highway. The day really began to take shape as I headed up Squaw Valley towards Sequoia National Park. 
​

This was the start of the best motorcycle road I have ever ridden on. Yes, Best. 
​It’s called the General’s Highway, California route no 198. It has character this road. It doesn’t have the best corners I’ve ever ridden or the best scenery or the most floral diversity or the least traffic. But it has a mix of all of that in such abundance that the character of the road is undeniable. The road climbs from 1000ft to 12,000ft and then back down, loops through the Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, all in the space of a hundred KMs. Both parks are superlatives of the American landscape. Kings Canyon is the deepest canyon in America while the Sequoia National Park contains the largest tree in the world and the highest peak in America (outside Alaska). ​

Walking amongst these giants is humbling. You can imagine the earth quaking and men and animals running in fear as one of these came crashing down in a thunderstorm. Photos will never do these things justice. I would highly recommend the trip up to see them if you’re ever in California.
The road changes character again after the Forest of the Giants. For a few Ks you ride through massive trees that are right on the adge of the road. ​

In fact, many corners are basically going round the circumference of giant Sequoia trees! At one point the road actually splits between 4 giant trees. It’s a bit bizzare but super cool. ​

All the time, the road is descending. Over the next 30 odd Ks, it descends from 10K ft to 1Kft. That means, steep, tight corner after corner after corner. Motion sickness victims need not apply. It was a stunning ride. Smooth and grippy for the most part, narrow and blind always. All the corners are between 10 – 30MPH signposted and all of them are bloody fantastic! ​