Small adventure motorcycles are the best!
I’m a soloist at heart — I’ve never been much of a team player. I like solo pursuits; it’s just how I’m built. I didn’t play team sports; I didn’t work in offices with lots of people around me; hell, I grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand.
Oddly enough, I was also not a rural person either and quickly found my way into cities, first Auckland (NZ’s largest), and then when I was 18, to Sydney, to London at 21, Los Angeles at 23, New York somewhere along the way, Bangkok and Ho Chi Minh City have all been homes at one point or another.
For the most part, I think traveling is best done alone, of course, meeting people along the way but moving as a soloist is, I believe, the ideal path. And for me, motorcycles are and will probably remain my preferred mode of overland transport. There are places and things you can do on two wheels that you can’t do on four or more.
Large motorcycles are cool, fast, strong, and expensive, but honestly, they’re not perfect, and in my opinion, they’re not ideal for a soloist. Small, nimble, light, and easy to ride, that’s what I’m talking about.
Mr. Honda first made a simple bike in the 1940s with a simple premise — affordable, reliable urban transport. I would say the Honda scooter has lifted more people out of poverty than almost any other single device in history.
I can’t imagine that he was thinking about the muddy hills of Northern Thailand in the monsoon as somewhere the little Honda Dream might be making its way along, but it certainly does. People take their wares to the market, their livestock, their kids to school, visiting relatives, or give rides to someone to get to a doctor or hospital over these rutted, muddy clay tracks all over Northern Thailand on Honda Dreams.
I also doubt that he envisioned the whirling, almost-conscious streams of Hondas moving in perfect unison through the chaotic streets of Ho Chi Minh City, but they do.
This is the kind of riding I love, all things coming in all directions at all times. — like rock climbing (another solo pursuit), you become one with the bike, the city, and the other people. As a rider, you find the ‘flow state,’ in the river of humans on motorcycles, of which you are a single piece. Together the throng is a syncopated network with no leader, no written rules but a living, constantly evolving thing that creates rules on the fly, which everyone, amazingly, understands.
I lived in Vietnam for a couple of years building what was to become Coaqua, a coconut water business, but I spent much time out and about on two wheels. I rode this little 1967 Honda for 2000 + km from Hanoi to Ho Chi Minh city. The Honda 67. In Vietnam has a long and cherished history. They first arrived on those shores during the “American war,” as it’s called in Vietnam. I fondly remember a story told to me by the bar owner in a local bar in Danang. The woman owner said to me that her dad had the first and only Honda 67 in their village and that he drove her pregnant mother on the bike to the hospital where Mem was born. Subsequently, all the women who needed to get to the hospital to give birth that year arrived on the back of that little Honda.
In India, I used to rent Royal Enfields; back in the day, I would ride the Royal Enfield bullet, the classic Enfield — designed in England and sold to India and now, of course, the largest motorcycle company in the world based on numbers of bikes built. The last time I was in India, which was in 2018, I decided it was time to try the new Royal Enfield Himalayan adventure bike, and so, in the hilltop city of Shimla, I did just that. The Himalayan in the Himalayas, irony aside … was outstanding. A small-ish, great-looking dual-purpose bike, designed by an Italian, built by Indians. Yes! This Himalayan, I thought, was almost the perfect motorcycle.
A couple of years earlier, I’d been in California visiting friends, a close friend had a couple of BMW 1200, whatever-they’re-called, dual-purpose bikes, and he and I rode up to Big Sur from Los Angeles together. On the 101 freeway, the BMW was solid, grounded to the highway, comfortable, fast, and everything you would imagine. Amazingly well built, German engineering at its absolute best but…too heavy, too tall, too expensive. This was not Mr. Honda’s dream; it wasn’t mine either.
For me, the pleasure of riding in the outback was not having to spend too much time worrying about the what-ifs — but on this BMW, that’s exactly what I found myself doing. I couldn’t touch the ground on central California’s back and dirt roads, and I knew I couldn’t pick this thing up if I laid it down (I’m short, but I’m not weak). What if I can’t get out of these ruts? What if the bike slides down this shitty stony hillside? How on earth am I going to be able to pick it up?
And so, cut to post-pandemic 2022, I started to think about doing something new. after a lifetime of travel and riding. I sold my business and wanted to do something I loved. You hear this all the time- follow your dreams, do what you are passionate about, and often, it’s not evident or apparent. I love cooking, but I don’t want to open a restaurant or make a cookbook. I love music, but I already did that. So what the hell?
And so, after months of pondering, daydreaming, it dawned on me — I’ll build adventure bikes — I’ll take the ethos of Mr. Honda — affordable, reliable, convenient and the off-roadyness of the BMW 1200, whatever-the-hell it’s called — and I’ll use the original Land Rovers as aesthetic inspiration, and I’ll take my love of travel, and I’ll wrap this whole fucking lot into …Outwild — I just needed a bike to build from.
I chose the ubiquitous Suzuki DR200 Trojan — why did I do that? It’s a reliable workhorse that’s been in production with almost no changes for 25 years; it’s got a fierce reputation as a farm bike in New Zealand, which means it’s indestructible, and there are loads of them around. It’s got super Japanese engineering. A metal tank, double kickstands for hillside stops. It weighs next to nothing, meaning most people can pick it up when it gets laid down. It’s only 200cc but produces the same horsepower as the Royal Enfield Himalayan, which is 400cc.
Am I a trained bike builder? Nope, but I am a pretty good designer and a reasonably confident mechanic; I can weld a little bit, I can spray paint, and I plan on making this little Suzuki DR into the first of what I hope will be a great-looking, excellent riding adventure bike that will get someone to the store or over the back roads of India, out of campgrounds and into the bush of New Zealand and where ever else they might want to go.