Patsy Quick and the KTM a "Gateway to New Horizons"

You know when you bought that album based on the one good track you heard, or the top selling single you liked, and then you get it home and the rest is awful, its a bit like being cheated. It may it only have been £15, but there is sits, its spine or case a reminder of an impetuous moment of excitement. It leads to an age of disappointment, until that moment 10 yrs later when you take it to the second hand shop, where there it sits, marked down to 50p for another ten.

I have done this with cars, the MGB GT which would never start on damp mornings, the third edition of the Land Rover LR Disco which died at 3am in Chamonix when it was -18deg c. and now a Vuaxhall Antara which I have inherited from my mum.

Whilst the BMW F800GS was a nice road bike it did not fill me with confidence off-road. Falling out of love either with a woman, man or a thing, often starts with an off-hand comment. This fateful end of life comment for the F800GS, came from Patsy Quick, famed  Dakar Rally Rider and boss at the Desert Rose Riding Academy. When I visited her stand at the Goodwood Festival of speed in 2014,  the rot set in. So now the BMW is gone, what to do?.

The Yamaha Tenere' 660 for me was too heavy, Morocco proved that, the Beta Alp 4.0 was a small mans toy, Yamaha WR250's looked good but a clean one was rare, the promising new CCM 450 Adventure thingy way too expensive, untried and just maybe 450cc was just too small on high Alpine roads where I love to ride (lack of a dealer/service network for the CCM was a huge issue for me). So I kept coming back to the KTM 690 Enduro R, with all its know short comings.

Lack of fuel range, poor lights, seat etc are all well discussed, but the number of companies making bits for the KTM are huge and there is an active eBay market for the add-ons if required.

My first experince with a KTM 690 Enduro was on a trip in 2012 when a friendly German we were riding with lent me his 2010 machine for a short road section. My first impressions were that it was slow, agricultural, rattled all over and had an awful gear box. I was not impressed. But I have been watching the slow evolution of the 690r for the last few years and at last EIMCA show in Milan the bike looked vastly improved. New Fly by Wire throttle, new Duke engine, and slightly more refinement. But before I was going to spank nearly £7000 on an "album" that promised a lot but ended up in the local Cancer Charity Shop I though I had best try on before buying.

So I called Patsy Quick's  http://www.adventureridingacademy.com/  and headed to Englandshire to learn something and see what I and it could do. After all she promised a "Gateway to New Horizons" 

BMW GS or Bust

A fully kited out ABR  - Icon Suit notwithstanding

The BMW 800GS was my second bike, quickly purchased post a brief and profitable foray with a Suzuki VStrom which I picked up for a song. Suckered into the GS fraternity by promises of adventures by Ewen Macgregor,  (Charley, was the sidekick at that time) it was fully kitted out with Caribou Panniers, Jesse Side Bars and Heidi Tyres and it really looked the part. The 30th Anniversary Paint job finished off the required ABR look. A frustrating digital subscription  to Adventure Bike Rider magazine complete with articles by "Dave an ABR from Brighton" on his latest foray though the Rhine Valley war fields via some rubbish cafe in Strasbourg should have sounded the warning bells, but no.

It took a hairpin 2000m up an Italian Alp to really seal the deal. "ABRism" and its love of the tank like BMW GS was fetish I had finished with. A marketing con for me at least, which came crashing down in a heap of dirt and rubble. These machines I now believe are the motorcycle riders equivalent of the Caravan Club "car of the year recommendations".  Great for towing you home about behind you but rubbish in a fight.

Its the add-ons which turn an already Scorpion Tank like ride into a Chieftain Tank width and weight machine. Don,t get me wrong they handle the weight of the 4 lights, steel panniers, engine bars, bash plates, huge luggage racks strong enough to anchor a Mule to and a repair kit so extensive you could repair a jumbo jet with, quite well, and they are good on the road. But when you drop them you need your entire family and a the accompanying film crew to pick them up. (Episode 2 - The Long Way Round)

Having ridden quite a lot of mountain dirt roads with my GS, it was not until Greg Watts, a fellow, at that time GS owner, struggled up and down the Col du Prapaillion, described the experience as "survival riding and not that much riding fun" did the penny really drop.

The suspension sucks, they dive and wallow under the weight (even with progressive springs), they are way to heavy by at least a 100kg loaded and impossible to pick up on your own if you happen to drop them on a road thats even just off the flat. The 800GS seems worse the the 1200GS as its carries its weight differently. Furthermore they are way to pretty to scuff, scratch and dent. Fine if your using someone else's on a dirt course in Wales, but drop your £15,000 machine on a sharp Italian rock and you will cry. Its not the zippy carefree fun it should be. Time to move on.

The Col du Prapaillion - France

1000 Km of Cols and Dust 1.

1000 Km of Cols and Dust.

The track gets rougher and rougher as it climbs up over 2,400m. The gravel of the lower altitudes has given way to melon sized rocks which lie scattered over the trail, sharp and threatening. The handle bars of the laden 250kg BMW buck and wrench from side to side pulling its bulk alarmingly across the 2m wide track. I am repeating my mantra given to me by my enduro trainer: ‘Keep your head up, look beyond the obstacles, keep light, and let it move underneath you. Don’t grip hard.’ At no other time, on no other ride, and on no other 2-wheeled machine, has this been more important to me than it is right now. On one side of me there is a solid rock wall hand cut by long dead Italian troops, and on the other side? A huge drop off. A 200m cliff. Beckoning, spiralling, crashing, fireball, imagined oblivion.

I am riding The Ligurian Border Ridge Road a 19^th century monument to a more tense period of European history when France and Italy were more likely to have been trading bullets and territory than pleasantries. Today it is increasingly frequented by a growing band of adventure motorcyclists and I am pretending to be one of this growing tribe; although I have to say I fancy myself more as Ewan than Charley. Exactly one year ago to the day on a cold wind-blown Industrial estate in Inverness, I was handed my full motorcycle licence. Call it a mid life crisis - the other symptoms are definitely there - but whatever trigged the journey that I now find myself on, I have no regrets and only adventures that await my twisted throttle progress.

Col de l'Arpettaz test ride

Over the last few weeks, I have preparing myself for a couple of long "GS" style rides. The first one is to ride from Chamonix to Finale on the Mediterranean coast riding on gravel, off-road and high Alpine roads. This short video is from one of the test rides.  I have been using a Contour + HD mini cam with various mounts. This ride is the Route de Montagnes, from the Col des Aravis to Ugine on the , France

K60 Scout by Heidenau

I am busy preparing my BMW F800GS for a transalpine off-road and on-road adventure (details to follow later). However one of the questions that has perplexed me up until now has been tire choice. There are many blog threads, tweets and much other noise about which tire is the best off-road/on road mix. The majority of the information on the web is American where they tend to go for full knobblies, the bigger the better. However big Enduro bikes, also spend a deal of any trip loaded up with a lot of gear and travelling on tarmac, and most, if not all off-road tires don,t handle as well on the road, make a lot of noise and the riders feel a definite buzz through the handle bars. After much reading and searching I have opted to try the K60 Scout by the German brand Heidenau, they are a true 50/50 tire especially designed for big Enduro GS machines. They have just arrived today and they look great, deep tread but with enough rolling edge to suggest they with be cool on the road as well. Only time will tell and I am told I do need to run them in but these tires mark the first significant step towards preparing the bike for a high altitude late summer adventure.