Suckin’ diesel with wind on my Thai
Motorcycles are light on fuel and, with helmet-wearing an optional choice in Thailand, we could enjoy the outdoors and fresh air to the full. In Thailand, nanny-state rules do not disbar an adult’s right to risk splitting his skull if he so chooses. Motorcycling is as it used to be when, as a young man, I owned a bike for a year.
I was no ‘biker’; the machine was a modest, if pretty, 200cc DKW, 10 years old, with no cowling. I wore no leather pants, jacket or big boots, and no helmet. I rode around London, from teaching job to teaching job, in a corduroy jacket, polo-neck sweater, everyday trousers and woollen gloves. That year, London experienced one of the coldest winters ever recorded, known as The Big Freeze of 1963.
From January to March (when there was still rock-hard snow on the pavements) I wore two pairs of trousers and yet I froze. At times, I wrapped my woollen scarf around my head and may have looked like T E Lawrence (of Arabia) who, in his time, also rode a motorbike.
In those days, one commonly saw a motorcyclist’s wife riding on the pillion, and two children in the sidecar. AA Roadside Assistance Officers rode yellow motorcycles with sidecars laden with tools. They did wear safety helmets, but would raise their right hand off the handlebars to salute motorists displaying the AA membership badge.
In South East Asia, it was the temptation of not only seeing but feeling the outdoors in glorious weather — of enjoying proximity to nature and the cooling rush of air — that twice decided us to rent a bike. Happily, my helmetless wife and I avoided accidents but, on both outings, instead ran into Murphy’s Law.
In eight weeks in South East Asia, we encountered rain only three times; on two of these, we happened to be riding a bike.
Negotiating earthen paths on an island on Thailand’s west coast, we got caught in an unprecedented downpour. Moments before, my shirt had been glued to my back with perspiration; now, seconds later, it was pasted to my body with rain, as was every stitch I wore.
Rain bounced on my naked pate and, as I speeded off to find shelter, hit me like buckshot; my wife crouched on the pillion behind. We found cover under a tree and a Thai woman came from her house and gave us towels to dry ourselves. When the cloudburst stopped, we set off again but were shortly, again, drenched to the skin.
Now, the rush of air on our cotton clothes didn’t cool us, but froze us. For once on our Asian journeying, we felt bitterly cold.
Weeks later, in southern Sri Lanka, we had similar misfortune. After an afternoon riding along dusty paths pleasantly cooled by the slipstream of air, we rode into the local town to have dinner at a popular ‘roti’ house with two Skibbereen residents we met earlier by chance, (the dinner for four cost €5). Hardly had we set off for our beachside cabin, five kilometres distant, than the skies opened and the dark, rutted road ran like a river as we negotiated our dangerous journey back to base.
I enjoyed the modest biking; however, I would forego it in cool-temperate Ireland where the legendary ‘wind in one hair’ could land one in gaol. What with the climate requiring upholstered underwear and the law requiring a helmet, motorcycling would be less an ‘outdoor’ experience and more like travelling in a cocoon.
On quite another theme, it seems that a strain of feral cats may survive and breed in Ireland. A friend arrived breathless at our door having diverted to tell me that he’d seen an “enormous” cat and a large, mature fox fighting tooth-and-claw on the road above the deep, wild valley of Scardoon between Bandon and Timoleague in west Cork.
Next day, we saw a fox dead at that very spot. Road kill — or cat kill? It’s a dangerous road so we couldn’t stop to do an autopsy. But the man swore the cat was twice the domestic size.
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