Day: August 29, 2018

BajaBound: A great organization!

Our recommendation for Baja motorcycle insurance is BajaBound.

If you’re headed into Baja, you need to have Mexican insurance on your car, truck, motorcycle, or motor scooter.  Your regular US motor vehicle insurance won’t be recognized as meeting this requirement in Mexico.  It’s that simple.

At the risk of being challenged by a keyboard commando telling me that you don’t have to have insurance in Mexico, I’ll say at the outset that what you need is proof of financial responsibility for liability incurred as the result of a motor vehicle accident.  Yeah, there are other ways of getting around this.  You can arrange a bond in advance with a Mexican bank (not very practical), you can carry enough cash to meet Mexico’s upper liability limits (just bring $333,000 in cash with you to show to the officer if you are stopped) or you can get Mexican insurance.  Door No. 3 is the obvious answer.

You might be tempted to just blow off the requirement for Mexican insurance, and you might get away with it. Then again, you might not. If you are stopped (or worse, you have an accident) and you can’t produce proof of Mexican insurance, you are going to be spending a lot more time in Mexico (and the accommodations will dramatically different) than what you originally planned. Trust me on this. It’s just not worth the risk.

I’ve been traveling in Baja and other parts of Mexico for close to 30 years, and I’ve tried several different outfits. To cut to the chase, BajaBound is the easiest and best way to insure your vehicle. What I like about it is that it’s all done online, it’s inexpensive, and it’s a quality product. What you need to get insurance is an internet connection, your driver’s license, a credit card, your bike’s registration, and a printer. That’s it.

Why go for anything but the best?

I always buy my insurance a day or two before I travel to Baja, and I always set it up to start the day I enter Baja (and just to be on the safe side, I insure for one day longer than I plan to be south of the border). If you’re new to BajaBound, you’ll answer a few questions about yourself to set up an account the first time you visit their website, and then you’re ready to start making selections (how many days, how much coverage, etc.). If you’ve insured previously with BajaBound, all you need to do is log in, specify the vehicle you’ll be using (super easy if it’s one you’ve previously insured), specify the dates, and pick the coverage you want. In my case, it typically works out to something south of $20 per day, and that’s a hell of deal.  You pay with a credit card, the policy is immediately available, and all you need to do is print the proof of insurance and you’re good to go.

I’ve been lucky. I’ve never needed to use my BajaBound insurance because I never crashed my car or motorcycle in Mexico. On one of the tours I led in Mexico, though, one of the guys I rode with had a bad crash. He got through it okay, but the motorcycle did not. My friend put in a claim and BajaBound paid promptly. This is the real deal, folks. It’s good insurance, it’s easy to get over the Internet, it meets all of Mexico’s legal requirements, and when necessary, they pay promptly. It doesn’t get any better than that.  It’s the only insurance I use for my Baja forays.

Would you like to know more about riding in Baja?   Hey, it’s the best riding on the planet!  Check out our ExhaustNotes Baja page for the best routes, hotels, restaurants, whale watching, cave paintings, and more!   Do a search here on the ExhaustNotes blog using the search term “Baja.”   Better yet, pick up a copy of Moto Baja, available now on Amazon.com!

Dirty Secret

Dirt roads…my favorite place to ride.

If I were forced to live in a large city I probably wouldn’t ride motorcycles. Connected technology has brought us all closer together, so close that none of us really like what we see from our fellow man. This ubiquitous-connectedness has created a disconnect in a huge quantity of automobile drivers. Proximity sensors that auto-apply braking and lane-holding algorithms are responses to a driving populace that grows ever more disinterested in what is happening on the other side of the windshield. Self driving cars can’t get here soon enough for me.

Public roads are dangerous for motorcycles, no two ways about it, but there is a better place to ride. It’s a place where youthful hijinks don’t end in an expensive traffic citations or death by obliviousness. This place can be found everywhere, mere inches below the civilized world. This place is called The Dirt.

The Dirt. It’s awesome. There are no drivers on their cell phones.

The Dirt is the true and holy Mother Road, unlike The Street, which relies completely on and has to be built on top of The Dirt. The Dirt stands on its own merits needing neither creation nor sustenance. Dirt will still be here long after the last human on Earth has crashed the last Volvo on Earth into the last telephone pole on Earth while sending the last text ever sent…on Earth.

The Dirt encompasses a wide variety of surfaces from graded county roads to nearly impassable paths more suitable to mountain goats. And you can ride a motorcycle over all of it. True, it’s getting harder to find places to ride near population centers. So pull up stakes and move to the less tony parts of the USA where there are miles and miles of dirt roads to explore.

A better place to ride.

Motorcyclists who start out in the dirt are simply better riders than those that don’t. Finding the limit on pavement is risky, expensive and painful. Those same limits can be exceeded and re-exceeded many times while riding in the dirt, sometimes without any input from the rider. Hell, sometimes the rider is tangled in a bush with a sprained thumb while the motorcycle explores the limits on its own. Crashing in The Dirt is less damaging to both body and bike. I’m not saying you can’t get killed dirt riding but it takes a determined effort to accomplish on your own what a drunken car driver will do for free.

The most interesting, less-picked-over sites are accessible only by dirt roads. Fencing and authorities are few and far between. If you see an abandoned mine shaft that needs falling into or a rusty car that needs a few more bullet holes you can fall or shoot with complete freedom.

Listen, don’t let street riding scares put you off motorcycles. Pick up an old dual purpose bike for a thousand or two and start finding your groove out where it’s safe to do the things you like to do.