Sleepless in Seattle? Nah. How about awake in Ankara?
I’ve had a few secret missions to Turkey and I love the place. When I fly in to Ankara, I usually arrive at 2:30 a.m. over there. That would be 4:30 p.m. back in So Cal, so I’m still usually wide awake after flying through the night (it’s 12 hours to Istanbul, and another hour to the capital). Hence the title of this blog.
Maybe I was a Turk in a prior life. But then I’ve sort of always felt I was Mexican in a prior life, too. I love Mexico (especially Baja), but here’s something you probably didn’t know: I love Turkey, too. And it’s weird…as far as I know, there’s nobody in the Berk family tree from Turkey. But my last name, with it’s unusual spelling (B-E-R-K) is a common last name in Turkey. When I’m over there and I pay with a credit card, folks frequently ask if I’m a Turk. Berk the Turk. Go figure.
Ankara is one of my favorite cities in Turkey, and like the rest of the country, it’s a photography Nirvana. I’ll share a few of my favorite Ankara spots in upcoming blogs, and I thought to get the ball rolling I’d share a few from the airport ride into downtown.
I’ll have a few more in future blogs…the Ataturk Museum, Old Ankara, the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations, and more.
Turkey would be my dream ride. They sell Zongshens over there, and the 250cc RX3 would be perfect for a ride across Turkey, I think. Someday.
Timely, perhaps…with the reactions we received on our recent Nine Reasons You Should Ride A Chinese Motorcycle blog, I received a nice email from Sergeant Zuo, the man who led our ride across China a few short years ago.
How are you doing recently? I bought the Zongshen RX3S, which is an old version with a displacement of 380cc. The RX3 has been 96,000 kilometers in 8 years. Our country’s motor vehicles have mandatory scrapping regulations, so I’d better replace them with a motorcycle. Who makes me like it. No matter how much I like RX3, I have to sell it, because I can only apply for one parking space in our carport, so let’s find someone who likes RX3.
Is the epidemic situation here for good or bad? Is the epidemic situation there any better? Be sure to protect yourself.
A friend who knows that you and I are good friends once said: “The real Sino-US friendship is among the people.” I like this sentence very much and I give it to you.
Enclosed are some photos of my RX3S. (You can use the letter and photos I sent you anyway). Miss you very much, my friend! Say hello to your wife and family, especially your grandchildren.
——— Zuo Zhenyi 2021.10.16 China•Lanzhou
Here are a couple of additional photos that Zuo sent to us:
So there you have it. That “uncle” business…I used to be a secret agent, you know, the Man from U.N.C.L.E., and…nah, just kidding. The Chinese named me Big Uncle and they called Gresh Little Uncle when we rode across China with them. The Chinese words are Da Jiu and Ar Jiu (Big Uncle and Little Uncle) and the “jiu” parts sounds a lot like Joe, so it was kind of a natural fit.
Don’t miss anything…get the latest as soon as it’s published!
Want to ride with us as we crossed China? Hey, it’s all right here!
Gee, I was gonna buy the RX3 and then I heard they were coming out with the RX4. Then I was gonna buy the RX4 and I heard they were coming out with a 400cc twin. Then I was gonna buy the 400cc twin and I heard they were coming out with a 650cc twin. Then I was gonna buy the 650 and I heard about this new 850cc Zongshen adventure bike.
I’m going to guess the above is a thought that has trickled through more than a few minds. It’s what I’m guessing occurs everytime Zongshen announces or leaks (I’m not sure what the appropriate word should be) that they have something newer, bigger, and better coming down the pike (like the RX850 you see above). Webster defines mayhem as “needless or willful damage or violence” (in a criminal context it’s the intentional mutilation or disfigurement of another human being) and Dictionary.com defines cannibalize as “to cut into; cause to become reduced; diminish.” Both words (i.e., cannibalize and mayhem) somehow seem relevant to Zongshen’s marketing practice of announcing new models just as (and sometimes even before) the preceding displacement model enters the marketplace. You’d think it would cannibalize sales of the models currently in showrooms, especially given our brainwashed belief that more displacement is always a good thing.
But what do I know? I sell one or two used motorcycles every decade or so, while Zongshen sells something like a million new motorcycles every year. I suspect companies selling Zongs both here and in other countries sell every bike they get (I know that’s the case with CSC, and I’ve seen it to be the case in Colombia). I once had a guy write to me who wanted to buy two RX3s so he and his wife could tour Colombia, but he couldn’t find a dealer in Colombia who wasn’t sold out. He wrote to me after reading Moto Colombia to ask if I could intervene with the AKT Motos general manager (I did, good buddy Enrique obliged, and that couple’s ride through magical Colombia went well).
My advice? Buy what you can get now. The 650 Zongshen hasn’t even hit the streets yet, so don’t wait for it or the RX850 you see above. If you want to have a lot of fun for a little money, any of the available Zongs will serve you well. I put a lot of miles on my RX3 and I got good money when I sold it 5 years later.
Oh, one more word I wanted to address, and it’s an adjective: Dormant. Webster defines it as being asleep or inactive. It is a word that is not in Zongshen’s dictionary.
Epic motorcycle rides on Zongshens, Harleys, KLRs, Enfields, and more? It’s all right here!
The RG3 is Zongshen’s newest motorcycle, and yesterday this video and its description showed up in my feed:
We are excited to share the epic journey of RG3 crew! Along the 318 national highway, our RG3 adventurers spent 12 days riding to reach Lhasa, Tibet from our factory in Chongqing. May the journey inspire you to start you own!
This is cool stuff and Zongshen (sold by CSC Motorcycles here in North America) is a cool company. I’ve been in the Zongshen plant a bunch of times along with good buddy Gobi Gresh, and we rode with Zongshen across China.
Gresh and I had a lot of fun with the Cult of the Zong, and we joked about the lines we’d be able to use after our 6,000-mile ride in the Ancient Kingdom. You know, little things we’d slip into a conversation like “as I was riding across the Gobi Desert” and “when we rode down off the Tibetan plateau” and others. We knew it would gave us the street cred we needed to converse with hardcore riders making the trek to Starbuck’s.
Zongshen puts together first class videos, and I always watch their new ones as they are released. One of my Zongshen favorites is the one they did on our China ride:
And another I enjoy is Joe Gresh’s video on that same ride:
I woke up last Friday with but one thought: I have got to get out on my motorcycle today.
Well, I did, and I had a glorious ride up through the Cajon Pass in southern California. That’s the pass that cuts between the San Gabriel Mountains and the San Bernardino Mountains. Most folks would just take Interstate 15 from So Cal to the High Desert through the Cajon, but to me riding a motorcycle on the freeway is a bit of a crime against nature. There are surface streets that get you through most of the Cajon Pass, and if you know where to look, there are dirt roads that do the same. Those roads are way more fun, but it’s like I said…you have to know where to look.
Me? I know where to look.
On old Route 66 through the Cajon Pass. Yep, it’s still there, and it was a perfect photo op with my black CSC TT250 on a cloudy June morning.
Big freight trains slog through the Cajon Pass on a regular basis, and there’s a dirt road that runs along the tracks for several miles. It was a perfect road for the TT250. I was out there on my own, having a good old time when I stopped to grab a photo, and that’s when I heard it. The rails, that is. They started singing. They do that when there’s a train downrange. You can actually hear the metallic buzz the rails emit miles before the train comes into view. Time to switch the cell phone camera to the video mode. I didn’t see anything for a couple of minutes, and then way down the hill in the distance I could just make out a headlight. Then that one orange orb became three blurry headlights, the signature of the first of several freight locomotives. They were working hard. It takes a lot of power to pull a train up a mountain pass. The lights grew in size, the indistinct three orange dots came into focus, and there it was:
The train was a monster. I finished the video, I took several stills, and then I mounted up and rode at a sedate pace in the opposite direction for a good five minutes before I saw the end of that train. I’ll bet it was three miles long. Maybe more. There were four locomotives pulling and there was a fifth on the tail end. It’s hard to imagine the weight and the energy of a freight train like the one I saw that morning. And it was doing it all going uphill, charging through the Cajon Pass from the Pomona Valley up to the High Desert. It was impressive.
That train just kept coming, and coming, and coming.
I had a hell of a ride that morning. A bit of freeway (but not too much), a fair amount of dirt, a stream crossing that was deeper than I thought it would be (and damn, there was no one to video me standing on the pegs with water splashing all over my boots and jeans), a train, Old Route 66, and nice, cool weather. It was grand.
It was about 5 years ago that I was sitting in Zongshen’s marketing offices in Chongqing discussing this, that, and the other thing on the RX3 for CSC Motorcycles. All the while, I kept stealing peeks at a 150cc dual sport bike the Zongshen wizards had mounted on a display pedestal in their conference area. Finally, I asked…what’s the deal on that motorcycle? Can it be had with a 250cc engine?
My good friend Chongqing Fan smiled. I could read that guy like a book, and what I was reading was this: He knew, and he knew I knew: The guys at Zongshen, China’s largest motorcycle manufacturer, they can do anything. A few quick digital pics back to CSC, a recommendation, a quick decision from a CEO who’s not afraid to make decisions (that would be Azusa Steve), and the CSC TT250 was born. I own one of the very first to arrive in America, and it’s been a hoot. We’ve even done Baja on the TT250s (talk about brand loyalty…half the guys on that ride also own an RX3). CSC can barely keep TT250 motorcycles in stock; they sell as soon as they arrive. Most of the time, they’re sold before the ship gets here.
I selected black for my TT250 (one of three or four colors available in 2016) because I thought it would photograph well, and I was right. It does a lot more than just sit there and look pretty, though. The TT250 is a great motorcycle. It’s simple, torquey, easy to maintain, great handling, reliable, comfortable, and inexpensive. Plus, I know the factory and the people who make and import this motorcycle. Good buddy Gerry and I wrote the shop manual for this motorcycle, and I know the bike’s innards. You might say I know it inside and out. I think the fact that I know most everyone involved in creating and importing this motorcycle makes it even more of a hoot to ride.
TT250s on the production line in Chongqing. Mine was in there somewhere.Your mileage may vary.
The TT250 is about as simple as a motorcycle gets, and it has what has to be one of the most ubiquitous and reliable motorcycle engines on the planet. You see these motors in various versions (ranging from 125cc to 250cc) everywhere. They’re bulletproof. They’re designed to be rode hard and put away wet, and that’s what folks in South America, Central America, Asia, and the Middle East do. It’s no accident that my good buddies at Janus Motorcycles chose the same engine to power their amazing 250cc motorcycles. I’m going to ride my TT250 until the wheels fall off. Then I’ll buy replacement parts for probably something like $9 and repeat the process.
The TT250 is a light bike. It’s easy to ride and easy to keep vertical (they tell me it’s easy to pick up if you drop it, but I’ve never dropped mine). The TT250 weighs 309 pounds wet and in an age of overweight, bloated, and expensive monster motorcycles, riding it is fun. It’s not an ego statement. It’s a motorcycle. It’s what a motorcycle should be. I feel like a kid every time I get on it (and in six months, I’ll be 70 years old). I started riding motorcycles on a Honda Super 90 (a 90cc single) when Lyndon Johnson was in the White House. Riding a simple single makes me a hooligan again, braapping the mean streets of rural New Jersey before I was old enough to have a license and loving every second of it.
I have the 49T rear sprocket on my TT250 (one down from the stock 50T), and that’s about perfect for me. My bike tops out at about 66 mph indicated, and after my hundred mile ride through the Cajon Pass that morning I topped off and checked my fuel economy. 62.5 mpg. Just a little better than I usually get. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.
I have the Wolfman bags on my TT. They’re light, they don’t get in the way, they’ve held up well, and they’re handy if I want to carry stuff. That’s usually a few tools (just in case, but I’ve never needed them on the road), a bottle of Aleve, a change of underwear, and I’m good for a couple of weeks in Baja.
Speaking of Baja, good buddy Baja John is another guy with the same affliction as me: He owns both an RX3 and a TT250. And a .44 Magnum or two, but that’s a story for another blog. Baja John keeps his TT250 at a beachfront home in Baja, and as soon as this Covid 19 business is in the rearview mirror, I’m headed down there. I want to photograph one or two of the more remote missions, John knows the trails, and the TT250 is the motorcycle to get us there.
More good times are on the horizon, folks. Stay tuned.
Sergeant Zuo on our 2016 ride across China, somewhere along the Silk Road.
I recently wrote to my good buddy Sergeant Zuo, who led our 2016 ride across China. Zuo lives in Lanzhou, a huge refining center we visited on the China ride. He and I became great friends on that 38-day adventure. Zuo is a former Chinese Army senior NCO and in an earlier life I was a lowly lieutenant in the US Army. But hey, a lieutenant outranks even a senior noncommissioned officer, and every morning (even though we served in different armies), he’d snap to attention and salute me. And I would then return the salute. It was cool and it added to the good nature and relaxed camaraderie we all felt on the China adventure. Zuo is that rare natural leader you sometimes encounter when groups gather and he was perfect for the China ride. He made what could have a been a scary undertaking into a grand adventure. I would follow him anywhere, and I imagine the troops in the Army units he led felt the same way.
Sergeant Zuo along Qinghai Lake, one of the largest salt water lakes on the planet. We were about a third of the way into our ride when I took this photo.
Zuo owns an RX3 (he was one of the very first people to buy an RX3 in China) and it is his daily driver. He doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Chinese, but that had no impact on us. We spoke RX3 and riding, I guess, and we formed an immediate bond. A good motorcycle can do that, you know.
Sergeant Zuo on the ferry ride to Qingdao. Qingdao was our final destination on the China ride.
Our trip started in Chongqing, we rode to northwest China (the Tibetan Plateau and the Gobi Desert), then back to central China, and finally over to Beijing and then Qingdao. Qingdao was a name that stuck in my mind. Nearly 50 years ago I was on a US Army missile site in Korea and our primary target line pointed straight across the Yellow Sea at Qingdao. And now, here we were at the end of our China ride five decades later in that very same city.
Zuo, Gresh, I, and a dozen others rode our motorcycles right onto the beach at Qingdao, stripped down, and went swimming in the Yellow Sea’s cool waters. Damn, that felt good. After fighting the oppressive heat and humidity of a damp Chinese summer, I could have spent all day in that cool ocean water. Back in the day I was ready to launch missiles at bad guys coming from Qingdao; 50 years later I swam in the Yellow Sea with Zuo at that very same spot to wrap up the grandest adventure of my life.
Our route on the ride across China.
With that as a backdrop, here’s the note from my good buddy Zuo:
Yeah, I know, you don’t speak Chinese. That’s not a problem; we’ll just turn to Google’s translation site:
Joe (big uncle):
Thank you for your letter.
Seeing the spread of the new coronavirus (CV-19) in the United States from the Internet, this terrible guy has become a common enemy of humanity, but we should believe that it will be defeated! Although the epidemic situation here has been controlled and alleviated, the epidemic alert has not ended.
J, I’m fine, thank you.
Reading your and Erji’s blog is the biggest joy in my life, and it’s great to see you playing happily. Because you have always believed that there is a good friend who cares about you on the other side of the ocean, has you been paying attention to you.
When the epidemic is over, it will be my happiest waiting if I can travel with you.
I miss you so much–my mentor.
Say hello to your friend.
I wish you and Erji all the best.
—- Zuo Zhenyi in Lanzhou, China, March 20, 2020
About that “Erji” business…the Chinese quickly gave Gresh and me Chinese names. I was Dajiu (big uncle), and Joe was Erji (little uncle). After that initial christening, those were our names for the entire trip. It was cool.
You know, when this CV19 business is over, it would be grand to get Zuo over here for a US and Baja ride. It’s something to look forward to, and I promise you it’s going to happen.
Edit: Just in case you haven’t seen these videos, here you go. The first is Gresh’s China Ride video, the second is the one released by Zongshen. They’re both great.
Wow, was I ever surprised when a young guy in a pickup truck held up this note as we rode south on Highway 101!
The photo you see above popped up in my Facebook feed this morning letting me know it was 4 years ago that I posted it, and that meant it was four years ago that we finished the 5000-mile Western America Adventure Ride. Here’s what I originally posted on the CSC blog about that “Hi Joe” sign:
We are in Santa Maria tonight. It was an easy roll once we got past San Jose, but the traffic on the 101 leaving San Francisco and all the way down past San Jose was rough this morning. After that, we basically put the bikes on cruise control and ran 75 mph all the way down.
Here’s a cool thing…on the 101, just past San Luis Obispo, a couple of guys in a gray pickup truck pulled up alongside our convoy and starting beeping and waving at us. When they were alongside me, one held up a sign that said “Hi, Joe!” Cool stuff. I have no idea who those guys were, but it’s a safe bet they’ll read this. Guys, when you do, shoot me an email. It made my day seeing you today. I had a good laugh over it.
I mentioned the above in the CSC blog, and later that same day I received this email from my good buddy San Marino Bill:
Joe:
My son just called me (3 pm) from the Paso Robles area and wanted to know where the CSC group was riding today. He is up there picking up his son. He was following a group of good looking bikes (10 or 12). I told him to make a sign that said HI JOE and show it to the leader. I hope it was you.
Bill
That was a pretty cool experience, and it kind of wrapped up how well the ride was received and how much good it did for the RX3 motorcycle and our efforts to show the world it is a great motorcycle. You can read more about that in 5000 Miles At 8000 RPM, the book about bringing the RX3 to America and the Western America Adventure Ride.
My 4-year-old RX3, with its Western America Adventure Ride decal. I still own the bike. It’s in my garage right now, just a few feet from where I sit typing this blog.
We sure had a blast on that ride, and people were following it on the CSC blog all over the world. I remember Pioneer Day in Idaho on that ride, where we literally rode in a parade and people lined the streets awaiting our arrival on the CSC motorcycles. I’ll post that story in another day or two.
Another grand adventure is a little less than a month away. I’ll be riding the new RX4 from Mexico to Canada in the Southern California Motorcycle Association’s 2019 Three Flags Classic. I last did that ride in 2005 (you can read the story about that here), and I’m looking forward to doing it again on the RX4. I’ll be blogging the ride daily, I have a commission for two magazine articles on it, and I’m toying with the idea of a short book on the ride, the RX4 bike, the SCMA, CSC, and Zongshen. That’s going to be good for CSC, Zongshen, the SCMA, and the Three Flags Classic event. It will be another grand adventure. Stay tuned, because I’ll be posting much more here on the ExNotes blog.
Good buddy Bob, our most recent adventure moto book contest winner!
It’s that time again, and our first quarter 2019 adventure motorcycle book contest winner is good buddy Bob. Bob became eligible when he signed up for our automatic email blog updates, and you can, too! We’re giving away another book at the end of this quarter, and all you have to do is sign up for our automatic email updates.
When we notified Bob of his win, he wrote to us…
I like your approach with the Zongshens…1200cc is not required for touring. My touring machine is shown in the photo: A 2002 Honda Silverwing scooter. I sold it with 35K showing on the odometer and later bought another.
Bob, your copy of Destinations, our latest moto adventure book, will be going out to you in the next few days. Congratulations to you and thanks for being an ExhaustNotes reader!
The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.
All went swimmingly on the tour but while I was in China That Other Magazine was going through upheaval on every level. I returned to a smoking, charred magazine landscape of fewer, thinner issues and a frequently changing vision for That Other Magazine. I ran the China story past each new editor (in quick succession) they all liked it but the reformatted book had many must-print stories and little space for a long feature on China.
That Other Magazine went through another major restyle opting for a spare, photo-heavy layout, a cut back to 6 issues a year and hired a platoon of fresh, new writers. I re-re-re-pitched the thing, refusing to believe it was over but like any failed love affair the day came when I realized my blue passion for That Other Magazine had faded to grey.
Whenever I do a free-riding junket for a motorcycle manufacturer there are no preconditions. I may love or hate their motorcycle but I will write honestly about it. The only thing I can offer in return for their hard-earned money is publicity. My job was to write a story and get it published: I had failed myself, CSC, Joe Berk, my fellow China Riders and Zongshen.
At this point I pretty much gave up on the China tour and shoved the thing into a dark, dusty corner of my hard drive. I couldn’t stand looking at the story, so much effort that came to naught. Newer challenges awaited writing and I wasn’t going to let the China story drag me down. I moved on.
Enter this blog and its demanding publishing schedule. While I’m no fountain of content I’ve never written as many words a month as I have since we started ExhaustNotes. The hectic pace and all-consuming need for content has changed my opinion of writing from an art form into a trade. I make stories like I pour concrete. Instead of a failure, the China tour became just another slab. I pitched the thing to Motorcycle.com and thankfully they bit. I rewrote the story to reflect the new realities regarding That Other Magazine and the result can be found here: Kung Fu Riding. Sorry it took so long.
This is a blog I wrote for CSC Motorcycles a little more than 4 years ago (time sure flies when you’re having fun). The topic was as timely then as it is today. I like big bikes, but I like small bikes more, and I’m convinced that a small bike makes way more sense than a big bike for real world adventure touring. I thought I would post the blog again, as we are having way too much fun with CSC, BMW, Janus, and other companies who have seen the light. Here’s the blog from back in September 2014…
A 250cc bike seems too small to many riders. Is it?
The 250cc CSC Cyclone.
The motorcycle craze in the US really started in the mid-1960s. I know motorcycling goes back way before that, but motorcycling was essentially a fringe endeavor until Honda came on the scene. We met the nicest people on Hondas, if you remember, and that ad tagline was a winner (so is “Don’t Miss The Boat,” by the way). (Note: “Don’t Miss The Boat” was CSC’s tagline for the US RX3 introduction, and those who didn’t miss the boat participated in one of the best deals in the history of motorcycling.)
Honda’s sales model was a good one. They pulled us in with small bikes and then convinced us we needed larger and larger bikes. Many of us started with a Honda Cub (the 50cc step-through), we progressed to the Super 90 (that was my jump in), then the 160cc baby Super Hawk, then the 305cc Super Hawk, and at that point in about 1967 that was it for Honda. They didn’t have anything bigger (yet). After the 305cc Super Hawk, the next step for most folks was either a Harley or a Triumph.
Yours Truly, on a Honda Super 90 in the mid-’60s.
You know, back in those days, a 650cc motorcycle was a BIG motorcycle. And it was.
But Honda kept on trucking…they offered a 450 that sort of flopped, and then in 1969 they delivered the CB-750. That bike was so far out in front of everyone else it killed the British motorcycle industry and (with a lot of self-inflicted wounds) it almost killed Harley.
The Japanese manufacturers piled on. Kawasaki one-upped Honda with a 900. (Another note…it’s one of those early Kawi 900s that Gobi Gresh is restoring in the Zed’s Not Dead series.) Honda came back with a 1000cc Gold Wing (which subsequently grew to 1100cc, then 1500cc, and is now an 1800cc). Triumph has a 2300cc road bike. Harley gave up on cubic centimeters and now describes their bikes with cubic inches. And on and on it went. It seems to keep on going. The bikes keep on getting bigger. And bigger. And bigger. And taller. And heavier. And bigger. In a society where everything was being supersized (burgers, bikes, and unfortunately, our beltlines), bigger bikes have ruled the roost for a long time. Too long, in my opinion.
Is this where it’s going? (Note: I shot this photo at the Long Beach International Motorcycle Show about 15 years ago.)
Weirdly, today many folks think of a 750 as a small bike. It’s a world gone nuts. But I digress…
I’ve done a lot of riding. Real riding. My bikes get used. A lot. I don’t much care for the idea of bikes as driveway jewelry, and on a lot of my rides in the US, Mexico, and Canada, I kind of realized that this “bigger is better” mentality is just flat wrong. It worked as a motorcycle marketing strategy for a while, but when you’re wrestling with a 700-lb bike in the soft stuff, you realize it doesn’t make any sense.
Really?
I’ve had some killer big bikes. A Triumph Daytona 1200. A Harley Softail. A TL1000S Suzuki. A Triumph Speed Triple (often called the Speed Cripple, which in my case sort of turned out to be true). All the while I was riding these monsters, I’d see guys on Gold Wings and other 2-liter leviathans and wonder…what are these folks thinking?
I’d always wanted a KLR-650 for a lot of reasons. The biggest reasons were the bikes were inexpensive back then and they were lighter than the armored vehicles I had been riding. I liked the idea of a bike I could travel on, take off road, and lift by myself if I dropped it. To make a long story short, I bought the KLR and I liked it. I still have it. But it’s tall, and it’s heavy (well over 500 lbs fully fueled). But it was a better deal than the bigger bikes for real world riding. Nobody buys a KLR to be a poser, nobody chromes out a KLR, and nobody buys leather fringe for a KLR, but if that’s what you want in a motorcycle, hey, more power to you.
More background…if you’ve been on this blog for more than 10 minutes you know I love riding in Baja. I talk about it all the time. My friends tell me I should be on the Baja Tourism Board. Whatever. It is some of the best riding in the world. I’ll get down there the first week I take delivery on my CSC Cyclone, and if you want to ride with me, you’re more than welcome. (Note: And I did. We did a lot of CSC Baja tours, and CSC introduced a lot of folks to riding and to Baja. That one innocent little sentence became a cornerstone of CSC’s marketing strategy.)
I was talking up Baja one day at the First Church of Bob (the BMW dealership where me and some of my buddies hang out on Saturday mornings). There I was, talking about the road to San Felipe through Tecate, when my good buddy Bob said “let’s do it.” Baja it was…the other guys were on their Harleys and uber-Beemers, and I was on my “small bore” KLR. The next weekend we pointed the bars south, wicked it up, and rode to San Felipe.
The Boys…bound for San Felipe with my KLR leading the pack
That was a fun trip. I took a lot of ribbing about the KLR, but the funny thing was I had no problem keeping up with the monster motos. In fact, most of the time, I was in the lead. And Bob? Well, he just kept studying the KLR. On Saturday night, he opened up a bit. Bob is the real deal…he rode the length of Baja before there was a road. That’s why he was enjoying this trip so much, and it’s why he was so interested in my smaller bike. In fact, he announced his intent to buy a smaller bike, which surprised everybody at the table.
Holding court on the Sea of Cortez. That’s Bob on the right.
Bob told us about a months-long moto trip he made to Alaska decades ago, and his dream about someday riding to Tierra del Fuego. That’s the southernmost tip of South America. He’d been to the Arctic Circle, and he wanted to be able to say that he’d been all the way south, too.
I thought all of this was incredibly interesting. Bob is usually a very quiet guy. He’s the best rider I’ve ever known, and I’ve watched him smoke Ricky Racers on the Angeles Crest Highway with what appeared to be no effort whatsoever. Sometimes he’d do it on a BMW trade-in police bike standing straight up on the pegs passing youngsters on Gixxers and Ducksters. Those kids had bikes with twice the horsepower and two-thirds the weight of Bob’s bike, and he could still out ride them. Awesome stuff. Anyway, Bob usually doesn’t talk much, but during dinner that night on the Sea of Cortez he was opening up about some of his epic rides. It was good stuff.
Finally, I asked: Bob, what bike would you use for a trip through South America?
Bob’s answer was immediate: A 250.
That surprised me, but only for an instant. I asked why and he told me, but I kind of knew the answer already. Bob’s take on why a 250: It’s light, it’s fast enough, it’s small enough that you can pick it up when it falls, you can change tires on it easily, you can take it off road, you can get across streams, and it gets good gas mileage.
Bob’s answer about a 250 really stuck in my mind. This guy knows more about motorcycles than I ever will, he is the best rider I’ve ever known, and he didn’t blink an eye before immediately answering that a 250 is the best bike for serious world travel.
It all made a lot of sense to me. I had ridden my liter-sized Triumph Tiger in Mexico, but when I took it off road the thing was terrifying. The bike weighed north of 600 lbs, it was way too tall, and I had nearly dropped it several times in soft sand. It was not fun. I remembered another ride with my friend Dave when he dropped his FJR in an ocean-sized puddle. It took three of us to get the thing upright, and we dropped it a couple of more times in our attempt to do so. John and I had taken my Harley and his Virago on some fun trips, but folks, those bikes made no sense at all for the kind of riding we did.
Upright in this photo, but it was like wrestling a pig in mud a few minutes earlier.
You might be wondering…what about the other so-called adventure bikes, like the BMW GS series, the Yamaha Tenere, or the Triumph Tiger? Good bikes, to be sure, but truth be told, they’re really street bikes dressed up like dirt bikes. Big street bikes dressed up like dirt bikes. Two things to keep in mind…seat height and weight. I can’t touch the ground when I get on a BMW GS, and as you’ve heard me say before, my days of spending $20K or $30K on a motorcycle are over. Nice bikes and super nice for freeway travel, but for around town or off road or long trips into unknown territory, these bikes are just too big, too heavy, and too tall.
There’s one other benefit to a small bike. Remember that stuff above about Honda’s 1960s marketing strategy? You know, starting on smaller bikes? Call me crazy, but when I get on bikes this size, I feel like a kid again. It’s fun.
I’ve thought about this long and hard. For my kind of riding, a 250 makes perfect sense. My invitation to you is to do the same kind of thinking.
So there you have it. That was the blog that helped to get the RX3 rolling, and CSC sold a lot of RX3 motorcycles. Back in the day, CSC was way out in front of everybody on the Internet publicizing the Zongshen 250cc ADV bikes, and other countries took notice. Colombia ordered several thousand RX3s based on what they CSC doing, other countries followed, and things just kept getting better and better. The central premise is still there, and it still makes sense. A 250 may well be the perfect motorcycle.
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The China tour story I wrote took a long, winding road to publication. I like to pre-sell any feature-ish story and since we had recently done another big CSC story at That Other Magazine I pitched the China ride to Editor in Chief, Marc Cook. He liked the idea and suggested making the story less about the CSC motorcycle and more about the ride.
