One issue I had on our Pyrenées trip last year was fuel capacity. The WR250R, stock, only carries 7.6 litres, good for about 90 miles.
I carried an extra 2.5 litres in a jerry can. While it was useful a couple of times it did take up valuable bag space. It also leaked one time more than I wanted it to, which, if you’ve ever tried soaking your clothes in petrol, you’ll know is zero times.
So the first thing I’m doing to prepare for this trip is to give the bike extra range.
The new tank is 13.5L, so should take me over 160 miles (or 250km) before I need to refill.
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When winter’s lifting, I start to think about motorbike trips.
I think about countries; roads and tracks; seas and airports; about the bike I would take and the luggage I’d fix onto it. There are a growing numbers of places that I haven’t been. Not because I dream of visiting them, but because I’ve thought about it then resigned myself not to.
Then I get this email from my uncle:
I’d like to invite you to a celebration of my 70th birthday at the restaurant Comendador Silva, Óbidos, Portugal on the evening of Tuesday 16 August.
An external constraint makes planning a trip easy. It’s harder when the idea comes only from within. You’re more likely to question it.
And so the first few places go onto the map.
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I left Nicosia going south, then turned to the west and into the mountains for the last time. I had until that evening to return the bike.
It was the longest day of riding on the trip but also the easiest. The practicalities were now routine: how far I could go on however many litres of petrol, how much water I needed to carry and where might be good to eat. I knew how the roads were signed and how people drove. It seemed a shame to have to stop.
At the same time, I was glad. I’d made something of the trip. But to worry otherwise—as I had at first—is a strange and privileged concern. Is it really an accomplishment to spend £600ish on a week’s holiday and actually enjoy it?
Being in Paphos again was a reminder that enjoyment is optional.
I had two nights in a hotel before my flight. Unlike the other places I’d stayed there were quite a few guests. All of them were British. Most were retired. The town catered to them, with its offers of full English breakfasts, sport via satellite, and ‘beer o’clock’.
There’s another divide in Cyprus and it’s between the areas where British people go and those they don’t. I was glad that I had crossed it.
Where my trip had been full of uncertainty, theirs were the opposite, circumscribed but certain. And some of them were at the hotel reception booking the same for next year.
At the end of my first motorbike trip I wrote
To have known is enough: it means it is possible to know again, of some other place, at some other time, tremendous and impermanent.
Cyprus is one of those other places now, and now is that other time.
Sometimes, in queues at airports, I pat my pocket to make sure my passport hasn’t fallen out. Adventure is the same in a funny way. Every now and then, you have to check it’s still there.
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