From the Library

[Biggles]

I strolled back to the bike and sat astride it for a while, smoking, thinking, feeling a bit dislocated. The guy who looked after the car park walked over and said hello. He'd been admiring my bike, he said, rode one himself, and told me how he dreamed of hitting the road one day.
 His name was Marc. He'd signed up for the Romanian secret service after leaving college "thinking I'd be tracking people down on my motorbike", but he'd been put in an office in a suit where he typed up reports all day until he could stand it no longer and quit. Now he was looking after this car park until something came up and he could afford to take his road trip.
"But with the money I earn here, maybe this is something I never get to do," he said, and held his shoulders in a shrug and turned his palms towards the sky. "But I dream about it all the time. You are living my dreams. You are a very lucky man."
Sons Of Thunder p169-70  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

It had begun to rain again, with the odd low growl of thunder thrown in for the requisite Transylvanian ambience. Just as I was about to pull over and make camp, the forest ended and I emerged somewhere in the sixteenth century.
The main street of the Roma village - just hardened clay really, turning swiftly to mud - was full of horses, and oxen, pulling carts piled high with straw, the drivers in pork pie hats, ancient bolt-action rifles slung over their shoulders.
Wizened old Roma women in headscarves carried their grandchildren on their backs in slings fashioned from rugs. There was a hand pump in the street from which villagers were drawing water. People sat out on their steps to watch this strange creature pass, and scruffy, shoeless urchins chased after me.
I felt a tad vulnerable, uncomfortable. Five years earlier, I had been in Romania's most cosmopolitan city imagining I was in mortal danger. Now I was in the middle of the forest, in the middle of nowhere and darkness closing in, and I was drawing a crowd, many of whom were armed. It's not easy to be inconspicuous riding a 1200cc motorcycle through a Brueghel painting.
Sons Of Thunder p170-1 Mike Carter

[Biggles]

Before I knew what was happening, a succession of small boys were carrying my luggage into the room. Shortly after, the entire village came round to see the stranger. There was lots of giggling and nudging and I poured my vodka into small glass tumblers and chipped mugs and then I cut my sausage into slices with my Leatherman and offered it around.
But they weren't too keen on the sausage and instead the woman of the house produced a steaming tureen of sour soup with pork and beans, and we slurped it and ate heavy, dark bread, and drank more vodka. They spoke Romanian and I spoke English and we seemed to get along just fine. Vodka makes polyglots of us all.
I went through my guidebook's conversations and essentials section and tried to ask my host in Romanian what his name was, but I don't think I pronounced it correctly as he kept pointing to his hat.
Sons Of Thunder p171-2 Mike Carter

[Biggles]

The greatest hazard was still the horse-drawn carts that outnumbered cars in the villages. Weirdly, Romanian geese that, unlike any other geese I'd encountered on the trip, seemed to have a personal issue with the engine pitch of a BMW R1200GS.
Some distance off I'd spot them pricking up their ears, or whatever it is that geese prick up, and start to spread their wings- an avian version of "you wanna piece of me, huh?" By the time I drew alongside them, they would be in a right old flap, squawking and hissing and chasing me down the road. Once at a safe distance, I would pull over and watch other people on motorbikes pass by. Not a peep. Bizarre.
Sons Of Thunder p173  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

I approached a bend. Fast. I couldn't see the exit. It was tight, and as I leaned into it, it got tighter and tighter. I couldn't touch the brakes. On a road like this, with loose shale on the surface, and potholes everywhere, it could have been fatal, my wheels falling away from under me. This is one of the most common causes of death on a motorbike: misjudging your speed coming into a bend.
I started to drift across the road, unable to keep in my lane. The bend showed no signs of opening up, smoothing out. On the far side of the road were spruce trees. 
I looked at them. There was one in particular, thicker than the rest. I stared at it. The bike started to straighten, move upright. I headed for the tree. I went to hit the brakes. I was going to crash, no doubt, but any reduction in speed might make all the difference. The whole thing had taken perhaps less than a couple of seconds, but somehow time was stretched.
I remembered Kevin's words. Have faith. Look where you want to go. The bike will follow. It has to.
I ripped my eyes from the spruce tree. It was an act of will. And I turned my head to look at the bend once more. The bike dipped again, leaned in. I think I left the road at one stage, crossing the line on the far side, riding over needles and cones, trees flashing past. But I couldn't be sure, because all I was looking at was the road ahead, the bend opening up, my right hand twisting back the throttle, me whooping like a lunatic.
Sons Of Thunder p176  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

"The fine will be eight million lei," the police officer was saying to me.
"But that's... that's about 200 euros," I replied, which a quick calculation told me was roughly the average Romanian wage for a month. I could feel my bottom lip trembling.
"You should not go so fast. This road very dangerous," he said.
"I'm sorry."
"No good. You under arrest. You get in car and we go to bank." I felt like the victim of a cashpoint mugging.
He ordered me to leave my bike by the side of the road and get into the passenger seat of the police car. Then we drove away heading for God knows where. After about 10 minutes, down a quiet country lane, the officer pulled over into a lay-by. Unless there was an ATM in one of the adjacent oak trees, which I was pretty certain there was not, I was guessing that this wasn't the end of the journey.
The officer switched off the ignition, slowly, deliberately, and turned to me, his gun nestling against his thigh.
"Okay. For you, for lei cash, there is 20 per cent discount," he said.
"Discount?"
"Yes. Consider it gesture of goodwill from the kind Romanian people."
As he was talking, he was fishing around in his wallet. He pulled out photographs. My prejudices started to resurface. I imagined they might be of bloodstained cells, or show corpses lying face down besides a lay-by, this lay-by.
"This my sister, she live London," he said, showing me a picture of a smiling woman toasting the camera with a large glass of red wine.
"You married?"
"No."
"I give you her address. She is very nice. Make good wife."
"I'm not looking for a wife," I said to him.
"You no like my sister?" he said.
"It's not that, it's..."
"How about this one?" He'd pulled another picture out. "She live Coventry."
"She seems very nice, too... Look, I'm flattered you think I might be good enough for your sisters, but I'm not interested!"
"Thirty percent."
"What?"
"Discount. Thirty per cent, as goodwill and because you think sisters very nice."
I laughed.
"What would the discount be if I married one of your sisters?" I said.
The policeman suddenly looked at me solemnly, gravely.
"Mister. You try bribe Romanian police officer? Is very serious offence."
Sons Of Thunder p177-8  Mike Carter

[Biggles]

When Cycle World called me to ask if I would road-test the new Harley Road King, I got uppity and said I'd rather have a Ducati superbike. It seemed like a chic decision at the time, and my friends on the superbike circuit got very excited. "Hot damn," they said. "We will take it to the track and blow the bastards away."
"Balls," I said. "Never mind the track. The track is for punks. We are Road People. We are Cafe Racers."
The Cafe Racer is a different breed, and we have our own situations. Pure speed in sixth gear on a 5,000-foot straightaway one thing, but pure speed in third gear on a gravel-strewn downhill ess-turn is quite another.
But we like it. A thoroughbred Cafe Racer will ride all night through a fog storm in freeway traffic to put himself into what somebody told him was the ugliest and tightest diminishing-radius loop turn since Genghis Khan invented the corkscrew.
Cafe Racing is mainly a matter of taste. It is an atavistic mentality, a peculiar mix or low style, high speed, pure dumbness, and overweening commitment to the Cafe Life and all its dangerous pleasures... I am a Cafe Racer myself, on some days - and it is one of my finest addictions.
Sons Of Thunder p183-4 Hunter S. Thompson

[Biggles]

The Ducati 900 is a finely engineered machine. We all love Torque, and some of us have taken it straight over the high side from time to time - and there is always pain in that... But there is also Fun, the deadly element, and Fun is what you get when you screw this monster on. BOOM! Instant take-off, no screeching or squawking around like a fool with your teeth clamping down on your tongue and your mind completely empty of everything but fear. No. This bugger digs right in and shoots you straight down the pipe, for good or ill.
On my first take-off, I hit second gear and went through the speed limit on a two-lane blacktop highway full of ranch traffic. By the time I went up to third, I was going 75 and the tach was barely above 4,000 rpm...
And that's when it got its second wind. From 4,000 to 6,000 in third will take you from 75 mph to 95 in two seconds - and after that, Bubba, you still have fourth, fifth, and sixth. Ho, ho.
Sons Of Thunder p187  Hunter S. Thompson

[Biggles]

No one told me to retard the spark. True enough, it was in the manual, but I had been unable to read that attentively. It had no plot, no characters. So my punishment was this: when I jumped on the kick starter, it backfired and more or less threw me off the bike. I was limping all through the first week from vicious blowbacks. I later learned it was a classic way to get a spiral fracture. I tried jumping lightly on the kick starter and, unfairly, it would blast back as viciously as with a sharp kick. Eventually it started, and sitting on it, I felt the torque tilt the bike under me. I was afraid to take my hands off the handlebars. My wife lowered the helmet onto my head; I compared it to the barber's basin Don Quixote had worn into battle, the Helmet of Mambrino.
Sons Of Thunder p201 Thomas McGuane

[Biggles]

You might think that one motorcycle is much like another and they are all equally soulless, dangerous, thrilling. I'm not so sure. A biker would tell you that the motorcycle is the nearest humanity has come to imbuing an artefact with character and soul. A car is simply an envelope in which you are posted more or less efficiently from one place to another (albeit with the usual vagaries attendant on the mail services). With a motorcycle, the biker would argue, you attempt to harmonise, establish some sense of balance and rhythm, even mutual understanding. At this point I want to make clear just how apposite is that terse epithet bestowed upon every two-wheeled product of the Harley- Davidson factory in Milwaukee. A Hog is a Hog is a Hog. In certain situations - on a die-straight desert highway for example, or posing at an agricultural show or stationary at a gas pump, which is its version of the feeding trough - it is perfectly capable of behaving itself and concentrating on the matter in hand. But show a 1340cc Electra-Glide Classic full-dresser in glitter-fleck metallic crimson 200 miles of narrow, twisting mountain road with a loose surface, roadworks, instant 180-degree hairpins, radical gradients, ruts and gullies and it transforms into some jittery, darting, groaning monstrous thing with which you wrestle and fight, and the harmonies of those desert highways on which your relationship was founded become a distant dream.
Sons Of Thunder p223-4  Jim Perrin

[Biggles]

"How d'you like the bike, son?" he growled.
At that precise moment I didn't like the bike at all, and the feeling was probably mutual. But this was American soil, the Stars & Stripes was flying, and I was being asked about the other great American icon. Sometimes you just get put on the spot:
"Well...  (long pause, not for emphasis)... it's got character... the, er, saddle's very comfortable, I like the riding position, and the way the sound system volume turns up when you twist the throttle's... amusing. And I love the exhaust note...
"Yeah, yeah - offset crank - atmosphere at the expense of performance..." he responded, a little impatiently.
I'd dried up. He was watching me. 'What the hell?' I thought, and launched in:
"O.K. It's got performance half of what that engine size should offer, handles like a tank, steers like a wasp in a jam jar, push it hard on bends and neither you nor it knows where it's going, feed in the gas and it gets the message five minutes later, the gears are borrowed off a tractor..."
"Hold it right there!"
He held up his hand, reached in his pocket, handed me his card:

C. William Gray
Vice-President
Harley-Davidson Motor Company

"That's me, and you and I are having dinner together tonight to go through this thing in detail. You European riders are just aggressive. Chill out, man. Get in the hot tub. See ya later."
Extracting a foot from my mouth, I hobbled away at his command.
Sons Of Thunder p225-6  Jim Perrin

[Biggles]

I even talk to my bike. "Come on, little hmar, don't fail me now!" was the superstitious battle cry that led Germans and Tuaregs alike to turn away, slightly embarrassed, tapping sides of their heads. Divvy as it sounds, it's even got a name - the Yamahmar, 'hmar' being the Arabic word for donkey. The parallels are obvious - both much-maligned beasts of burden, overloaded and abused by cruel owners. And I like donkeys 'cause they invariably wink when I say hello.
Yep, I love my bike. Which is good, because it's all I've got left. 'Dear John,' said Lou as she made a laughing-stock April Fool of me. Home no longer exists. So I'm packing my bags again, and hitting the road again, whistling 'Hey Joe' while pushing hard for motorcycle emptiness.
Sons Of Thunder p237  Dan Walsh

[Biggles]

Honda-san, and later Mr Suzuki and others, knew full well that Norton, Triumph, MV Agusta and a dozen other factories had built their brand image at the TT, making millions by testing their engineering prowess against the gruelling Manx roads, proving that their machinery was both rapid and rugged. It was motorcycling's ultimate exercise in corporate PR.
And yet the event had the genteel air of an English village fete about it, with the discordant twist of death and destruction lurking in the shadows. The TT was run by old boys in blazers and enthusiastic ladies who might otherwise have invested their energies in the Women's Institute, They talked about the Island's capricious weather like they were getting ready for a spot of gardening, apparently unaware that fog and rain usually meant more accidents, more broken legs, more fatalities. 
Tradition mattered on the Island, so practice went ahead whatever the conditions. As the chaps in blazers would say: 'No such thing as inclement weather, old boy, only inappropriate clothing.'
Sons Of Thunder p242-3  Mat Oxley

[Biggles]

That long left turn where I made two of the overtaking moves I enjoyed the most in my entire career, is probably the most exciting stretch of a fantastic track that will forever be close to my heart. At Philip Island, there is the long initial straightaway, and following that you reach the ocean after a series of turns - some wide, some tight, with changes in speed and elevation. You reach the ocean and then you leave it behind, twice, before joining a long ramp which takes you straight up to the famous long left turn. But just before that, there is a very fast chicane: you arrive in fourth gear, at 200kph, go down to third gear and 170kph to negotiate the right-left change in direction and, finally, you take on that long uphill curve. On that long turn, you spend what seems like an eternity bent over, flying along at very high speeds, unable to see what's ahead. It is one of the most beautiful, fastest and difficult turns in the whole MotoGP tour. You have to be extremely accurate and sensitive to negotiate your way through it, and it's one of those spots where the quality of the rider makes all the difference. Just as, to me, it makes all the difference if it's the last lap or not.
Sons Of Thunder p257-8  Valentino Rossi

[Biggles]

Instead of insulating its owner like a car, a bike extends him into the environment, all senses alert. Everything that happens on the road and in the air, the inflections of road surface, the shuttle and weave of traffic, the opening and squeezing of space, the cold and heat, the stinks, perfumes, noises and silences the biker flows into it in a state of heightened consciousness that no driver, with his windows and heater and radio, will ever know. It is this total experience, not the fustian clichés about symbolic penises and deficient father figures that every amateur Freudian trots out when motorcycles are mentioned, that creates bikers. 
Riding across San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge on his motorcycle, the biker is sensually receptive to every yard of the way: to the bridge drumming under the tires, to the immense Pacific wind, to the cliff of icy blue space below.
"Se tu sarai solo," Leonardo da Vinci remarked five hundred years ago, "tu sarai tutto tuo" (If you are alone, you are your own man). Biking, like gliding, is one of the most delightful expressions of this fact. There is nothing second-hand or vicarious about the sense of freedom, which means possessing one's own and unique experiences, that a big bike well ridden confers. Antisocial? Indeed, yes. And being so, a means to sanity. The motorcycle is a charm against the Group Man.
Sons Of Thunder p266  Robert Hughes