It is the early eighties – that is, 1980 – and I’m enjoying the freedom of European travel on my Honda CB900F2, complete with a Moriwaki big bore kit and a Harris Performance Exhaust.
My girlfriend at the time had strangely decided not to bring her bike but to ride pillion. Considering how young we were, we were probably broke, and this kept the costs down. The other thing we were was naïve. As green as they come.
It had taken me an hour to realise Centrum wasn’t one large town but signs to the centre of whichever town we were passing. Thankfully we didn’t have intercoms back then, or I would have proven my inexperience with some dumb comment. Instead, communication consisted of yelling or just tapping me on the back of my lid when a stop was needed.
Toll Booths
After a couple of hours, off in the distance, I could see what looked like a set of toll booths across both sides of the motorway. My lack of experience, fuelled by the arrogance of youth, told me that these couldn’t be toll booths. This was the Netherlands, and they don’t have toll roads in the Netherlands, so I just kept going.
Some 10 minutes later, we pulled into the next services to look at the map. I’d been expecting to have crossed the border into Germany by now, and the penny still hadn’t dropped. As I remember, it took another 10 minutes for me to realise those were definitely not toll booths but the border with Germany, and I’d not stopped. I was most likely 40 MPH the wrong side of stopped as we went between the booths, with the Harris exhaust howling and reverberating off the walls.
No barriers were down. I hadn’t seen anyone tell me to stop, and if there were chasing me, hanging about like a complete lemon wasn’t a good idea. “Immer geradeaus aus”, as they say in Germany (always straight ahead)
Andy Wareing
I tell you all this because this is why I found Andy Wareing’s books on his touring adventures from the Eighties so appealing, even if he did ride a Suzuki GS1000 with what looks like a knockoff GPZ nose cone.
Andy Wareing resolutely states that his biking days aren’t entirely behind him (his last bike was a Ducati 996S). Yet, the days of crazy adventures might be. Back in the day, as we oldies are apt to say, foreign travel was more challenging. No internet, no smartphones, no Google maps, no GPS and hard borders between every country, even in Europe.
The AA produced a book that listed a few hotels in a region, and you had to ring them or write them a letter to make a reservation. Flash sods might have sent a fax. It was in that era that Andy chose to punish himself by riding to far-flung places.
Two Books
His two favourite rides were through parts of the USSR to reach ancient Istanbul, the city that spans Europe and Asia and the following year to Nordkapp, the most northern part of Europe, deep inside the Arctic Circle, and somewhere that today is still something of a road trip.
But remember, we are talking about the 1980s … as in 40-plus years ago. [F88K ~ Ed.]
On the long list of memorable occurrences, Andy recalls dead horses, punishing storms, crashes, sickness and near incarcerations. By his own admission, Andy almost always wondered why he was subjecting himself to the hardship of long-distance solo travel almost as soon as he set off, but it obviously didn’t stop him.
Amid the trials and misery, there were always chance meetings, especially on the roads less travelled, friendships unlooked for and laughs a plenty.
If, like me, you enjoy reading a good bike travel adventure filled with humour and stupid facts that give you a sense of the exploration involved in a way that travelling in today’s world can’t, then you will enjoy the two books Andy has written about his adventures.
Both books are available through Andy’s website, Amazon, and there are Kindle versions too.
And Now
And now, having interrupted my reading to write this; I’m going back to the book to discover what happened after the Hungarian border guard suggested – at gunpoint – that Andy needed to get off his bike.
