Now you must have noticed by now that my motorcycling experience has been almost entirely devoid of anything dirt bike related. The reason for this is that I discovered very early that I liked to have both wheels of the bike pointing in the same direction all the time. You hear the MotoGp riders talk about “front end confidence” well, riding a dirt bike has none of that so, after a few aborted attempts, I swore off them and stayed on the tar. My dislike of broken surfaces continues to this day and when I hear well-meaning friends say, “Yeh, well there IS some gravel but it’s pretty easy.” I know to avoid the roads of which they are speaking.
With one notable exception, my dirt bike experiences have all contrived to keep me on the black stuff. Let me explain. My first dirt bike wasn’t really a dirt bike at all but it could, at a pinch be used as one and it was set up from the factory AS a road/trail bike. It was the infamous Honda MT125, yes, this one.
We were living in Dapto, funny, that, that’s where we are living now and it was 1975. I had just sold my 350/4 Honda and was looking for another bike. Right up the road from our place the new F6 Freeway was being built and the area comprised literally acres of earthworks where one could ride to ones heart’s content. The guys at Uncle Brian’s Bike Shop in Baan Baan Street were mad dirt bike fiends and they convinced me that a road/trail bike could be the answer. Ride it to school each day and then play in the dirt whenever I wanted to. Seemed like a great idea, except for one thing. The MT125 (however did Honda DARE to put the revered “Elsinore” decal on the side covers?) was a totally unsuitable road bike and an even MORE unsuitable dirt bike. As you can see from the photo, ignorance is bliss and it didn’t stop me taking the bike out to the freeway and trying out the humps and hollows being made there. But the bike had no power, no brakes and negligible suspension travel. It was a dog and it got kicked to the kerb within a couple of months.
Some years passed and we were living in Canberra. My good mate, Bob (he who had introduced me to motorcycling in the first place) , was running a 2nd hand car yard there and one day he turned up at my place with a little Suzuki TS100 trail bike.
Blue, just like this one. “Someone traded it on a car,” he explained, “I don’t want it and I’ll probably sell it again but, in the mean time, keep it and ride it.” Well, how could I resist? It was even road registered 🙂 The school where I was teaching was only about 5kms from home so I used to ride it as a commuter. it was GANGS of fun and I really got to love it, even though I knew I shouldn’t. The school kids thought it was cool so I, by association, was also cool. Win-win. I used to take it down to Macarthur every afternoon and belt around the circuit on it. I soon found that I could do a whole lap of Macarthur Park holding the throttle wide open and never touching the brakes!
But it came to a crashing halt one day when I hopped on it at lunch time and belted across the paddock between the school and Kambah Shops, in search of some fish and chips. Unbeknownst to me the paddock had a ha-ha fence across it and I discovered this far too late to be able, with my limited dirt riding skills, to do anything about it. I crashed to the dirt in a cloud of dust and opened my eyes to find myself and the little Suzuki entangled in three rows of 8 gauge. I eventually extricated us and rode on to get my lunch. I rode back along the ROAD instead (which I should have done to start with, it’s just that across the paddock was a much shorter route) and pulled into the car park to the hoots and hollows of a couple of hundred children who had witnessed my demise from the playground. I was never sure whether they thought I was hero for providing them with some unscheduled lunchtime entertainment or a goose for having attempted it to start with and I was too embarrassed to ask so I will never know. Bob relinquished the TS soon after and it was sold, what a fun little jigger it was. I should have just stayed on the tar.
Fast forward to the mid-80’s. Were were living in Ipswich in Queensland (yes, I have done some very stupid things in my life) and one of the members of our church had two teenage sons who loved riding. Cecil had bought two trail bikes, I knew so little about them that I can’t tell you to this day what they were, But he would take them out to a local farm and they would spend the day belting around in the scrub. The farm (and this isn’t really relevant to the story so you can skip this bit if you want) was owned by a lovely old gentleman who also attended church with us. It was located out on the Warrego Highway west of town on what was known as the blacksoil plains. The area was incredibly fertile and Wally’s 180 acre plot was very productive, especially his over 100 avocado trees that kept us in that delicious fruit all summer. Wally was in his 80’s and was showing signs of living a great deal longer but he was crossing the highway to the servo on the other side to get some milk and was hit by a car and killed. It was an incredibly sad end to a lovely life.
When Cec found out that I rode he invited me to come out to the farm and ride with them. So many enjoyable Saturdays were spent with the 4 of us sharing two bikes, hooning away. I soon found out that I still had no dirt bike riding skills at all but it still was fun.
And that, I am sad to say, is it, well, not quite. The featured pic is of the only dirt bike over which I ever felt that I had a degree of control. Bought way back in 1975 when I had disposed of the MT125 and bought a brand new Yamaha RD250 from Uncle Brian’s, it was a cast-off from one of his mechanics and it needed work. I got it for a song and was able to fix it and get it running. For one brief moment of my motorcycling career I actually owned TWO Yamahas at the same time 🙂
But the TY I absolutely loved. It made me look like a good rider, never a great one, but a good one. I rode it up to the roadworks every afternoon after school and practised till it was time to come home for dinner. I was no Mick Andrews, I knew that, but I could do things on that bike that astounded me. And I think the TY is the reason why it WAS the only dirt bike I ever felt I was controlling. It was because everything happened SLOWLY! Yes, life on broken surfaces seemed so much more sensible when you had time to think, react and press on.
Sadly the TY went, like all good bikes do, and I still regret selling it, something to do with family budget or something trivial like that 🙂 But, if you offered me another TY right now, I’d snap your arm off. Of course times have changed a lot. These days even an off-road bike needs to be registered and insured unless you have private land on which to ride it. But they were great days and I still look back and think, hey, I did that. 🙂
So, it’s been pretty much road bikes, they’re easier to clean anyway.
