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Cameron Cooper
24 Dec 2021
For as long as I can remember I’d craved a motorcycle. Daring young men roared past me in the summertime, their machines a snarling blur, and even at six years old, I envied them. It was the ultimate symbol of freedom—go anywhere, anytime, with anyone. And as a bonus, as far as my 13-year-old self knew, chicks dug them and would jump on the back and ride with me into the sunset. What more could a teenage boy wish for?
In my part of the world, motorbikes were discouraged as death traps and the transport of hairy and smelly Hell’s Angels. Being a rider was a commitment inviting endless criticism, secretly fueled by envy. And then I moved to Thailand, where motorbikes were everywhere. Indeed, the Honda Super Cub 50 played a huge part in building up Southeast Asia’s regional economies after WWII. They were Asia’s smaller, cheaper answer to America’s Ford Model T, upwardly mobilising anyone who could scrape a down payment together and transport themselves to that job that was once too far away, or festoon their bike with a load of bananas and putter them to market. People here saw two-wheelers not as a reckless luxury but as a godsend.
And they have also traditionally believed that road accidents are a function of bad luck, with the rider’s stupidity playing a smaller part in their fate than their karma. All the visiting foreigner needed was flip-flops, a youthful belief in their immortality and 100 baht a day and they were off. It was a great way to kindle the fire, starting small and working up to successively larger bikes over the years.
Eventually, I took a job in Singapore and finally secured an insanely fast motorbike—a 2006 Yamaha FZ-1, a robust sports touring bike with a 1,000cc four-cylinder engine lifted from Yamaha’s pro racing bike. It put out about 145 horsepower, with the power to weight ratio of a Ferrari, but for 160,000 baht instead of 30 million baht. If you want to experience extreme power and speed but aren’t one of the ultra-rich, this is how it’s done.
So, 0-100km/hr in 2.8 seconds—literally the same acceleration as jumping off a building. Top speed, 275km/hr. There is no straight-faced justification for it, but thankfully not all fun has been outlawed yet. And there are practical uses. Make a wish and you are beamed from the back to the front of a transport truck convoy in three seconds. It is a responsibility that no human being should be trusted with and the most excitement you have ever experienced. I rode it at every opportunity, every excuse, every day off, every evening—usually alone, but sometimes with a screaming and weeping pillion rider. I was in love, possibly for the first time.
Then disaster struck. My job contract ended and a return to Bangkok was imminent. (The international expat dictionary defines Bangkok as: “That place you keep finding yourself crawling back to.”) I would have to sell off my beloved road rocket. I felt like Superman being stripped of his powers.
So I decided on a swansong—to make a solo road trip to the land of the polite, pretty and eternally hungry, and back—2,000km each way. No worries. Easy as pie. What could possibly go wrong? I would be like John Wayne crossing the promised land on a beloved horse, but on a motorised horse. A motorcycle is not a two-wheeled car. It descends from equine purity—a man and his steed against the world.
You don’t really grasp old-school travel until you have experienced the agony and ecstasy of becoming part of your horse or bike and losing yourself to it—like a gas- powered centaur. To turn a car, you twist a wheel. To turn a bike or a horse, you look and lean and it goes where you want it to. The only significant difference between a bike and a horse is that it is not illegal to ride a horse drunk. I reckoned the trip would probably take three days in one direction. Eight hundred kilometres from Singapore to Penang, and then the remaining 1250km spread over two days. That was the plan, anyway.
Departing in the early morning, it was about 20 minutes to the Singapore-Malaysia border, fill in some paperwork and cross into lax laws and laxer law enforcement. The speed limit jumped from 80 to 110km/h. The highway to Thailand is long, straight, smooth and uncrowded—a drag strip with no cops.
So to make time, I cruised at around 160km/h. A bike like this is actually happy and stable at that speed, doing what it is designed to do. There were occasional pushes to 200 and one big, very scary push to 250, clinging on for dear life. Above 200km/h you aren’t riding the bike, the bike is riding you. I carried on like this for hours, and then I roared past “The 40-year-old Boy Racer”. I don’t know our relative speeds when I overtook him, but he clearly got into a snit over me whizzing so effortlessly and audaciously past his faux race car. How dare I?
Starting as a distant dot in my rearview mirror, he quickly loomed large-a souped-up Honda Civic hatchback, black on black in black. Hood pins, fake scoop, rear wing, go-faster stripes, tyres as wide as coffee tables. He pulled up abreast at 140km/h like he was sidling up to the bar in a public saloon, then pulled a few metres ahead, then dropped back just behind me and pulled ahead again. He was challenging me to a race.
I had encountered such idiots before. His manhood (as he understood it) and an embarrassing percentage of his disposable income were riding on it. In his little world, that car was the lynchpin of his pride and I had inadvertently dislodged it. According to Sigmund Freud, his investment was dedicated to two main goals: 1. To attract adoring curvaceous women rendered weak-kneed by his efforts to extract maximum horsepower from a tiny engine and 2. To race and defeat other men in or on legitimately powerful vehicles and temporarily grant his life the illusion of significance. Having failed at the former, he was having a stab at failing to achieve the latter.
It was like the first time Captain Ahab spotted Moby Dick, long before the great spermaceti nibbled his leg off. Ahab just didn’t know when he was outclassed. I wasn’t keen to dance with this fool but he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so I twisted my wrist and shot off like a man fired from a cannon, leaving him miles behind, probably wondering what the hell just happened. I slowed back down to a 160km/h cruising speed (it is tiring to keep running at 190) and after 15 minutes he was back in my mirrors, struggling to catch up. I repeated my tortoise and hare party trick and 15 minutes later he was back again. It was like being pursued by ravenous zombies, or some obsessed highway killer with a chainsaw, and almost equally dangerous. Eventually he had to turn off or ran out of fuel or maybe even gave up, like that fly pestering you all day that suddenly disappears.
And then alas, it was back to the boredom and the sinking realisation that I really should have purchased the gel seat cover. My bum was incredibly sore and tipping towards unbearable. Stopping and getting off the bike worked for maybe five minutes but you just have to remount and the searing pain resumed immediately. This was going to be a serious mental challenge.
The rest of the day was uneventful riding for ten hours and 800km, nearly non-stop, with only quick gasoline and noodle refuelings. It was a brainless semi-meditative blur. I interacted with almost no one. I sang involuntary mantras chosen by my subconscious mind, the big favourite OCD loop being: “One foot on Jacob’s ladder, and one foot in the fire. And it all goes down in your mind.” I crossed the bridge to Penang in the evening, checked in somewhere, ate something, slept and left at 7am. That is honestly all I remember.
Early the next morning, the true hell began. My backside ached the moment it touched the seat. Crossing the border, the road quality on the Thai side was dramatically worse. Thailand’s deep south has been somehow shafted on road budgets. There were potholes everywhere—a serious hazard for a two-wheeler if you want to go faster than 50km/h. Constant vigilance was required.
I also discovered the truth of an important adage: It is always raining on the Isthmus of Kra (which sounded to me like the secret lair of an intergalactic criminal). It is a thin strip of land dividing two seas. It’s not going to be arid, is it? So, I’d plow into sideways sheets of water for ten minutes, then no rain for ten minutes, then raindrops like squash balls for ten minutes and then dry again for fifteen—dozens of successive wash and dry cycles. Just as you are getting comfortable again—ploosh! More water. It’s horrible and makes you feel sick. If you put on rain gear, then between the downpours you sweat in your waterproofs and get wet anyway, you never dry off. There is no solution.
When a biker walks into a restaurant, soaked to the bone, the ordinarily envious car people see them feeling as downtrodden as a political prisoner after a waterboarding session. The smug condescending grin plays upon their lips. “So... Don’t you wish you were driving a car?”
“No. But I wish it wasn’t raining.”
Night fell and I discovered that much of the southern highway is very badly lit. Couldn’t see a damn thing. I thought I caught glimpses of befanged goblins and giggling seraphim streaking through the droplets in my headlamp beam. In the distance cars appeared to careen off the road. I was scared witless for most of this section, terrified of rear-ending an elephant and asphyxiating with my head lodged up its backside... You know they’d have to laugh at the funeral.
Eventually, south Thailand evolved into central Thailand, the surface and lighting improved and the rain stopped. So let’s stop somewhere overnight. Chumphon... nah. Prachuap Khiri Khan... nope. Hua Hin... Lord no, please. I pressed on, suffering from “white line fever”—an irrational urge to reach my final destination at any cost.
“I’m fine to drive, honestly! It’s only four more hours— ‘tis nothing!” So goes the internal monologue, a mix of delusion, gullibility, persuasiveness, lies and stupidity contained in the same exhausted and faltering mind. Like Robinson Crusoe, you suspect you might be going mad but without a companion there is no way to tell. If other people serve any purpose at all in life, it is to periodically confirm whether or not we are actually crazy, though tears of frustration, a looping monologue and frequent involuntary whimperings should provide a clue that you can’t trust yourself anymore.
Finally, Bangkok heaved to on the horizon. I’d made it! 1250km in one day! What a man, what a hero, what a moron! I was as bereft of intelligence as a sea cucumber, so hired a motorcycle taxi to guide me to my destination—Adhere the 13th, the cool little blues bar on Samsen Road (where I had long been a valued denizen). I rolled in at about 10pm after 15 hours on the road, filthy as Black Bart, barely able to speak, eyes like a combat veteran. Strangers assumed I was an autistic fellow in blackface and gave me plenty of room. I couldn’t believe I was no longer soaring down the highway.
Old friend and bar owner Nong quickly understood that I was not quite right in the noggin and required female guidance. She stuffed food in my face, gave me two shots of Jack Daniels, then ordered me to check into a nearby hotel to clean up, change clothes and come back, which I did. After returning, I had a few more drinks, chatted with strangers like a newly released psychiatric patient, staggered to my room at 1am or so and slept until 4pm the next afternoon—about as many hours as the ride itself.
So that’s what marathon motorcycle touring is all about, kids! It was mental and physical agony, but it can never be taken away from me. Would I ever again put in 25 hours in the saddle in a 40 hour period? Not unless my family’s life depended on it. It was madness but it had to be done... at least once. And there was still the trip back to Singapore... but that is another story.
[This story first appeared in Koktail Magazine issue 1.]
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