The Perfect Baja Bike
The perfect Baja bike
LEANINGS
Peter Egan
THE MAN ARRIVED AT THE PEMEX GAS station on a well-seasoned XR600 Honda, wearily deployed the long kickstand and walked over to look at the Harley Ultra Classic Electra Glide and sidecar rig I’d been manhandling over the mountain roads of central Baja for four days.
He dropped his goggles onto his Thor jersey, revealing a raccoon mask of desert dust, and slowly examined the big Harley from one end to the other. He broke into a wide, appreciative smile. “Man!” he said, “that looks comfortable!”
I turned and looked at the big plush “pillow-look” seat of the Harley and had to laugh. The guy was right. It did look comfortable. And it was. Probably the best long-distance perch I’d ever ridden on. I’d done one 14-hour day on our trip and hardly noticed the seat. It made the royal throne of Louis XIV look like a sawhorse. With splinters.
“It is comfortable,” I admitted. “But your bike looks like a little more fun on these rough mountain roads.”
“It’s been pretty nice down here,” he admitted. “But now I have to ride home on the highway. Maybe we could trade bikes...”
“Too late,” I grinned, looking up the road.
We were in the little Mexican hamlet of Catavina, in the parking lot of one of the many closed Pemex gas stations on the 1000-mile Baja peninsula, buying gas out of a jerrycan from a small, toothless man who was running a freelance gas station out of the back of his beat-up pickup truck. We were still a good 300 miles from the border.
The XR would be fun on the remaining mountain twisties, but there was a lot of wide-open pavement between us and Tijuana. Given my druthers, I’d keep the Harley.
Most of the time. But sometimes not.
And therein lie the great conundrums and compromises of adventure travel.
How comfortable do you want to be? How agile? Will there be a lot of dirt roads, or more paved? Can you pick your bike up if you dump it in the sand? How much luggage do you have to carry? How much gas? Are you camping, or credit-carding hotels? Are the saddlebags big enough for a bottle of tequila and clean underwear?
Difficult questions all, as reflected in the adventure-touring comparison test in our April, 2000, issue. In that particular shootout, the BMW RI 150GS won the staff’s hearts and minds, but with the clear admonition that nothing works great everywhere; some bikes merely cut a wider swath of utility than others.
The Harley Ultra Glide and the Honda XR600, meanwhile, sat at the gas station almost symbolically, like opposite poles of the motorcycle spectrum, with all kinds of choices in between. Yet we’d both been halfway down the Baja peninsula and back. He’d been able to travel on roads and trails I couldn’t take, but I’d had four idyllic days of contentment, sitting regally behind my bat-wing fairing, regarding the passage of the Sonoran desert like a visiting potentate, spreading benedictions on all of Nature.
Which way was better? What is the best Baja bike?
These questions had been much on my mind through the whole trip, because (a) I really like traveling in Baja and plan to return soon and (b) in my fertile imagination I envision my retirement years (mere decades away) being largely spent in some kind of allpurpose world motorcycle travel mode.
And somehow Baja, with its ideal combination of mountains, beaches, dirt roads, trails and long miles of wide-open asphalt, seems the perfect test. If a bike works here, it’ll probably work anywhere in the world.
On our trip through the peninsula (see “A Sidecar in Baja,” CW, June), we saw a lot of choices people had already made. I would say at least half the tourist traffic in the lower peninsula was on motorcycles. Groups of three or four riding buddies and large tour groups descended on every hotel where we stayed.
Much variety here. One group, from Pancho Villa Tours, was nearly all on their own Harleys, with every model and type represented. Another bunch of retired guys were all on BMW F650 Funduros. One of these gentlemen told me they all used to ride GS Twins, and then he’d bought a Single and converted the rest of the gang to these lighter .bikes. “They’re great,” he said. “You can ride 100 mph on the pavement, but you can also manage them in the dirt.”
A young, hip-looking German couple we met in San Ignacio rode an early-Eighties Yamaha XJ750 Four they’d bought in L.A., with windshield and soft bags. Suzuki DR350s and 650s were well represented, along with more Honda XRs and XR-Ls.
Three escaped businessmen from New Orleans were on BMWs, two 1100s and an 850R. A lone rider in El Rosario, a young man, was headed south on his brand-new yellow GS1150 Beemer. “I love this bike,” he told me, “but it is big for real off-road work.”
I talked to a lot of these folks and found nearly all of them to be openminded and filled with reflections and theories about the Right Tool for the Job. Many confessed to be still searching for exactly the right combination.
And all of them, I suspect, love problems like this as much as I do. Contemplating the correct application of the world’s ever-changing profusion of motorcycles is about half the reason some of us get up in the morning. These problems are not to be solved too quickly, or taken lightly.
But behind all the pros and cons is the pleasant truth that almost any bike works, and that riding something somewhere is the only thing that really matters.
The guy on the XR600 and I were both having a great time. So was the German couple on the old Yamaha.
My hero, though, was one of the Harley guys with the Pancho Villa tour. He was riding a Captain America lookalike hardtail chopper with a stroker Evo motor. Five hundred miles south of the border, in San Ignacio.
He’ll remember the trip better than any of us. □
