Just Add Adventure
JUST ADD ADVENTURE
The bike before the Stelvio: A Guzzi Quota through South America
It’s really just a clever phrase coined by some slick, gelled-hair marketing exec in a paisley tie and a pair of Vans sitting in front of a Mac flat-screen: “Adventure-touring.” What better way to bring out the Walter Mitty streak in all of us than by conjuring up images of places that have found their way into our dreams via the pages of National Geographic, then imply that we can somehow get there on a motorcycle, helmet replaced by an Indiana Jones hat
Appeal to the freedom-loving, rugged individual that we all know is hidden somewhere deep down inside us and you end up selling us a motorcycle. I wonder how often the sales gurus thought we’d actually take their sales pitch and run with it?
For me and my adventure-tourer, it was a meeting of chance, like two recently dumped people sitting at opposite ends of an empty bar at last call. I was in need of a bike to have an adventure on and at exactly that same moment a used Moto Guzzi Quota was sitting on the local dealer’s floor in need of an owner. One month later, the Quota and I, plus passenger, were making our way down the PanAmerican Highway.
Up to the point that I decided to travel outside the country, adventure-touring had been, for me-and for most American riders— an interesting concept I had never quite found a use for. But this all changes when you start asking yourself, what kind of motorcycle should I be riding when I leave the American superslab?
The Quota came as the unexpected answer. All the Guzzi’s little details whispered “adventure,” from the braced Magura bars to the folding brake and shift levers, from the high muffler to the skinny, spoked 21-inch front wheel. The Quota has a simple and reassuring crudeness to it, a hammer in a world of graphing calculators; a brutal, dinosaurish, low-tech machine. In the months that followed my purchase of the bike, I would find that there’s nothing like a Third World country to show an over-exuberant motorcyclist that he’s not riding a works Dakar racer with hard bags.
Riding on Guatemalan roads washed away by Hurricane Stan, overused brakes fade at precisely the same moment that an ownerless burro steps out in front of you.
Headlights prove inadequate while riding for hours in the dark and rain on the road to Cuzco in the Peruvian Andes, dodging stray dogs, people and potholes like in an 8-bit arcade game.
A 5-gallon fuel tank hangs you out to dry when it’s more than 200 miles between gas stations, leaving you scrounging for the precious liquid at roadside tiendas and filling the tank with questionable fluids poured from buckets or old anti-freeze bottles.
Rims crack under the strain of two-up riding and ubiquitous Mexican tope speed bumps.
At some point you have the epiphany that you’re doing things on a nearly stock motorcycle that, despite the marketing hype, it was never really intended to do.
The Moto Guzzi added its own unique character to the adventure equation. The “Italian Harley” perpetually dripped oil from somewhere, a disconcerting phenomenon when you’re 15,000 miles from home. The transverse-Vee does a side-to-side samba that shook bolts loose and cracked the exhaust headers and engine guard so often that I feel like I’m friends with every backyard welder between Laredo and Ushuaia.
But despite its shortcomings, the Quota proved in many ways to be the perfect adventure machine. The requirements for such a motorcycle are simple: Be mechanically reliable, have plenty of suspension travel and ground clearance, be able to carry its weight in passengers and luggage, and, most importantly, have a real-world toughness, a bare-knuckled streetfighter to the average streetbike’s Greco-Roman style.
Surviving a crash, it seems, is the essence of any motorcycle that has the word “adventure” in its description. The reality of adventure riding is crashing; an overloaded motorcycle and bad roads making this a matter of when and not if. The Quota is built like a tank and, like a tank, nothing short of a direct hit from a depleted-uranium Howitzer round seems to faze it.
When a Mexican-made innertube decided to let loose at the seams while running 75 mph on a deserted stretch of road in Argentinean Patagonia, bike and riders were thrown to the pavement. Adrenaline pumping, I was on my feet before I had a chance to check myself for injuries, running toward the Quota with the expectations of finding trip-ending damage. But besides a little road rash, bike and riders were fine. A fresh tube and we were back on our way.
It’s been two years since the Quota and I returned from our Pan-American Highway trip. Its typical duty now consists of local commutes or getting its saddlebags filled with groceries, a task that continental-48-bound riders have found adventure bikes also excel at. The Quota still cuts an impressive figure parked among the rows of SUVs and minivans at an urban strip mall, the character of its scrapes and rust and patch-welded parts not visible from 10 feet away. But sitting there, the last traces of exotic dust long since washed away by the routine of a normal life, it’s as out of place as a B-17 parked among hot air balloons. And somehow, so is its rider.
Because once you’ve experienced the thrill of the unknown that the ever-fleeting horizon promises, the kid-on-Christmas-morning excitement that comes from waking each sunrise in a different bed, the satisfaction of a life stripped to its bare minimum that is all part of long-distance motorcycle touring, there’s no going back. The OEMs give the rider the motorcycle, but it’s up to the rider to seek the adventure. Jeremiah Knupp
