Last Monday (21st Aug) I headed off on a 3 day trip. I had friends looking after an amazing house in Akaroa and a few work things to do on the way up and back. I had the choice of this week or the following one depending on weather, which was great, as I wanted to take the bike.
Forecast for Monday was rapidly turning to crap but it looked like if I got away promptly I would keep in front of most of it. Tuesday was meant to improve and Weds for the return trip should be really good. By and large that’s how it worked out except the jobs done on the way up meant that by the time I left Oamaru it was starting to rain lightly but from Leeston onwards it absolutely pissed down.
My bike is a 2001 Honda Transalp 650. It is fitted with hot grips, a higher screen, and for this trip I had my large Givi topbox and Givi tankbag for gear.
Unlike my car I don’t have a radar detector on the bike and I was pretty keen to avoid any fines and particularly the accompanying demerit points, so by and large speed was kept below 110km/hr except when a convenient cage was traveling fast enough to follow.
Its interesting that on a bike at this speed you generally cruise along with the traffic on the easy stuff but as soon as you start adding a mix of hills and corners you quickly end up catching, passing and losing cars all the time.
The trip was straight after the weekend when there had been a lot of student activities in Dunedin (something to do with the undie 500). On the roadside in the first hour North from Dunedin there were 4 old vans abandoned on the side of the road, their running gear finally giving way to the load and the hills. So if your daughter said she was late home because the car broke down…….
I’ve had the Transalp for about 51/2 months now and done around 4500km on it. Generally I have been really impressed with the bike. It has plenty of passing power if your manoevre starts around the speed limit, if your passing generally starts at 120km/hr then an extra few cubes would make a big difference but below that the practical difference is minimal. Its pretty comfortable although at my height, 6ft 1 in, I find my bum gets pushed back into the bit of the seat where it rises for the pillion and after a while this causes some mild ache. Realistically this takes 200km to become a pain by which time you’re probably ready for a brief stop and walk anyway and this quickly brings things right again.
I decided to keep a really good record of fuel use for the trip. This brings up another small gripe which I’d be interested to hear about for other bikes – the fuel gauge. From a full tank you head off and after 110km look down and see the gauge hasn’t moved and could be forgiven for thinking those brilliant engineers at Honda have cracked it – a bike to go round the world on using just one tank of gas!! Alas that all changes and the gauge reacquaints itself with gravity and starts to fall, quickly for a while and then slows again. When it just reaches the halfway mark it usually has around 200km on the trip meter. Then the really scary decent starts as it rockets down to the red zone – I have had one very nervous trip where I have discovered it goes through the red zone, out the bottom and still keeps going as it sneaks towards the big E.
WHY can’t anyone invent a decent fuel gauge for a bike???
Leeston strikes me as one of those larger rural towns that has been just big enough and with things like local Government offices, good size schools and rural servicing businesses, that have kept it pretty healthy while other smaller places have struggled and died with heaps of empty shops. I noticed one larger empty shop on the main drag but pretty much everything else looked like things are still happening OK.
After Leeston the rain really started to get heavy with more and more puddles on the road. I continued on through Lincoln, Tai Tapu and then headed out toward the Peninsula around the shores of Lake Ellesmere. It was along here that I began to notice a certain cooling. Now I know a blokes anatomy is meant to be kept a bit below body temperature but this was definitely somewhat cooler than that. What does one do? What I did was pretend that the only explanation was a pool of water accumulating in my lap and that there was no reason to stop until I got to Akaroa.
I passed quite few camper vans heading up towards Little River and caught up on a late model VX Landcruiser just as I was leaving the township. This guy had his foot down, obviously knew the road like the back of his had, and had no intention of slowing down to let me past. He was great to follow. It was pissing down again, I didn’t know the road well and having that big beast just ahead made reading the corners a breeze. If you’re reading this thanks.
By the time the VX turned off at Barry’s Bay I was also thinking that in this whole trip through appalling weather I hadn’t felt a single twitch on the wet road. I certainly wasn’t going sports bike speed but I wasn’t hanging around that much either. I think the combination of the big diameter wheels and newish Pirelli Scorpion MT90 on the front and Michelin Sirac on the back all made it work, plus, I think there’d been so much rain all the slippery shit had been washed off.
Finally to Akaroa. Stand up off the bike. Shit, wrong move, all that F’ing water has just rung down my leg. My newish Rjay riding pants just didn’t keep the water out in the crutch (This had a happy conclusion on Friday when I took them back in to Honda Otago to find out how I could get them fixed – they simply gave me a new pair (same brand but next model up) and said that shouldn’t have happened and that Rjays back their gear so here’s another one. So a big Onya to Honda Otago and Rjays for that.)
Monday night it snowed on the hills around Akaroa, Tuesday it added to it and it finally stopped raining in the early hours of Weds morning before I had to leave, but with plenty of snow still on the tops.
The grit trucks must have had a special from their suppliers this week or had a pile of this years stuff they needed to use before spring – man do they pour it on. The ride from Barry’s bay to the Hill Top and then down to Cooptown was going to be a highlight of my trip – rain reduced it one way and this grit totally stuffed it the other. A speedway bike would have been fun.
I decided to do something else – count the corners – there are 35 from Barry’s Bay to the Hill Top pub and 42 from there to Cooptown. Heaps of them are 25-55 km/hr ones. That’s 77 corners in 13km which must make it one of NZ’s windiest and best bike roads when the conditions are right.
The trip home was pretty uneventful with the only diversion being the Trotters Gorge route from just South of Moeraki through to Palmerston. The whole thing is sealed now but it is narrow, windy in places and unexpected forestry vehicles and sometimes stock trucks can lurk around blind corners so take it easy. There’s often loose stuff fallen off banks onto the seal, especially the South side of the summit to watch for as well. It is worth the side trip though because there are some huge spectacular limestone outcrops to view. It virtually adds no distance compared to SH1 and very little time.
Fuel consumption worked out at 19km/l for the first tank (most disciplined speedwise), 18 km/l for the second tank which include the return trip over the Port Hills, and 18km/l for the Tai Tapu to Oamaru return leg which was the fastest section and was also the only fill of 96 octane because the garage at Tai Tapu is a Challenge station and I’ve been told their 91 sometimes isn’t quite up to grade (I have no idea whether this is true but didn’t want to risk it). The rest of the time I always use 91.
My DriRider jacket did its thing superbly. The hot grips are brilliant as are the rain shields in front of the grips on the Transalp although they didn’t stop my gloves getting wet. Without the hot grips I think safety would have been an issue towards the end as I was having to give them the full heat boost quite frequently.
The Transalp has passed its test with honour. It is a very easy bike to ride on any road. That V twin torquey power is just great on windy hill roads, it is smooth, has great brakes and while the tyre diameter looks feeble compared to most sports bikes it seems to work. While it certainly ain’t no sportsbike I know which I would have rather been riding over that grit, not to mention the many back roads it has seen and will see. Maybe the next update from Honda should see it get fuel injection to give its performance and economy a lift but not much else needs big changes – apart from that bloody fuel gauge.
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Originally Posted by Ruralman
Cheers, John.
Cheers John.
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