1610 DT Final

Pack smart. Modern motorcycle
gear is very compact. Don’t
pack too much rubbish
Some Tips for adventure riders:
CHOOSING YOUR BIKE
1) Know your size. Adventure
machines are not dirt bikes. You won’t
be comfortable racing down the street
at 200 KPH on a dirt bike, so don’t
think for a minute that you should feel
comfortable traveling dirt bike speeds
off-road. It doesn’t take a physicist to
understand that force equals mass times
acceleration.
2) Pay attention to balance and the
muscles you’re using. If you’re exerting
too much energy or feel tense, you’re
likely out of balance and compensating
with strength or possibly speed. “Get
over the back wheel and gas it!” may
be a popular saying, but it’s not proper
technique.
3) When you bottom the suspension,
the bike is warning you. If you didn’t
expect the bike to bottom, take the
warning doubly serious. If the bottoming
continues, sooner or later, you’ll have a
broken bike, or worse, a hurt rider.
4) Standing on the foot pegs is key
to controlling a heavy machine in
demanding conditions. Your weight
becomes somewhat isolated from the
motorcycle and you can use all of it,
mostly through the pegs, to control the
bike.
5) If you venture beyond maintained
dirt roads, having knobby-style tyres
improves dirt handling and safety
appreciably. Though durability often
dissuades riders from switching to
knobs, you’ll never wear out any tyres
with a cast on your leg.
10 cool adventure riding tips:
We’ve got zillions of long distance
kilometres under our belts.
Here are some of the things we’ve
learned, which we hope will be helpful.
1) File a daily “Flight Plan” with
friends and relatives. When you’re
putting in big miles in unfamiliar places,
especially in remote areas, it’s a good
idea to give friends and family an idea
of where you’ll end up every day, and
when you’ll be checking in. At the least,
this will give your loved ones a sense of
ease about you riding alone. As riders,
we often discount the concerns of
others, because we know the rewards
of motorcycling. But if we do have
some issue, out on the road alone,
it’s wise to have someone back home
who’s thinking about us, and who can
reach out if you don’t check in after a
reasonable amount of time. 99 times
out of 100, the “Flight Plan” helps our
families feel better more than it helps us.
But you never know.
2) Start early, finish early. When we’re
on the road, we like to be up at 6:00am,
shower, breakfast, pack and on the
bike by 8am (earlier if possible). It’s an
incredible feeling watching the world
wake up from the seat of a motorcycle,
and if you’re planning to do big miles,
the earlier you start, the earlier you can
finish. As a rule, we are off the bikes
before dusk, certainly sunset.
Why? Well, dusk is when animals like to
run out in front of bikes. The changing
50 DIRT & TRAIL MAGAZINE OCTOBER 2016