Tejon
Well she may be small, but we all know size doesn’t matter right?!!
I did contemplate shipping Badger to Colombia so I could ride that country and finish off my intended route from 2020. However, the more I looked at it the less I could justify the £2,500 ish shipping costs. Having your own bike for big touring over most of a continent and half a dozen countries makes some kind of sense, but doing the same for a (relatively) small single country makes less financial sense. I say “relatively” small because Colombia is still about the same size as France and Spain combined! But, having lived in Australia, I have a healthy appreciation of what is really a big country…
So I hired a bike while I was in Colombia to see what I could see on two wheels. Bike hire in Colombia is pretty affordable and it is possible to get proper ‘big’ bikes, though there is a real premium for these. It seems that small bikes are the best way to go.
The good people at Colombian Moto Adventures furnished me with a small but strong, fully equipped Honda XRE300 for the handsome sum of US$75 per day. That’s pretty pricey, particularly in an affordable country like Colombia, but included kit and (importantly) accident insurance for me and the bike. Of course it was no Bumble or Badger, but I enjoyed travelling light and clocking up some serious off-road miles and getting some proper skills.
Badger
I bought Badger – a 2011 Triumph Tiger 800 XC – in 2021 after a year without a bike. I was looking for something that could take me plenty of miles in relative comfort and handle a bit of luggage and light off-roading. My experience with Bumble was great and she never let me down so I did contemplate buying another beamer but they are just so ubiquitous now… I also remember reading the biking magazine comparison between the 2011 Tiger and 2011 800GS when they came out, it was a very close call between the two. The Tiger just pinching the road supremacy and the GS slightly ahead off-road.
Badger came with very low miles – just 5,000 – and the panniers, so it seemed a good buy to me, and so it has proved. She has carried me confidently on short trips to Eire, Germany and around England. With the biggest adventure to date taking me 7,000 miles to Armenia and back, read about that here…
Bumble
As soon as I started thinking about my first trip to South America I quickly got carried away with choosing just the perfect bike and (oh lord…) the “perfect” gear to wear. Although I tried really hard not to let it, these thoughts quickly took up way too much time and effort. Of course, the actual answer is – any bike, any gear – plenty of people have followed that philosophy and had an amazing adventure. I guess I became sucked in by my monthly dose of bike porn and the lie that minor differences in this tyre or that tyre, this helmet or that, will make all the difference. Of course they didn’t. Not when I was freezing my balls off at 4000 metres on a dirt road in the rain…
Anyway, I settled on a 2008 BMW F800GS. It was in pretty good nick with 30,000 on the clock before I set off, which was about right for the year.
As for transport, I banked everything on the good people from Moto Birds who fill an important gap in the market offering women only adventure bike tours. They also arrange bike shipping and were as good as gold from start to finish. It was a big moment when the nice man from Poland loaded up Bumble into his white van and drove back it back to ship the bike.
As can be seen elsewhere on this site, Bumble sadly did not make it home. However, I’m pleased to report that when I last heard she was helping out a local Arequipa charity in Peru, delivering xmas gifts to local kids… ahhhh!
Gus' Adventures 