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10 myths about motorcycle travel debunked

Season 5: Destination Unknown

15 August 2021

When sharing your motorcycle adventures with all its ups and downs, you are bound to receive lots of advice and comments about how you should have done things differently. In The Netherlands we have a saying ‘De beste stuurlui staan aan wal’, which can be translated as ‘the best captains stand ashore’. 

Receiving good advice is fantastic, but not if it discourages aspiring adventure riders to have their own! That is why I want to demystify 10 of those commonly made comments about what you should and should not do when you go on a motorcycle adventure! 

1. You need at least a 600 or 700cc motorcycle for a round-the-world trip! 

I used to ride a 800cc Ducati when living in The Netherlands. Definitely not a bike to go around the world with! I started my around-the-world travel with a 400cc Himalayan and later I traveled around Europe on a Honda CB500x. Now I am riding a small Honda CRF250L, named Savannah, and what a great time we have together! 

I bought the Honda CRF250L because it was a reliable bike, perfect for off-road riding and it was the cheapest bike in the shop.I believe that you don’t need an expensive big motorcycle to go on an adventure. After all, it’s not the size of an engine that will bring the adventure, it’s the adventurous spirit in you that does all that! 

When you prefer to cruise on tarmac, you might prefer a larger bike. All I can say is, choose the bike that works best for you and the type of journey you are planning. There are lots of bikers going around the world on a 1250cc BMW GS too. Just follow your dream and ride the motorcycle that you want (and can afford to) ride! 

2. You need Dakar Rally Rider skills

Yes, I am addicted to dirt road riding, but do you remember when I took a dirt road for the first time? Or how I dealt with some bad road conditions in Asia? My off road riding skills were absolutely atrocious. In fact, I had never ridden roads like these before when I started my motorcycle travel! Now, after several years of riding, I am comfortable and can handle a lot more challenging dirt roads than the first ones I rode in Asia. 

In Africa I encountered a lot of deep sand sections. Riding in deep sand is absolutely terrifying to say the least. Everything that you’ve learned regarding riding on tarmac, goes out of the window as soon as you hit sand. 

The perfect riding technique for sand is not rocket science though. Many say that you have to stand on the pegs, lean back a little and give it full throttle. That is great advice, but at the same time, it’s terrible advice! Telling a novice dirt rider to just do what the Dakar Rally riders are doing, is simply not realistic. There is only one way to become a good rider in sand and that’s experience! 

There is absolutely no shame in going slow through sand, to stick your legs out and just ‘peddle’ through it. You might get stuck sometimes, but that’s just good practice to learn how to get your bike out of sand again. The more experience you get, the more you learn about how much your bike can wobble and move under you without falling. Gaining that confidence in the bike and your own skills is essential to become a better rider. 

3. Guidelines are not written in stone 

One of the guidelines for riding up a steep road is to stand on the pegs and give it full throttle (again!). Momentum is your friend in those situations, they say. Stopping on a steep section will make your life very difficult as continuing after that is much harder. The heavier the bike you ride, the harder it gets to gain momentum again on those steep, rocky or gravelly sections of a hill. 

But, no matter how true this guideline is, there are always other aspects to consider when riding up a steep hill that are at least as important. Because, when you are doing some technical hill climbs near your town and you have cell phone reception along the way, or when you travel with a group of friends, you can take more risks than when you are riding alone, in a remote area without cell phone reception. Circumstances have to be taken in consideration too, not only guidelines for riding techniques.   

The most important thing is to get your bike and yourself through an adventure in one piece. That may require a different approach, because when you go faster, your crash will be harder too. 

4. Traveling alone is lonely

Many people worry about traveling alone on a bike. Will it be safe? Are you not going to be lonely? 

There is an essential difference between traveling alone and being lonely. You’d be surprised how many people you will meet on the road and the amount of new friends you can make. Alright, some countries are so sparsely populated, like Namibia, that it can feel as if the only people you’ll meet are the petrol station attendants! 

But the reality remains that solo travellers are much more approachable than people that travel in groups. That means that you don’t have to make an effort to meet local people, they will make sure to meet you! 

For me there is no other way than solo travel, it’s what I’ve always done. Besides the advantage of always being able to follow your own plans, traveling alone also pushes you to face every struggle by yourself. You’ll learn that you are a lot more capable than you might iniatially think, and eventually you realize that pretty much any situation you face, is a situation that you can handle. Traveling alone is good for your self confidence, and for that alone, I highly recommend everyone to go on a solo trip at least once in their lifetime! 

5. Hard panniers are the best

In the last few years, I feel like there is a shift towards soft panniers, but this certainly wasn’t the case when I first started riding with soft panniers. I was told many times that I should have stayed with hard panniers and it was a mistake to ride with soft panniers. 

The biggest advantage of hard panniers is that they are easy to lock, so your things are safe on the bike when you leave it parked somewhere. But that’s about it! I never liked the weight of hard panniers, the fact that even though they are supposedly waterproof, my belongings still ended up damp from the condense inside, and of course there is the risk of injuring a foot or leg in a fall. 

Once I started riding with soft luggage, I realised that this was the way to go! Especially when you like to go off-road, I would never opt for hard luggage again.

When you go touring through a more densely populated area and when you only ride on tarmac, then hard panniers can be a good choice. But, as soon as you hit the dirt, it’s soft luggage all the way for me! 

6. You should be afraid of strangers

When you are traveling alone, you are often asked ‘Are you traveling alone?’ or ‘Where are you heading to?’ In fact, ‘are you traveling alone’, is probably the most asked question during my travels, sometimes this question is being asked several times per day!

Often I receive messages in which people suggest I should always lie when answering that question. I should say that I’m not alone and my friend is coming in a few minutes. Or lie about where I’m going. People suggest this because they worry that I might be harmed once it becomes clear that I am traveling alone. Besides the fact that this question has been asked hundreds of times, and nobody ever came after me, I think that there is something fundamentally wrong with this way of thinking. 

When you are traveling around the world, and you are meeting new people with such big suspicion by assuming they mean you harm, I think it is better to stay at home and not go out at all. In my view, there is no way you can see and experience the world when you are afraid and suspicious of every single person that you meet. How can you enjoy the great adventure you are on?

When you travel by yourself for a long time, you’ll develop some good intuitive skills and you’ll be able to judge when a situation is dodgy or not. If it doesn’t feel right, just make your way out of there. But once you are out there having your motorcycle adventure, you’ll see that those situations are very, very rare. So just feel comfortable and enjoy the interactions you’ll have with local people! 

7. It’s only an adventure when you camp

Camping in the wilderness with your motorcycle right beside your tent while cooking food over a fire, is an ultimate motorcycle adventure dream for many. 

When I traveled in Iceland and Scandinavia, I decided to bring camping gear with me to save money on lodging. To my surprise, I received several messages stating that now that I was camping, I finally was on a real adventure. Traveling 60.000 kilometers through over 30 countries hadn’t been a real adventure because I was not camping? Only then I realized how strong people believed that going on a motorcycle adventure should involve camping. 

There is definitely a certain attraction to wild camping. Being able to create a home in the midst of nature, getting water from the river, cooking over a fire and sleeping under the stars is amazing! But the reality is also that you have to carry a lot of extra weight and gear with you and you spend a lot of time setting up and breaking off camp while you could also be riding your bike! And well, then there is the thing of having a shower and a comfortable bed after a long ride… 

Camping in Iceland and Sweden to me, meant sitting inside my tent most of the time while it was pouring with rain outside. Most of my possessions were damp and my back was getting sore from sitting uncomfortably while I tried to some editing work. The only way to charge my laptop and drone batteries was to leave them in the toilet buildings of the campsite. 

If you want to save money on accommodation and you love to camp, then definitely go for it! But don’t let anyone tell you that you are less adventurous when you rather stay in guesthouses. I think my travels and videos show that there is lots of adventure to have without going camping.  

8. You should know how to fix your bike

While it would be incredibly useful to have great motorcycle mechanical skills before a long journey, you can definitely manage without them!

Of course, it’s very useful to be able to fix your own tyres in case of a flat one. But to be fair, on my first 36.000 kilometres from India to the Netherlands I couldn’t even do that. But the 4 flat tyres I got after that, I was able to fix myself, so this turned out to be quite a good skill to learn. Other basic motorcycle maintenance like cleaning out your air filter and adjusting your chain are easy to learn and good to know when you head off for a longer motorcycle adventure. 

But, when it becomes a bit more technical there is absolutely no shame in going to a motorcycle repair shop to have qualified mechanics look after your motorcycle! There is absolutely no need to know everything yourself. Especially because you won’t be able to carry the tools you’d need for those repairs with you anyway. Even for something relatively simple like fixing the fork seals, you need tools that in no circumstance you want to carry with you on your trip. 

I even prefer to do the oil change in a motorcycle shop. It is so much easier and faster to have it done there. When you are on the road, you don’t carry a drip tray with you to collect the old oil in. Finding a place to dispose your old oil in an environmentally friendly way, might also be challenging. Since you have to go to a motorcycle shop to buy the new oil anyway, you might as well do it over there and save a lot of hassle. 

9. You should have a different set of tyres for each terrain 

As I ride on all sorts of terrains, I am bound to catch some wobblies or even crashes on camera. Without a single fail, when I include a moment of struggle or slipping in my video, I receive recommendations for using a different set of tyres. No matter which tyres I am running, there are always better ones to have according to some! 

Of course I would love to blame every little slip with the bike on my tyres, but I know that you can’t blame everything on your tyres. Sometimes, you just make a mistake. Or the ground is so incredibly slippery, that it really doesn't matter how aggressive your tyres are, you will struggle! Especially when you are an adventure rider, and you are basically doing dual sport: both tarmac and offroad on your trip, you’ll have to accept that you’ll never have the perfect tyre for every scenario and condition that you will encounter. 

Another aspect to take into account is that when you are traveling long distances, the longevity of a tyre becomes very important too. Changing tyres every week is not an option, especially not in Namibia where there are only a handful of motorcycle shops in the entire country! 

In my opinion, you’ll just have to accept that you can never have a perfect tyre for each terrain, but when you find a good all-rounder that performs well enough in all areas, and on top of that will last you 10.000 kilometers or so, then that’s the tyre you need to have!

10. When you prepare well, nothing will go wrong 

No matter how well you prepare, things will break, get lost along the way and you will have to change your plans again and again. Nothing in life is certain except that everything is uncertain. 

How you deal with this fact is a matter of mindset. If you accept that things will turn out differently than planned, you are in a much better position to deal with whatever comes your way. When you share your adventures online or with friends, many people will give you advice on how you could have done things differently. My only advice is to forget about those captains ashore, and just know that you can never prepare for everything! 

So, let's get out there, feel free and ride!

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Hello Noraly,

I am very well, thank you and hope you and your family and friends are too, wherever they are in this amazing world.

I have really enjoyed watching your videos a and adventures get more exciting and informative and these blogs are very well written, offering practical, sensible, common sense advice with heaps of encouragement to ignore the ‘Google experts, shore based Captains and armchair referees’, just get a bike, make a plan of sorts (or not!) and just go out and explore.

I’ve been out around Devon and Cornwall a few times now and definitely have a great answer to the worse riding condition. Thick fog! In my case combined with rain and a road spread with loose chippings all of a sudden 🙈.

With the CB500X squirming around, underneath my very novice riding skills, it made me appreciate yours and anyone’s off-road riding skills and attempts. You just have to get out and try, with a strong belief that you can do it.

The best thing about your years long adventures in so many countries? That the vast majority of people, wherever they live or come from, are the same as you or I and will be friendly, want to help and offer whatever they can to someone in need. That, it seems, is the polar opposite of what a lot of mainstream media and, shall I say, governments want us to believe!

Ride safe Noraly, and every other biker and would be biker. My advice, start motorcycling (or push biking if that is all you can afford now), get out there alone and let an adventure find you!

“Still round the corner there may wait a new road or a secret gate, and though I oft have passed them by, a day will come at last when I shall take the hidden paths that run west of the moon, east of the sun” Frodo Baggins

DCBaxter  | 

Thanks DC Baxter for your story! Let an adventure find you, I like that one :-)

Noraly  | 

Thank you Noraly , for all you do and share with the World. I carry note cards with your inspirational sayings in my wallet and our travel gear. When my wife and I travel ( even by car ) it is with your spirit of adventure and the wonders we see. When I ride my mid-sized Yamaha R3 around the back roads of Michigan by myself ( I am 68 yrs old ) I am stopped by nice people all the time that want to know of the fun I am having. Travel and adventure on... We all thank you. Your outlook on life is like rocket fuel in our gas tanks! Rex

Rex Rides  | 

Wow! Notecards with some of my sayings ;-)

Noraly  | 

Wow, these points resonate on so many levels, with #6 as my absolute favorite!
Keep being awesome 👍💪
Groetjes van Sebas, a fellow Dutchy now working, living and riding in Portugal

Sebas Tampinongkol  | 

Hi Noraly
I've only recently found your blog and travel adventure channel on youtube etc and really enjoy it. This recent blog post I was delighted to find since your myth-busters concur with my extremely limited experience and I hope they encourage others to get out there. Maybe my own experience will also help OLDER women to get out there; as a 62-year-old woman I got my bike licence on January 2nd 2020 after a 5-day intensive course I took in the UK, having NEVER ridden a proper geared bike before (the nearest was a Vespa where the gear change is on the handlebars and very different also with the size of wheels). Anyway, with just that 5 days of experience and my precious bike licence I went to Vietnam a few weeks later and spent 16 days going around the northern mountainous China-border region on the most amazing adventure, on my own, on a Honda XR150, staying often in some pretty basic lodges (rats running around at 3am waking me up), falling off on a tiny muddy track, coping on the first day out (ie. day 6 of ever being on a motorbike for me) with a mudslide which also caused 2 lorries to block the road and I had to learn to 'walk' the bike through, in first gear. This just a tiny snapshot. I conquered mountainous tracks with steep hairpin bends I would never have dreamt of coping with, going off google maps I was in such remote terrain and meeting the most wonderful people. I dream of my next adventure (Pakistan if I can) and for now, you are keeping me going by living that dream for me. Anyone of any age should not hesitate at having a go at this. It is so liberating and addictive! Happy riding to you and safe home when you are done. Many thanks. Janet

SpikeyF  | 

Thanks Spikey F for sharing your story. I am really impressed with what an adventure you had!!

Noraly  | 

Hey Noraly!
Very good advice. I'm a little surprised you've teasing all the captains. If you have almost a million followers, there are of course a lot of captains there.
I have followed you almost from the start. Even though I see that you drive very responsibly, an accident in some remote areas could be dangerous. But I believe in your case there is no better captain than yourself.
Thank you so much for sharing all these amazing adventures.

Sonny
Riding R 1250 GSA with hard pannier

SF  | 

Great advice Noraly! So many people always want to show their experience by offering advise rather than watching and listening to what you have and are doing. I have always believed that almost all people are good and willing to help when asked. Very often people who have the least are willing to help the most.

Keep on riding and doing your own thing. Stop when you can and entertain us with your adventures, your great videos, and most of all, your wonderful smile!

Andy  | 

Hi Noraly,
I have followed your channel from the first episode you produced. I have to say you have travelled not only miles but your skills at filming, producing, your own maturity and skills has grown immensely . I also thoroughly enjoy the way you educate your viewers about geography, geology and the people you meet. As I travelled by motorcycle I always preferred doing so alone. Of course you get lonely but meeting people and becoming welcomed by people just isn't the same as if you are two or more. I think you're just scratching the surface of doors that will open for you as you grow and continue to mature with life. Keep up the great work. May your spirits of life travel and watch over you. Be blessed.
Paul Fetter

Pfetter  | 

You have the heart of a warrior with great passion and a great writer Noraly!
Those who doubt you are a bit jealous.
Safe travels

Seawhiskers  | 

'De beste stuurlui staan aan wal'. Love this...says it perfectly!
Season 1 was the perfect example of how what you can do by just getting out there and doing it. Fantastic youtube channel and blog!

Pete  | 

Yes, there is a big difference not only in riding but also filming :-)

Noraly  | 

Noraly, thank you for this. Your comments not only make sense, they are realistic. As a newly revived rider, I appreciate your thoughts on adventure bike riding. I look forward to your next installment. Safe riding.

Drider  | 
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