London to Dover would have been a piece of cake were it not for the April showers. Thunder and lightning accompanied our early evening run from the capital. The old XS650, two up with more gear than you could shake a stick at, would only do about 60mph on the slippery road surface. Which was OK, it was about as fast as the headlamp and chaotic traffic could take. The night ferry gave us a chance to dry out our soaked clothing and down a few gallons of beer.
I had never been abroad before and was a bit worried over riding on the wrong side of the road. I figured a thoroughly paralytic state was the only way to make an entrance into France. The XS refused to start, something that happened about once a week. Usually, I had to walk away from it for a few hours then she'd come to life first kick. As the ferry company would probably object to such tardiness, there was nothing for it but to push start her. This had the effect of sobering us up pretty damn quick. After falling over in a heap twice, we finally got things together and persuaded the old girl to growl into life.
The XS, despite going around the clock and being over 15 years old, was in pretty good shape. I had done a thorough renovation of the bike - the cycle parts needing more attention than the engine, which was still running a stock bottom end, needing just a rebore, new camchain and set of exhaust valves. I did not abuse the machine too much, limiting myself to a maximum of 90mph (thereafter fierce primary vibes tried to wreck the machine) and not thrashing the balls off the venerable engine in the lower gears. Having owned the bike for five years and about 60000 miles I had great faith in its reliability.
Calais was a bit of a blur that early in the morning. Not too many cars about, I was riding slowly and carefully, concentrating on staying on the proper side of the road. Luckily, the rain had abated before out arrival, the roads still slightly damp but the sun trying to dissipate the worst of the rain clouds. My pillion was an experienced continental tourer in his own right and when his hangover had dissipated would take a turn at the controls. We planned on two hours riding, two hours pillion, hoping to cover vast distances in a day.
Our destination was open to chance, but we planned heading south until we found somewhere cheap, warm and interesting to hole up for a couple of weeks. We were both despatch riders and only had to go back to the capital when our money ran out. We decided to follow the coast, first stop Le Harve. Not a very pretty bit of France, to be sure, and infested with heavy traffic by the time we reached Dieppe, where we stopped for coffee and croissants. I had not been impressed by some of the antics of Frog drivers who appeared to take a British number plate as an open invitation to commit murder.
I had to brake harshly (non-standard double discs off an XJ900 out front) several times to avoid putting the front wheel into the side of some French cage that had viciously cut me up after overtaking with about an inch’s clearance. I had spent more time looking paranoidly in the mirrors than observing what was going on out front. Not that it did that much good, as at most revs the mirrors shook up and down from the vertical twin vibes.
From Dieppe to Le Havre my mate took the controls, as he's bigger than me all I saw was the occasional side view of the English Channel. The King & Queen seat I'd fitted to the Yamaha was brilliant in its comfort, even after a full day in the saddle we were to find ourselves perfectly able to stand upright. My mate reckoned it was essential to visit Rouen, but from the half hour we spent wandering around I couldn’t see why!
Blitzing through Caen as fast as humanely possible, I almost lost the bike when a Citroen appeared as if from nowhere moving at the speed of light. Frog cagers drive everywhere with their foot on the floor and damn the consequences. The XS is normally quite a stable beast at moderate speeds, but I had the forks down on the stops, twisting the bars viciously to the right to avoid becoming dead meat. I had time to manage a blast on the air horns, which judging by the way the car's front wheels suddenly twitched was the first he knew of our presence.
I had both feet down to stop the slithering, twitching beast from falling flat on its side. The XS weighs around 500lbs, which it normally hides well, but when it decides to go it does so fast and furiously. I managed to viciously wrench my leg whilst stopping the bike from falling over. Bending the leg in the normal seated position proved excruciatingly painful. I ended up on the pillion, leg pointed as straight as possible, as we grumbled through the industrial smog of Caen looking for a hotel.
We ended up in a rat infested doss house that even the more dubious parts of London would have problems matching. No shower or toilet that we could find but only 20 francs for the night. After about an hour of resting up my leg I found I could hobble about, so we located a cafe selling cheap wine and drank several litres. Staggering back to the hotel, I fell down three times, but once there we slept the sleep of the dead.
The next morning I thought I was going to die. Through the hangover haze I could see that my body was covered in lumps. My scalp felt itchy, like it was infested with a million ants. My companion was in a similar state. We rode over to the nearest hospital which looked more like a prison both inside and out. The lumps were mosquito bites and the itching lice. We had to burn most of our clothes and have our heads shaved. At least that's what the grinning maniac of a doctor recommended. Two thousand francs poorer and bearing a passing resemblance to Buddhist monks we were able to continue our journey, thoroughly pissed off.
We had to abandon our newish full face helmets in favour of some open face relics that were procured from a nearby moped shop. These did not come with visors, so after riding the Yamaha for five minutes our eyes were turned red with the eyeballs sticking out on storks. By the time we did the 120 miles to Rennes we looked nearer fifty than our true age of twenty! This was not helped by a sudden thunderstorm that was augmented by hailstones. By the time we found a decent hotel, we were shivering like we'd done Everest barefoot and crept into our beds naked, not having any spare clothes left to change into.
The next morning was bright and sunny. New clothes helped raise our spirits. The good old XS growled into life first kick. In a rush of enthusiasm we decided to do the 400 miles to Bordeaux that day. I took the first stint at the controls, a nice fast run down to Nantes, on a reasonable A-type road that suited the XS perfectly. I strung her out to 90mph on quite a few occasions when I felt the need to put some cager in his proper place. Out of town, driving standards improved dramatically, although the cagers still preferred to use the horn rather than the brakes!
The next stage, from Nantes to La Rochelle, took nearly four hours because we decided to use minor tracks that took us in and out, to and from, the coast. Our first view of the Bay of Biscay was encouraging, the wind off the sea being almost warm. A break was called for in La Rochelle. What we thought was a cheap restaurant turned out to be the most expensive in town with a waiter who misinterpreted our every order. We ended up munching through a huge five course meal, drowning our dismay with a few litres of extravagantly priced wine. Total cost, 2500 francs, which went on my mate’s American Express card (flash bugger). We hurried out without leaving a tip.
I took the controls again for the mad dash to Bordeaux, about 100 miles away. By the time we hit Saintes my foul mood had dissipated to the point where I decided it would be a good idea to back off from 90mph a bit. The last thing we wanted to do was add to our financial woes by being dumped upon for a huge fine by French porkers. A few miles out of that blessed town the steering started to go to pot. Anything over 70mph produced a handlebar that twitched viciously. 25 miles from Bordeaux we were down to 50mph and by the time we entered the city no more than 30mph could be sustained.
It wasn't a great problem, the taper roller steering head bearings that I'd fitted had worked progressively looser. A bit of spanner wielding sorted the problem, but I was so obsessed with reaching our destination that I did not want to stop en route. Another cheap hotel was found, but this time we took the precaution of pumping the room full of a couple of cans of insecticide before going out for a night on the town.
The next morning we tossed a coin to decide whether to go on south to Spain, or east towards Italy. The latter won. Further coin tossing revealed that we should spend the night in Marseille. This was another day's hard ride away, so we got stuck into some high speed work, getting to Toulouse without incident in about three hours. Traffic was light as we had left at 5.30am!
Breakfast in Toulouse was OK as we were accosted by a couple of teenage femmes from Paris. Unfortunately, four on the XS would be problematical, but they gave us the address of a squat in Genova if we made it that far. The XS decided it had had enough for the day, refusing to start, even when some locals were press-ganged into helping us push the beast. New spark plugs were tried to no avail. A set of car coils had the engine grumbling to itself again, but they were too big to locate properly. We bodged them on in front of the engine as best we could.
I was pillion all the way to Narbonne on the Mediterranean coast and felt a bit seasick from the way my so-called mate was throwing the massive XS about. We had a bit of time to make up, for sure, but I didn‘t like the way the vibes were making my feet jump off the pillion pegs every so often. In Narbonne we had a lot of trouble from the police. True, my mate looked a dead ringer for a skinhead, what with the shaven head and jeans that were three inches too short for his extremely long legs. I just looked like a pill popping desperado, having decided to compensate for the bare head by not shaving and my poor old eyeballs out on stalks from the excess of drink and XS produced wind.
We were taken along to the local cop shop by gun totting gendarme, stripped naked and intimately searched. Whilst that was going down, the XS and our luggage were pulled apart. When they were finally satisfied that we were not drug dealers or terrorists, they threw us, what was left of our luggage and the XS out into the street. It was already dark, so we had to reassemble everything under the neon glow of the street lamps before heading out of town before they thought of something else.
No way we could reach Marseille in the paranoid, wrecked state we were in. We rolled into Sete, awash with rabid property developers wreaking destruction and havoc on the coast (if anyone should have been arrested it was they) and found yet another cheap hotel. We didn’t have the energy to find some insect spray this time and my mate had to fight off the attentions, of the ancient landlady who had lustily eyed him up the moment we entered the premises. He never did tell me what happened, I dropped off into a deep, untroubled sleep the moment my head hit the pillow.
I was relieved, the next morning, to find a lack of itchiness and no new mosquito bites. It was only a hundred miles to Marseille, a piece of cake if ever there was one, we thought. The gods had other ideas. No sooner had we mounted the venerable twin than a gale brewed up from the south. We should have bedded down for the night there and then, but at first it was just a strong wind that was more invigorating than frightening. It wasn’t until we had passed Montpellier that wave after wave of rain arrived.
The ride became most interesting. The XS, on Roadrunners, was never entirely safe in the wet, often losing a wheel when the tyre slipped. Added to that, the exposed coils meant the engine kept cutting out. And the wind from the sea was so strong that we had to pivot the bike into it at an absurd angle. I don't think we got the speedo above 30mph in the whole five hour journey to Marseille.
Most of the time visibility was so poor 10mph was the limit. This didn’t stop car drivers hurtling past, regardless, at what seemed like 100mph. By the time we hit Arles I was exhausted and mentally vacant from the effort of holding the XS on to something resembling a line. We were both drenched through, but the thought of not reaching our destination this time was too much to bear. Onward, with my mate at the helm, we would have to go.
Just outside this town there was a big accident. A Citroen crunched flat where a lorry had skidded off the road. The police had blocked off the route and stopped all traffic movement. We had skidded and slithered through a line of stalled cars to watch as some poor driver was cut free of the car and hurried into the back of an ambulance... he didn't seem to have any legs left!
My mate had no intention of staying there all day and rode through the assembly of police cars out to the other side. One porker raised his fist and shouted something, but as he rushed over to cut us off he skidded on what looked like blood, ending up on his back. Cheered us up no end, that did!
Perhaps predictably, the storm did not start to abate until we actually reached the outskirts of Marseille. We were both grey faced and shivering by then. Lady Luck finally smiled on us as we saw an apartment complex with a for rent sign within minutes. It was a bit seedy and run down, but nothing that a few tins of insect spray couldn’t sort out. Minimum period of rent was for a month, 1000 francs for a studio flat. We were in such a bad way we would have signed our lives away for a night's decent kip. My mate reckoned Marseille was an ideal place to explore the rest of the area and the way we had been going through money a thousand francs was next to nothing. If we didn’t like it after a few days we could cut our losses and move on. We slept for most of the next day, getting up in time to explore the town’s nightlife.
Funny, I thought, as we wandered downstairs, I was sure I'd dumped the Yamaha next to the entrance. Panic rapidly invaded my mind as I realised that the bloody thing was nowhere to be seen. My mate suggested that perhaps the manager had stashed it away for safe keeping but we were only met by blank stares and moronic nods.
Yes, some bloody bastard had nicked my pride and joy, apparently within minutes of our leaving it. I couldn’t remember whether or not I had locked it up, we were in such an exhausted state that it's likely I clean forgot. When we explained our predicament the manager just gave a Gallic shrug, suggesting that it was such a common occurrence that we should not have been in the least bit surprised.
Especially in Marseille, which is one of Europe’s biggest den of thieves. The bike was not insured for theft, I would only have got a couple of hundred quid back if it had been. After our previous contact with the police I never wanted to speak to a Frog porker again, let alone voluntarily enter a police station. We had no choice but to cut our losses and head back by bus or train.
We had deliberately set out to make the tour a bit of an adventure. We consulted no guide books, knew nothing about the towns where we stayed and had no planned itinerary. When we got really desperate to decide where to go we merely tossed a coin, and let fate take a hand. In theory that was just fine, the way travel should be, open minded and without strict plans. But our innocence meant we were easy prey for poor hotels, greedy doctors, mad policemen and outright thieves. Most of time we did not enjoy ourselves. Next time (yes, there will be a next time) we will take a guide to hotels, read a few books on France to find places of interest and plan our itinerary a bit more carefully. No more coin tossing for us!
Gary