Review TCX Drifter boots

I bought these from what is quickly becoming my favourite supplier of motorcycle goods, Sportsbikeshop and I’ve worn them on one two hour in-the-rain trip to Suffolk.

Sizing: reviewers are advising prospective purchasers to go for their usual shoe size when buying, unlike Alpine Stars for instance where you really have to buy one size up. So, I went for Euro size 45. In the house these were certainly not sloppy. My left toe (half a size bigger than the right) was pretty snug against the toecap – but comfortable. I’d describe the fit as rather narrow or you might consider it a supportive design especially around the ankles (more on ankles later).

Buckles: there are three buckles that, once you’ve worked out which way the clasps move, and adjusted the length, are surprisingly smooth to use. Along with a small area of velcro near the top, they give a very secure feeling. I see they are replaceable but I’m not sure of the material.

Comfort: like most pairs of new shoes, I think there is a brief honeymoon where you are astonished that they do not hurt or dig in. During this time they feel super comfortable. But then, somehow, you start to notice the pressure in unpredictable places. So after nearly two hours of riding and some walking comfort, these boots suddenly became exquisitely painful mainly around my ankles where it felt like some of the protection had decided to make its presence felt. This led to some desperate leg manoeuvres on the bike as I got nearer to my increasingly longed for destination. I am hoping that this will pass. It might be that I had crammed, successfully I thought, my leather trousers into these boots.

Looks: maybe this should have come first. I think they look great. A year or so back I would never imaging wearing brown suede motorcycle boots but these have changed my mind. See this web page for some beautiful product shots of these boots.

Build quality: these are very rugged. Everything is double stitched and the protection feels strong. I can see that they are not as tank-like as my Alpine Starts old Tech 3s but they are an improvement on my disintegrating Spada cheap boots which I bought these to replace as those head into the bin. They are made in Romania which is refreshing when everything seems to have been made in China.

Waterproofness: during my 100 mile plus rides the heavens opened. I did not notice my feet being wet or cold so I presume their waterproofness, aided by a part elastic top, is pretty effective.

Overall: I will be very happy if the pain I felt after a day’s riding eases off. This kind of pain that only sets in after a couple of hours of riding is a killer. It adds to fatigue and just makes you want to stop riding. My otherwise lovely leather trousers from Hideout Leather are the same. After a while the armour on the left knee becomes really uncomfortable and distracting. I have some good quality textile trousers on my shopping list and these might solve both problems.

return journey via A1120 – the tourist route

Charley Boorman – Race to Dakar (DVD)

I saved buying this DVD (I see I bought it back in 2010) till the evenings had got darker and my son finally left home leaving me to the guilty pleasures of watching motorcycle vids in the empty house. Overall, this is a powerful documentary. The Dakar is not for the faint hearted and you have to take your hat off to anyone who dares enter it, Charley Boorman included. The characters are nearly all men in this and they pretty much conform to a stereotype of driven, inarticulate (there is a huge amount of effing and blinding), self-obsessed and in the early episodes this gets annoying; for example how they seem ready to blame eachother when things don’t go to plan. But when they are in their element – actually roughing it on the race – they become more likable and admirable. The series is well edited, it keeps up the tension (without the stupid staged ‘fallings out’ of the Long Way documentaries) and the end is very moving. If you like this kind of stuff, you will love it. (I’ve recently copied it to my iPhone for those late evening winter train journies home after work).

If you don’t have it already its still available from Amazon here.

As a note from 10 years later, the Dakar moved to South America in 2009 after being cancelled the previous year because of an apparent security threat. From 2020 it moved, controversially, to Saudi Arabia.

The Africa Eco Race started in 2009 as a rally designed to return to the return to the spirit of the original race. Lyndon Poskitt has put a range of impressively produced videos of this race on line.

Red Tape and White Knuckles: One woman’s motorcycle adventure through Africa: Lois Pryce, 2008, Century Books

‘Her light-hearted account almost disguises the grit’ There are always two reactions to motorcycle travel books: one is to the journey itself – usually awe inspiring in some way – and the other is to the writing. Lois Pryce’s second book about motorcycle travel (I haven’t read the first one yet) is a nicely written, easy-to-read contribution to this genre. But it tells a tale of almost unimaginable nerve and endurance across some of the most difficult terrain and politically frightening countries you could think of.

In our patriarchal world men not only take centre-stage but manage to convince most people that the male way of being in the world is some kind of norm. For example, Ted Simon’s accounts of riding around the world seem, mostly, to be the story of a person’s adventures rather than specifically of a man’s. But Lois Pryce’s books remind us that riding a motorbike, like everything in life, is gendered: in Muslim Algeria the man pumping petrol into her motorbike looks away from her and does not acknowledge her greeting once he realises this is a woman out in public, in other places she has to pretend that it’s a man and not her who is riding the bike in order to be given permission to travel, and in the Congo when she is stuck on the back of a train for a whole day with her strapped-down bike and surrounded by stoned Congolese soldiers touting Kalashnikovs the defining feature of this astonishingly tense passage is to do with gender – and power.

Lois is not afraid to be critical and poke fun at some of the tedious characters she encounters or travels with (she mentions the fantasy of parts of the German motorcycle industry to have the world full of identically dressed middle aged men advancing on bikes – in some latter day colonialist aspiration) but she also writes movingly about some of the positive and generous spirited people she meets in war-ravaged countries like Angola, some she considers her ‘guardian angels’. The middle chapters, mainly dealing with the Congolese and Angolan parts of the journey are genuinely scary and had my pulse racing.

Overall the style is light and humour is never far away. We don’t get the personal introspection nor the lingering political and social analysis of Ted Simon, so the book feels less serious than some but Lois is skilled at telling the story and the ending, which in this kind of book always runs the danger of anti-climax, is moving. Strangely, Lois is still in deep shit in an Angolan mine field and you notice there are hardly any pages left. Uneventful Namibia and South Africa get just a dozen or so pages.

As Ted Simon’s book jacket comment, used above to introduce this review, points out the book and the journey are in some ways at odds with each other, though not in any problematic way. As the jacket says elsewhere, the author is equipped with formidable strength of character and an immense passion for life. I’m not the first to say this, but it is a good read. Having finished it, I do wonder why the seriousness was kept at bay so much. I would have thought that an experience like this gave any author the right to offer some more extended reflections on life, humanity and the puzzle of the drive behind this kind of undertaking. Its available second hand from Abe Books here.

New exhaust not new note yet

SC Projects are based in what, on Google street view, looks like an ugly building in an industrial estate on the edges of Milan. But their products are anything but ugly – and, as replacement slip on exhausts go, they are well priced even including the nearly £100 tax that we have to pay post Brexit. Their products look good and sound good – especially when you remove the sound-killing baffle. THanson shows his struggle, successful in the end removing his from the same model of exhaust that I have. The end result in terms of sound is impressive. My efforts with grips and my best efforts have so far not budged the db killer. I have the feeling the design has been updated since he made his video.

shame there’s no soundtrack
Just 20 miles to try it out. It did not fall off or catch fire

More work more buttons

Now I have installed heated grips – fiddly but working and a One-finger clutch which also was fiddly but now is working nicely. The piece of work I had to pay for is cruise control – costing £460 at Orwell Motorcycles.

One finger clutch being installed

Cruise control and heating grips

Back in Cambridge with Moto Mosko in place

We have had a shortage of fuel recently due to a lack of tanker drivers due to Brexit and probably a sudden increase in demand as people start moving after Covid. I could buy petrol just outside Colchester. It was a long day’s riding. I think I need to adjust the handlebars to dial out the right shoulder pain if possible.

Reviewing Mosko Moto Nomax Tank Bag

In 2009 when I bought a 1200GS adventure, I discovered Touratech in the same breath. It was the obvious go-to place for accessories, and for me this was firstly luggage. Touratech were promoting a vision of the world, as Lois Pryce pointed out in one of her books, of squadrons of identically dressed middle-aged European men colonising Africa and other ‘third world’ regions, surrounded in the photos by young black boys admiring the German technology of their motorcycles (see the Touratech catalogues). It was a vision that was at best corny (and old-fashioned) and at worst contributing to a racist view of the world.

That was then – this is now. What came first? Me discovering that a 1200cc bike with metal luggage was pretty much unmovable when in narrow situations – or even on the stoney or sloping carparks of campsites – or the commercial promotion of ‘light is right’ from other companies like Adventure Spec and Mosko Moto? I’m not sure. Touratech, like most companies, was selling more than just products. It was selling a lifestyle or fantasy – of a certain way to be in the world with a motorcycle. Mosko Moto does exactly the same with their well-curated videos of the team off camping somewhere on their dirt bikes. Its quite a different style to Herbert and Ramona’s trips to test Touratech gear, its more down to earth, much simpler and they are a younger, perhaps more innovative, agile bunch.

Mosko’s luggage is, of course, ‘soft’. But its also cleverly designed. Here’s the tank bag. Many other tank bags are bigger and have one large compartment and maybe a couple of small pockets on the outside. The Nomax takes a different approach and splits the available space, which is not large to start with, into four narrow layers, the bottom-most being designed to hold a hydration pack – supplied with the bag. Where the spaces coincide with the owner’s intentions things work well of course. In mine I have one layer devoted to a clever new USB device that charges up to five different devices (batteries, iPhone), running from the single USB socket on the bike’s cockpit. If you have many small or flat items that you want to carry with you then this is perfect. If you want to drop your grocery shopping in there or want to keep your DSLR in it, you will be disappointed as neither will work. You need to think of another solution. But it is small which works well for me on a bike significantly shorter than my 1200GS and, in my view it looks good. You can buy a separate map holder, with transparent top (obviously) as my previous tank bags have had – this is almost their most useful feature because as well as maps and instructions you can keep a passport or cabin ticket there at hand. All my luggage shopping was delayed by post-Brexit fiascos so the map pocket did not arrive for my holiday. In fact neither did the map I ordered from Stanfords. The problem with it, now that I have it, is that it is too small to fit the A4 sized road atlas that so usefully fitted into my previous holder. So, again, I will need to think of another solution. Unlike Touratech who had the budget to develop luggage specifically for different motorcycles, MM have to design a fitting that is versatile enough to work with a range of bikes. I think this makes them a little more fiddly to take on and off – but not by much. Finally, their products are well made, using what definitely feels like high quality materials. The factory in Vietnam must have hugely strong needles in their sewing machines. Buckles, straps and velcro are supplied in generous qualities.