Riding my motorbike on a nice day through a nice landscape often sets my mind into a contemplative mood – after I while I start to contemplate questions like “from thousands of possible hobbies, why did I choose the one that makes my lower backside hurt like hell?”. But it has been fun of course.
Over the weekend I was away for the 30th summer camp of the motorbike club Kuhle Wampe – an association of bike clubs from all over Germany and like the name suggests a somewhat left-leaning outfit (apart from lobbying for motorbike related interets like safer streets or better fuel effiency for bikes they do for example anti-racist work). But I heard little talk about politics – instead we were discussing motobikes, riding out, drinking beer and generally doing what a (female) friend of mine insists on refering to as “doing boys stuff”.
Actually there were quite a number of women and even some girls present, but still this assessment was to some extent correct – while usually women have some civilizing effect on men bike camps have a profoundly de-civilizing effect on women, in part simply because after two day of exposure to exhaust fume, campfire sooth and beer even the most distinguished lady will smell like a weazel (although the effect was mitigated by the fact that the camping site featured it’s own swimming pool).
Call me a spoiled brat, but as far as I’m concerned the three main signs of civilization are flushing toilets, web access and a decent cup of coffee in the morning. As for the camp, well, there was coffee. Another sign of civilization is that men try regularly to escape from it, although it’s not quite clear why they use motorbikes to do so (they don’t grow on trees, you know). But at least some of them try to use the least civilized bikes available.
This is a indian/british motorbike (built in India with, for lack of a better word, technology dating back to the time of colonialism). Built by Enfield it’s one of the few bikes I know that feature a diesel engine as a means of locomotion. I’ve never been to India but it must be a quite relaxed country – either that or indian motobikers are constantly swearing during the 90 or so seconds it takes to accelerate from 0 to 80 km/h.
Exhibit B used to be a Honda CX 500 – it’s amazing what they do with cheap spray paint these days, isn’t it.
Of course we were not always riding out – sometimes people just spent some quality time wearing funny hats (actually that’s the bag for our tent, and no, this isn’t me. I’ve changed but not that much).
After some 1000 kilometers in the saddle, which is not bad for a weekend, I finally arrived back home and re-entered civilization by downloading the latest batch of penny stock offers and penis enlargement spam.
Already I’m planning the next escape.
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