There
are a million motorcycles in Bangkok, but almost all of them have
engines that displace 125 cc or less. Most of them, in fact,
displace 100 cc, with a sprinkling of 115 cc engines. Those are all
step-through frame jobs with the gas tank in the seat. Suzuki, and, I
think, Yamaha, make step-through framed bikes with 150 cc engines,
just to try to create and fill a market niche, but you don't see many
of those. Any bike displacing 175 cc or more is automatically a big
bike. Almost all of those have tube-down frames and a gas tank up
where it belongs.
There
are a few manufacturers marketing single cylinder 250 cc motorcycles.
That's the next step up, size wise. Yamaha makes a beauty; it's
really a classic. I've posted pix of those on many occasions. I love
those bikes. These two shown above, I encountered the both of them
this week for the first time.
The
top picture shows a Kawasaki that was designed to be as close a
replica of an English 500 cc single from the 1950s as possible.
Except for the giant, vented front disk-brake of course. It's a
handsome bike, and I'll bet that it makes a beautiful sound. Fast?
Don't be silly. Even those old English bikes weren't fast, at twice
the displacement. You could row them through the gears for seven or
eight minutes and get them going 100 mph, but everything “quick”
was denied them. With either of these bikes in the photos, even 100
mph might be too much to ask.
The
bike in the bottom picture, however, might have more of a chance of
reaching the “ton,” as the English lads once called going 100
mph. It's a Honda, and it has nothing to do with anything old, design
wise or anything else wise. It's water cooled, and almost certainly
double cammed with four valves per cylinder. It certainly looks
faster, and probably is rather faster, than the Kawasaki.
This
is all very interesting to me, but I realize that I may be trying my
readers' patience. Not everyone shares my sense of wonder at
everything to do with motorcycles. Well, let's be real. Whose blog is
this anyway?
Honda
makes a really beautiful 400 cc single, but it's so rare that I have
never had an opportunity to photograph one. I saw one again yesterday, and
man oh man, it's a beauty. What a sound! That's a real thumper right
there. It's all laid out cafe-racer style, Old School English all the
way. You could make the ton on that one, definitely. If I were thirty
years younger, I'd buy one. Might as well drain the oil and keep it
in the living room on display though. Living in Bangkok, there's no
place to let out the leash on a fast bike.
I'm
too afraid of orthopedic injuries these days to really push the
envelope anyway, so who am I kidding? But I still take the
taxi-motorcycles on my Soi down to the main road. The guys love me,
because I give them double the fare as a tip and talk to them in
Thai. It's only an extra quarter. I have loved every second that I have ever spent on a
motorcycle, since that first ride long ago, 1964 to be exact, when my
friend Hilliary's brother drove me home from Bayside to College Point
on the back of his Honda CB-305 Super Hawk. I was smitten, and I've
never gotten over it. If I die tomorrow on the Soi, people will say,
“what the fuck was a seventy year old doing riding on the back of
motorcycle-taxis in Bangkok?” You can tell them for me, “he was
just enjoying himself, that's what.”
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