IMMEASURABLY more than driving, motorcycle riding is a sensory experience. It’s not that you gain consciousness at the lights having undergone intense hallucinations the likes of which even Timothy Leary might have balked at. It’s more the case that even the most cursory of journeys can send your nostrils twitching or your peepers widening.
The sights you see from the vantage point of a motorcycle saddle span the glorious and the godawful. As the late author Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: “Through [a] car window everything you see is just more TV … It is all moving by you boringly in a frame. On a cycle the frame is gone … You're in the scene, not just watching it.”
While this means you get a new perspective on rural landscapes, you also get a new perspective on human behaviour, especially when it comes to people using smartphones at the wheel. Texting, watching videos, making calls – I’ve seen it all.
The nose takes a fair battering too when you’re on a bike. If it’s not a cloud of camomile and walnut-flavour vapour billowing from the driver’s window of a premium German car it’s a lungful of illicit smoke floating from the cabin of a Fiat Ducato on a Friday afternoon, or a whopping belch of diesel fumes from the exhaust pipes of a bus (providing there’s any left in the tank. In my experience most of the diesel that buses take on at the depot ends up on the road).
Further thrills are to be had when passing kebab shops, fishmongers, sewage treatment plants and rubbish dumps. It’s even better when you’re forced to stop outside said establishments.
While modern cars all come with suspension so soft you can’t tell when you pass over a cattle grid, motorbikes are not so forgiving. This means your sense of touch is heightened, which in turn informs how involved you become in the practical business of steering the motorcycle, which in turn makes getting from A to B an active pursuit and not, like 99% of car journeys, a passive experience.
Every rut and bump or change of camber can upset the balance of the machine, as can ironworks and road markings. The rider who can find the least disturbed surface will inevitably have the most pleasant ride. You know you’re making progress when you begin to manoeuvre the bike between paint and manholes silkily and almost unconsciously.
As for your ears, like your nose they are subjected to epic levels of abuse, mainly though not exclusively in the form of wind noise. It is, however, a microscopic price to pay for the relentlessly alluring roar/grunt/burble/whistle of whatever exhaust you have stuck on your machine (only squares leave the original pipes on, dude).
All of which leaves one sense unexplored. While it’s fleeting – and the fact it’s required at all is perhaps an indictment of the way most of us choose to lead our lives – it’s at the very heart of the motorcycling experience, and always will be: the taste of freedom. Now that's a trip.
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