SPLASH HIT!

Five motorcycles, a scooter and rainy mud. A most fun and dirty antidote to lockdowns

- Kartik Ware

If you don’t know where you’re going, you need suspension of disbelief. That’s no metaphysical statement; when out on our Bike Slush Fest, you need shock absorbers that make you go, ‘Whoa, I didn’t even feel that.’ As such, perhaps it was questionable to take along a 51-year-old Rajdoot 175 on our voluntary annual battle against the forces of mud and monsoon. But then I told myself that all good ideas start off as bad ones, and given that we were taking along a mix of machines — a scooter, a commuter, the cheapest Indian dual-purpose bike, the hottest adventure bike right now, and a big ADV bike for reference — I thought an old machine might add a bit of sepia charm to the proceedings. And I was in for a surprise.

The order of machines described above consisted of the following: the Yamaha RayZR 125 Street Rally, I clearly fixated on that last word in its name; the Hero Passion Pro, a light and cheerful machine that punches above its weight the BS6 Hero Xpulse, a massive improvement over its older self; the KTM 390 Adventure because, well, because; and the BMW F 850 GS, the bike that BMW uses to train riders for its GS Trophy events. As usual, no modifications were made to any of these machines. As usual, we would come to regret that later in some cases. For example, the GS came with street tyres on it despite putting in a request for dual-purpose ones at the very least. You can imagine how that went.

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