Sri Lanka

Trevor Gerdsen set out on his first ever off-road adventure.

- Trevor Gerdsen

What had I got myself into? It was mid-morning in Colombo and I’d just swung my leg over a dirt bike for the first time in my life. I was set for 14 days riding around Sri Lanka.

I blamed my riding partner, Albert. Last time we rode overseas it was New Zealand, and I’d chosen that destination and the traffic there had been nowhere near as frenetic. At least Kiwis used their indicators (well…mostly) and tended to stick to their lanes (again, mostly). In Colombo, anything goes.

Still, this was no ordinary dirt bike I was on. Unlike me, the bike had enormous experience, so much so that not much worked anymore. There was no tacho, speedo, fuel gauge, warning or blinker lights, and the whole headlight and instrument assembly points were pointing in a different direction to the rest of the bike. But who needs indicators when the horn works? And I forgot to mention the brakes. They worked, sort of. But more of that later.

There were just two of us and our guide, Dayan, from Ceylon Tusker Tours, atop Baja Honda 250R twins.

A coastal idyll

After 15 minutes on the bike in the Colombo traffic, noise and dust I’d turned liquid in my riding gear through adrenalin, fear, heat and humidity. As the days progressed, the first two subsided a little, but not the latter.

Thirty minutes riding north of Colombo we emerged onto an idyllic, coastal scene – golden sand and the azure-blue of the Indian Ocean to our left, with villagers hauling a drag net out of the breakers onto the sand, and palm trees, thatched huts and rice paddies to our right.