Honda GL 1800 Gold Wing

Tour to Umdloti

- Howie Da Far Looker

Serendipity is the happy phenomenon of receiving pleasant or valuable things by chance. It's my favourite kind of good fortune and I'm lucky because I'm often blessed with serendipitous happenings. I was planning to travel to Durban on business in early June and couldn't decide whether to go by bike or car. The phone rang. "Hello Howie this is Irene from Honda. We've just put a new Gold Wing into our demo fleet. Would you like to ride it?" That, my brethren, is serendipity!

The Wing was delivered to my house on Thursday morning and I spent a couple of days commuting on it. I work on Rivonia Road but I live in the suffering south. Before the M2 closure I used to take the M1 North or ride up Joe Slovo to join the M1 at Killarney. Neither of those routes work any more because they're just too congested. These days when I leave home I get on at Comaro, ride the N12W and then take the N1N to the Rivonia Road off ramp. It's a 50km commute but the traffic flows nicely and I soon got used to the dimensions and mass of the Wing. When the traffic slowed down I rode the suicide lane with headlights blazing and with full confidence in the Wing's ABS brakes and light handling characteristics.

I packed the bike on Saturday evening though "packed" is probably the wrong word. I was going to be away for two nights and all my clothes and kit only occupied one of the panniers and a third of the top box. On Sunday morning I left home at 11:30 which was a bit late but the weather was perfect, cloudless sky, 20°C, and no forecast of rain anywhere on my route. And, of course, I was riding the acme of touring machines and Durban was a mere 600km distant. Let's get it on!