Looking back to years gone by

My love of motorbikes goes way back to my teenage years but I only bought my first motorbike in 1973 in Durban when I was 24 years old, that was a Suzuki GT750 "Water buffalo", it was second hand but in lovely condition.

My first brand new bike was a Yamaha 1.1 shaft which I bought in 1981 for the princely sum of R3,500 if I remember correctly, man that was an exciting day!

 We lived in a little village in the Eastern Cape from 1977 until 1987 and there was only one other bike owner, my mate Dirk so obviously we used to ride together whenever we could, usually on weekends because we were both working.

Our children were very young then so our biking was limited but our wives loved the bikes too.

When we could get away for a day, thanks to the kindness of friends looking after the children there were only two directions to go, these being road bikes it was either north up the N2 towards Umtata or South towards East London, it got a bit boring.

 It wasn't long before I added a couple of scramblers, we had lots of bush tracks and dirt roads to play on.

I also used to "tootle" around the village with the children on the bike, Christie on the back and Simon on the seat in front of me. Later on I would use the bike to go and fetch Christie from school, she had her own crash helmet and became a fearless pillion passenger.

I added the "Windjammer" fairing and "Wedge" panniers a bit later in preparation for an extended trip around South Africa which we had planned. I wrote about that trip earlier in which we traveled 8630km in a month around the whole country.

 

I sold that Yamaha a bit later and bought the first of my Honda Goldwings but I wish that I could have kept every single bike that I had previously and subsequently owned. Now it is more than thirty years since these photos were taken and I am still riding, hopefully there are a good few riding years still left in this old biker.