I went to see a motorcycle in Granada yesterday (a 2004 Suzuki Marauder 250cc, as you ask) and I was immediately reminded of how long it has been since I sat on a motorcycle and how good it felt! I really can’t wait to get back on the road again…

The Suzuki felt bigger and more solid than I had expected, and very comfortable for myself and Julie. It’s on sale for less than €1,000 and the price includes a set of panniers, a backrest and the transfer fee (here in Spain, if you buy a used vehicle of any kind, you have to have a legal agreement drawn up between the buyer and seller by a lawyer) so it’s certainly a possibility…

This is the Suzuki I was looking at yesterday…

However, actually looking at a bike made me think about how we’re going to fit minimalism and motorcycling together? Like the Pirate Code, minimalism isn’t a set of rules, it’s more a philosophy for approaching your life. But how does that translate to two wheels? That’s what I want to talk about in the next couple of posts.

When I first got into motorcycling, a 750cc bike was pretty damn big and traveling at anything over 100mph felt like an adventure (especially on one of my Nortons). Over the years, I went through a number of very high performance motorcycles and I can still remember in those pre-speed camera days of the mid 1980s (sigh…) watching in amazement as the needle on the speedo of my Kawasaki GPz900R buried itself against the stop at somewhere north of 160mph.

But, I don’t want to do that anymore. Spending almost five years living in South East Asia and in some areas with awful poverty has made me think more about how I use the resources of the world. And anyway, as I get older I no longer want to travel everywhere at warp speed. I actually enjoy ambling along and enjoying the smell of the wild rosemary at the side of the road. I like to listen to the sound of the world as I ride rather than just hearing the tearing scream of wind on my helmet.

Which is why I want a smaller bike. And I want something simple, partly because that will help to use less fuel but also because I want to be able to maintain (and fix if necessary) the bike myself. And I want a used bike because that costs less and buying used is a kind of recycling. Keeping an older bike going and even refurbishing it may mean one less new bike on the road.

But I also want to go touring for which I want a bike that will be able to undertake even long journeys without my having to worry if it will make it. That effectively rules out anything very old or even vintage – I started my motorcycling life on British bikes of the 1960s and 1970s. I loved them, but even I couldn’t claim they were reliable. I once wrote an article for a bike magazine titled Choosing a British Motorcycle from the 1970s and it consisted of a single word: ‘Don’t!’ (though strangely, the editor seemed uninterested in publishing it…)

So, I won’t be looking at any BSA Bantams or lightweight Italian bikes because I don’t find anything amusing about oil leaks and comedy electrics. The bike I choose will almost certainly be Japanese because there are lots of them around, they’re cheap, they’re good at really basic things like keeping oil on the inside of the engine and if they do go wrong, part are easy to find.

That’s a BSA Bantam. If you can rescue one of these and go touring on it, you have my complete respect. But that’s not what I want to do because I want to be able to focus on the trip, not the bike.

If possible, I want a 250cc bike, because that seems a reasonable compromise between the ability to carry two people and fuel consumption. I’ll probably go for some sort of cruiser style because that offers good comfort for two people. Does that really represent motorcycling minimalism? I suppose the most important answer to that is, it does to me. And that’s really what minimalism is about – deciding how to do more with less in your life.

That might simply mean going for a smaller capacity bike. Or a used bike instead of new. Or, if you have the ability you might choose to take an old nail that’s on its last legs and give it a new lease of life, meaning that all the time and resources which went into creating it will actually deliver more miles traveled. Minimalism means what you want it to mean, in motorcycling or any other part of your life.

See also: Magical Thinking and Motorcycles