Testing the off-road performance!

Darren Moss is an experienced climber from Preston in the UK but has lived in Grenoble for the last two years. In summer 2009 he and his girlfriend Cecile took off for Corsica from Grenoble by scooter. They lived to tell the tale on Grenoble Life.

by Darren Moss

All she’d ever done since I bought it was take the mickey out of it. So it came as a bit of a surprise when Cecile, my better-half, suggested that for our August holidays we should ride my 125cc Retro Chinese scooter from our home in Grenoble to Corsica.

I bought it from a supermarket last September for a thousand euros, brand new. Cecile described it’s Italian retro styling as a cross between a Harley Davidson and a plastic bug. Undeterred, I named it Tian-Ma, after the legendary Chinese horses of unnatural power and agility.

We made a pile of only the absolutely necessary items: a fifteen kilogram bag of ropes and climbing equipment, tent, sleeping bags and mattresses, a cooking stove and pots and pans and cans of gas, beach towels, snorkels and masks, inflatable dolphin, swimming costumes and a parasol, warm clothes for the mountains, waterproof jackets, first-aid kit, headtorches, tool kit for the scooter … We looked at our mountain of absolutely necessary items and something had to go. It was painful, but we left the flippers.

With four bulky backpacks strapped to it and another between my legs, the handling wasn’t up to it’s usual Ducati-like standard. The suspension bottomed out over bumps and tight turns were difficult as the handlebars hit my knees. But eventually, in the early evening, doubting our legality, we wobbled onto the open road and kept our eyes peeled for Gendarmes.

Maximum uphill speed: 25kmph

As it only did sixty kmph flat out, maybe seventy downhill with a tailwind and the mirrors folded back and my head tucked behind the speedometer, the autoroutes were a no-go. Even the big Routes Nationales were scary, as cars whooshed past leaving us weaving in a whirlwind of dust and fumes. So we stuck to the scenic route. This was better anyway. On steep uphill sections we couldn’t shift faster than twenty kmph, so we could relax, admire the scenery and converse with passing cyclists. At ten-o-clock, we struck our first camp, under a viaduct near Monestier de Clermont.

The next day we made it to Orange, where we saw Buena Vista Social Club in concert and luxuriated in a three star hotel. On day three we had to make it to Toulon, six hours of scootering away.

What’s that bloke doing in the middle of the road? It was one of France’s finest, Monsieur Gendarme, signalling us, of course, to pull over. I considered gunning the throttle and burning past him, but he looked quite fit and could probably run pretty fast. There were two of them. While the serious one scoured the bike for socially endangering infringements, the friendly one chatted about rugby and his elbow injury and how we reminded him of when his dad had travelled to Corsica on a motorbike when he was a kid and how we should mind out for people driving round the bends on the wrong side of the road, and the pigs – watch out for the wild pigs. By the end we were all laughing like a bunch of mates and they let us off scott free. We warbled away, riding proud and righteous.

On the afternoon of day four, we trundled down the ferry ramp amidst and the roar and growl of a squadron of brother-bikers. Corsica. We’d made it. For the next two weeks we swam in crystal seas, marvelled at the blood red sunsets, climbed the sculpted granite spikes high on the Massif de Bavella. We lazed naked in sun warmed mountain pools. And Tian-ma powered onward, over the highest of passes, along the roughest of roads and around the wildest of pigs.

Sunset, Col De Bavella, Corsica

Amazingly, someone nicked our reg. plate! We crawled out of the tent one morning and there it was; gone. It was undoubtedly already in Italy stuck to the back of a stolen motorbike. The thief obviously had too much respect to steal the whole bike. We reported the theft and fashioned a stylish cardboard replacement.

Then the back tyre developed a crack an inch long down the sidewall, which though not leaking air, could’ve exploded at any moment. Perhaps the designers envisaged that the tyre would last longer than the bike because to remove the rear wheel you have to remove the exhaust pipe, which requires the removal of the plastic fairings, which requires the removal of the seat, the rack, footrests … I’m convinced that manufacturers the world over have a competition to produce “The world’s least user-fixable vehicle”. This thing would’ve done well. So we nervously continued until the sad day that we had to leave Corsica.

On hearing of our epic voyage, the garage owner we found in Nice, his son, the mechanic, administrative assistants and several passing locals shook our hands in congratulation and admiration. He said that as a salesman of this model he knew how bad they are and that we’d made him very proud. He took photos to send to the manufacturers in China. Maybe there are already huge billboard advertisements all over China showing me and Cess astride their trusty steed.

Three more days of butt-numbing trek followed. We even grovelled our way up to Col de la Cayolle on the border between the Alpes-Maritimes and Alpes-de-Haute-Provence, all two thousand three hundred and twenty six metres. Some of the last bikers to fire past us beeping and waving, took our photo when we arrived.

Grenoble. Home. One thousand eight hundred and forty three kilometres and exactly three weeks later. The following Monday I rode the scooter to work. People still laugh at it, but they don’t know anything. Even Cecile is convinced. They’ve never known the joys of warm summer wind breezing through your Bermuda’s, the sweep and swoosh of the mountain roads, the joyful burble of a little low polluting cheap as chips motorbike, Tian-Ma.

Related Posts:

• English Talk Radio meets ABC Anglais at Les Petits Bilingues
• The history of Grenoble in two short blogs (part II)
• What do YOU love about Grenoble?
• Grenoble Life meets The Cake Shop’s Paul Waters
• Transhumance in the Alps