After a relaxing weekend in Revelstoke, we rolled out on a loopy week around the area of Canada known as the Kootenay Rockies. These were short days punctuated with sightseeing and easy rides between attractive provincial towns; short days in a land of huge distances. The reason for this idleness was simple enough, we had committed to be in the village of Nakusp BC, just 80km from Revelstoke, by Thursday to attend a Horizons Unlimited Motorcycle travellers meeting.

We have been to a number of previous HU meetings including one in Cambria, CA and two in Australia. The meetings are a gathering of the small clan of long distance motorcycle travellers and they bring together a spectrum from experienced international riders to those who still have only ambitions. Jo and I had agreed to give three presentations at the meeting. Two were classroom presentations (Travel Writing for the Non-writer and The Alps Beyond Alpine Roads), the third was a presentation on the modifications we have made to Elephant during our travels.

We had the opportunity to attend a number of other presentations that we thought might be useful. Jo took a particular interest in a few hours by a photo journalist and we were both interested in a presentation on safety around bears since one of our main hopes in Canada is to see some bears in the wild. The bear-presenter was a professional hiking guide and told a great yarn about a bus load of German tourists he was leading on a hike into bear country. They were all suitably equipped with bear bells (don't ask) and stuff called bear spray. This is  like capsicum spray. You spray it at the bear then run like hell!

The way we got the story, the tourists were just getting off the bus when one mother, having clearly misunderstood the meaning of “bear spray”, covered the eyes of her young son with her hand and started spraying him all over. The screaming came a few seconds later and a walk in the woods became a rush to hospital!

All of our presentations were well attended but it was the somewhat informal presentation on Elephant that drew the biggest crowd. Indeed, so unusual is its fitout, that Elephant draws a  audience anywhere we run across motorcycle riders. This got me to thinking about the various riders and bikes that turned up at Nakusp and the underlying ideas that brought them there. It seemed to me that there was an almost unhealthy fascination with the equipment among one group of riders while others seemed to understand what a motorcycle adventure is really about. Two examples should illustrate the point.

One fellow spent a full twenty minutes telling us about all the essential extras he had fitted to his brand spanking new BMW R1200GS Adventure. I opined that it was an interesting choice of first new bike since he last rode in 1972 but he assured me that it was the best possible choice for a lightly built solo rider. After all, he had seen it with his own eyes flying across rough country in the Touratec promotional video just the evening before. I admired his after-market foot rests which were broad and serrated and, no doubt, expensive. They were he said essential as a rider's foot would just slip off the standard items. I didn't bother to point out that I had ridden a similar bike around the world over some diabolical roads and couldn't remember ever having my foot slip off the standard rests. The final touch was a “special” and, no doubt, essential bike cover by the same company that makes covers for stealth fighters at a cool US300 a copy.
We had seen hundreds of riders like this in the Alps. They were riding in a pack, each one equipped with a top of the line BMW GS with every extra in the Touratec catalogue. They would ride down from Munich for the weekend to ride the Grossglockner Hochalpenstrasse and be back to work on Monday morning.

At the other end of the scale was a young Aussie couple who will, I hope, not mind being mentioned and having their photos included. Fiona and Matt are our heroes as they embody everything we think is important in a motorcycle adventure. They packed up their lives and shipped their bikes to South America, then spent the next two years riding South, Central and North America. Their bikes were cheap and cheerful Honda CB 250s fitted with cheap soft luggage. They are light, easy to manage, reliable, and cheap to buy and run. On these simple machines Fiona and Matt had managed the grandest of adventures.

Of course, we see lots of this in many areas of life; an obsession with the trappings and the  triumph of style over substance; the belief that possessions are interchangeable with experience. It seemed to us that the mantra should be: it's about the adventure, and not about the hardware!