The BMW GS Safari, that is. Not the desert race Safari, not the New Zealand Yamaha Safari and not the GS Safari Enduro. Just the original BMW GS Safari, an excellent dualsport ride if ever there was one.
The GS Safari is in its 22nd year, and there’s no doubt it’s been refined over the years. It’s a beautifully run, well-attended ride, and I can see why. The support staff are fabulous and the riding as good as the support staff.
I only did the first two days. I was there for work and my reason for being invited was so I could ride the 2017 F800GSA. I always liked the 800 BMWs, but I thought my allegiance may have been swerving from the GSA to the GS. Now I’ve ridden the GSA I’m firmly back in the Adventure’s fan club. It’s a great bike.
The ride for me kicked off at Jupiters on the Gold Coast, and, as always on a GS Safari, began with a fairly lavish dinner and briefing. There were a stack of familiar faces and it was a great evening.
BMW has an R1200GS designated ‘Triple Black’ and I reckon it’s incredibly horny. It’s even more horny in a carpeted conference room right next to your dinner table.
Craig ‘Benno’ Bennett, BMW Motorrad tech trainer and one of the nicest blokes ever, rode this one, and I was jealous.
The ride headed down and around to wind up the first night at Tenterfield. The second day finished up at Toowoomba, and while the temperature climbed a bit and things got a little dusty in places, the riding was fabulous and the people great company.
I had a great time, due in no small part to the 800GSA being a surprising improvement over the old model (I say ‘surprising’ because I thought the previous model was pretty damn good. I didn’t think BMW could do a whole lot to improve it. But BMW did).
Because I was leaving in the middle of the five-day ride, BMW made available some kind of SUV-styled BMW car for me to drive back to the Gold Coast where I’d left my van. I don’t know what model it was, but it was way beyond my understanding. I couldn’t work out how to turn on the lights, and the airconditioning had four different zones. The GPS kept saying ‘please’ when it was giving me directions. It was all I could do to get it to Jupiters. Once I somehow got it into ‘Park’ – I don’t know how I did that – I couldn’t get it out of ‘Park’. The lights were on and the engine was running and I was causing a bit of a traffic jam outside the casino, so I took the cowards’ way out. In my most arrogant tone I threw the ‘key’ (there was no key) to the valet and said, “Look after my vehicle,” before slinking off into reception.
The car was gone when I came back down, so I guess the valet knew a fair bit more about it than I did. It wouldn’t have been hard.
After the GS Safari I had the chance to relive an old memory or two and dropped in on Adventure Bike Australia owner Mal McConnell and his wife Karen. Mal has a few bikes, but my interest was in a 1996 Suzuki Freewind.
The Freewind was a smoother, more road-oriented version of the DR650SE. In a lot of ways, it roughly paralleled the Dominator compared to the XR.
Like all Mal’s bikes, the Freewind is in really excellent condition. The bike was only available in Australia for two years, and I have some great memories of riding one during my time at ADB Magazine. I was thrilled when Mal insisted I take his Freewind for a ride.
Mal even had a Freewind banner he put on his fence! What a crack-up.
The bike has a big-bore kit, so it performed a little better than the bikes I remembered from the mid-1990s, and I really enjoyed cruising around the backstreets of the Gold Coast.
So that was my week.
Marty Blake dropped by and invited me on a ride, but I still don’t have a ridable registered bike in the shed, so I had to pass. We did gasbag for a while during work time, and that was a pleasant way to pass a very hot afternoon.
I was expecting to be in Melbourne this coming week, but that trip’s cancelled now, so I’m hoping to spend the week at my desk getting some work done and wishing I had a registered bike.
We’ll see.
TF
