The good, the bad and the ugly

I put quite a bit of thought into preparing for the rally and in this section I want to take a look back at how my expectations fared when faced with the cold (and on most days, wet) light of reality. It's more than just which gadget worked or broke, it's more whether I set off in the right direction or not.

Firstly why on earth did I decide to go to Germany in the first place. It's the middle of winter, it's dark a lot more of the day than it's light and if it isn't snowing and below zero then the conditions are too mild. I suppose that's the whole point of the Elephant rally. Even though there are tougher events out there now it has some sort of reputation as representing a kind of pinnacle and it's been going long enough that many if not most bikers will have heard of it. That's not a reason for freezing to death for a week on the autobahn though. I suppose it ultimately comes down to whatever it is that attracts you to motorcycles in the first place. I don't have any interest in fastest-kid-on-the-block type sports bikes and although I watch the occasional MotoGP race on TV it's decades since I last went to watch a race live. In fact I don't have much interest in any kind of two wheeled motorsport and I've always ridden bikes more as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. By that I mean I enjoy going places on them. Whether that means coaxing a clapped out Lambretta from Essex to see Stonehenge as I did when I was 16 or trying (and failing) to get to Timbuktoo on an XR600 10 yrs ago, the bike is a means to that end. It's integral to the journey and therefore not interchangeable with a car or an airline flight, but it is an adjunct. That's the spirit in which I went to the Elephant rally four times back in the 1970's; I wanted to see what it was all about. Along the way it's had a huge impact on the way my path through life has gone but at its core that's all it is, just motorised curiosity.

So why this year - after all the 70's was a long time ago and you're not getting any younger etc etc. I had thought about it before, and probably considered it each year for the last ten or so but somehow something or other wasn't right each time. Either I didn't have a suitable bike or we were going away on a family holiday or work got in the way or something. This was no great burning desire, if anything that sounded better came along I'd quite happily abandon plans for the Elephant and take the better offer. Last year though I was offered the Bloop. I thought straight away it would be perfect for the Elephant and I agreed to take it on the basis that I'd see if I could get it going well enough to do the trip. In view of what I've written over the course of the earlier entries in this blog you might wonder about the use of the word "perfect"in relation to the bike. After all I must have known it's slow, mechanically rudimentary and well beyond its design life before I chose to go on it. If I'm going to spend a week in some seriously taxing conditions why would I not use a bike with at least some sort of life support potential - decent electrics, good lights, a turn of speed on the autobahn, that sort of thing. Well, I've outlined the idea behind a lightweight bike in snow earlier in the blog and it's perfectly valid but it's not the only reason. I could have lowered the XR600 so I could get my feet down and used that (I still might do that!) but the Bloop had other attractions. Firstly there was a perverse attraction of using something totally unsuitable. My Elephant history is full of using unsuitable machinery. Apart from the first time when we did use a halfway sensible bike I've used these -

In case you don't recognise them they are, from left to right, a Honda C50, an MZ250 which we used two-up and a Suzuki TS100. Nothing there which would come into the sensible category. The Elephant rally for me has been something where I seem to need to turn a drama into some sort of crisis, to make things harder than they need be and for no other reason than it amuses me. So that why the Bloop was perfect.

There's no need to invite trouble though. Despite everything I would prefer to get there and back without huge issues or problems. The last time I went - on the TS100 - I caught flu on the way back and spent a week in bed afterwards. I certainly didn't want a repeat of that. The year I went on the C50 the engine blew up and it had to be abandoned in Germany. I'd prefer not to repeat that either. So a degree of foresight and preparation was in order. It was a lightweight trip that I had to take seriously.

Over the summer and autumn of 2012 I took the whole bike to bits and checked just about everything. It had been sitting in an unheated garage for 20yrs so corrosion was likely to be the biggest problem. The piston was seized in the bore but with care and patience I managed to rescue all the parts intact and reuse them. The inside of the fuel tank was totally rusty and needed cleaning out with hydrochloric acid. I had endless problems with the wiring loom and it took me a good month to get the right hand indicator working reliably. The fuel tap leaked (then part of it snapped off) and I managed to break the speedometer glass by dropping a spanner on it. All of these problems I worked through as well as repainting items such as the stands and footrest brackets, polishing corrosion off of numerous aluminium parts and doing what I could to rescue the chrome. I then set about trying to protect it against the ravages of salt laden winter roads. I covered everything with a combination of Waxoyl and / or ACF50, made extended front and rear mudflaps to try and keep overspray down and lacquered a lot of the chrome as a third layer of defence. Much of the rest of the bike was still in good condition - the chain ran inside a metal case and was still oily even after twenty years. I did take a chance with the tyres though. As far as I'm aware they were the 1970's original fitment but they had no signs of cracking or oxidation so I decided I'd see how things went. They still seemed to have plenty of grip and the MOT man seemed happy with them so they stayed. In the event they gave me no problem at all and after 1800+ miles, 90+ percent of which was on wet roads I'm still very happy with them. By all normal criteria they should have been death traps but they were fine. Here's what the bike looked like around the end of summer 2012 -



I then had to consider the bike's limitations and what could I do about it. Firstly, luggage capacity. It already had a rack fitted and a medium sized top box bolted to it. That was a good start but the rack was never going to take much weight as at the back it was bolted to the rear light fitting. Overloading that would eventually break the rear mudguard so it would have to be restricted to light items only. That meant not using my huge 1970's top box which although it had my previous Elefantentreffen stickers on it was too heavy empty, never mind loaded. In the end I used the smaller box and just kept stuff like washing kit, towel, first aid kit etc in it. Much of the heavier stuff was going to go into a set of period 70's panniers that I found in the garage. That meant making up some sort of framework to mount them and it took me about a month to construct the side frame and the fittings from scratch. Quite a bit of effort went into ensuring that they would all come apart as intended when it was below zero and my fingers were frozen. In the event they all worked faultlessly and I've chalked that up as a success. The tops of the panniers were deliberately intended to be at seat height so I could use them as a platform to mount a large holdall sideways. That was to contain the large, bulky items like the sleeping bag, tent etc. That also worked faultlessly so another tick in the yes box although with hindsight I'd put the spare petrol can somewhere else next time. I spent a lot of time considering how much spare petrol to take. With only 7L available in the main tank I was fearful about running out on some lonely stretch of autobahn and looked at the merits or otherwise of taking 2L, 3L, 4L and 5L in various combinations of cans. In the end the symmetry of putting a 2L can of petrol at one end of the holdall and 2 litres of oil at the other won me over so that's what I went with. That was probably about right as the 2L supply never actually got used although it was comforting at times to know it was there.

I made a screen for the front based on memories of the last Elephant trip - the one where I came back with flu. John made his "cat-flap fairing" for the Honda he went on and survived ok. I didn't and didn't. This picture says it all -



So some sort of weather protection was a must. The handlebar muffs were borrowed from my CCM and the screen knocked up out of bits of plastic bought on ebay. Leg protection was an area that taxed my imagination but in the end I started feeling a little uneasy about keeping on bolting stuff to a 10bhp motorcycle. It was slow enough without all these extras so in the end I called a halt to it. The day before I left there was one last addition though. I put a kind of deflector strip along the top of the screen to try and stop an aerodynamic monotone - like you get when you blow across the top of a bottle - that came from the edge of the screen. It was purely a guess but it worked. So, the screen was a success. It kept me a lot drier and warmer than I would have been without it and cost next to nothing. It slowed the bike down quite a bit and was probably responsible for knocking 10mpg off the fuel consumption but it was worth the effort. I preferred being warmer and drier than being a few miles per hour faster. And I didn't catch flu.



So, staying with the bike, what didn't work? The main thing that disappointed me were the LED spotlights. Even when it was working the Bloop headlight was terrible and for months I'd considered what I could do to upgrade it. Auxiliary lights seemed to be the way to go and I had in mind a set up where they would go on and off with the dipswitch. To do that with high powered LEDs meant importing a load of bits from the US and making a system from scratch and I dithered around thinking about it until I didn't have enough time to do it. So the battery powered bicycle units I bought on ebay seemed like a good second choice. Two of them together seemed staggeringly bright - easily car headlight intensity - and I was very please with the way they mounted on the bike. The batteries went in the tank bag and I could just about turn them on and off manually. Their construction seemed solid enough so I didn't strip them down beforehand. That was a big mistake. They both failed because the high frequency engine vibration snapped off poorly supported components on the circuit boards - the same part on both lights. That would have been foreseeable and preventable if only I'd taken a look at them beforehand.

The lithium batteries that came with the lights worked well but being 8.4v needed some bespoke electronics to power my sat-nav and tent light, something I knocked up a couple of days before departure using some cheap components and lots of duct tape. Much to my surprise the converter box worked throughout the trip without any problems. A few other small items fell down on the job though. A fish tank digital thermometer bought from ebay for £2.50 proved to be not only inaccurate but the display continually reset itself as soon as the bike engine started - vibration again. A matching digital clock filled up with water every time it rained (ie every day)and I was having to dry it out overnight in every hotel. My £2.00 last ditch back up for powering the sat-nav, a USB output wind generator, never worked properly and is still under investigation at the moment. How hard can it be - the wind turns the generator and that charges a small internal battery, but it never seemed to have any charge in it. There was plenty of wind as I rode along at 50mph so it should have worked.

What else? My Lidl's tank bag came close to not making it back. It was too big for the Bloop and kept slipping off the side of the tank. It also had three zips break over the time I was away - the first before I even left. It wasn't waterproof and I took to keeping all the paperwork and electronics in a bin liner inside the bag as additional protection. When I got back I found the one year warranty still had a few days to run and they gave me my money back. It wasn't actually a bad design but I just wished they'd paid the Chinese a few euros more to make it slightly better quality.

So that was the bike. It did the job and it was an amusing, if not particularly relaxing, ride to Bavaria and back. It's strange how something as small, slow and disposable as the Bloop should not be relaxing; what exactly was I un-relaxed about? Well it wasn't because I was going so fast that the concentration level needed wore me out, but having to rev the engine to it's maximum all the time to make any sort of progress is equally wearing - and you're having to do it for longer each day because you're going so slowly. Every little gust of wind, every vehicle that came past, every tiny little hill, whether I leant forward or not, all made a difference to what speed the bike would do. I could even detect a difference between dry roads (not many) and wet roads - the effort of clearing water by the tyres slowed the bike perceptibly. In many ways this was closer to sailing than biking; I spent more time reading the wind than reading the road signs. On a bigger bike a long motorway trip can become tedious because the limitations on progress are mainly external - keeping within the speed limit for example or fuel consumption, things like that. There's not much you can do about a speed limit apart from accepting it and relaxing as best you can but that was a problem I never had to face with the Bloop; even in 50mph roadworks sections I was struggling to keep up. If you relaxed for a moment you'd find yourself doing 30mph rather than 50.   

Trying to draw all of this together into some sort of conclusion is slightly difficult because there is a contradiction in all of this - the more sensible choice of bike I make, the less I want to do the trip. The Bloop, for all its shortcomings, was probably close to ideal in terms of motivating me to go in the first place. I have two much more "sensible" bikes for this kind of thing in the garage and I've not gone in the last twenty years.

Would I do it again? Perhaps. It's not the conditions or anything that would put me off - some forethought and decent equipment and the climate isn't really a problem but it's more fundamental than that. This year I went out of curiosity; I wanted to see what had happened to the rally since my last visit decades earlier. Having seen it, that reason isn't going to work a second time. I would go as a social activity - in a group with a bunch of friends but these days biking has become more and more a solitary activity as people have moved away or lost interest or gone in different directions so I don't know too many people who would consider the week spent riding to Bavaria and back and camping in the snow a "must do" project. I'd have no problem finding people who'd be happy to spend a week in the snow but they'd usually want be on skis.

Now that I'm back from the rally I've been wondering what to do with the bike. Previously my vision never stretched that far - probably because some part of me didn't actually believe it would make it back in one still usable piece. On the back of a recovery truck or dumped with a seized engine or a snapped frame or something equally terminal, maybe but for it to be just to be sitting on the drive not showing any sign of distress from the trip wasn't something I'd thought likely. I don't have any more motorcycle based trips planned at the moment other than a few local ones but in my wilder moments I've thought about using it for a trip down to our flat in the Alps, perhaps in the summer or early autumn - something perfectly feasible, or even for my next trip down to West Africa (if the political situation there ever stabilises). A cruising speed of 45 - 50 mph is fine for that - there's no point in rushing past it, you're not going to be there too many times. For the time being though I'll just see how things work out.

Wending my way home

 Monday morning always seems to be be depressing no matter where you are. Wondering whether I'd actually get to the rally, splashing around in the mud, all that sort of stuff, that was behind me, that was last week. Now all I had in front of me was a six hundred mile plod along the motorway in the rain (yes it was raining again) on something just one step up from a children's toy. I did briefly wonder whether I could make better use of the spare petrol and whether EasyJet flew from anywhere near Wurzburg. A few cups of coffee and whatever else I could face for breakfast and then the realisation that dawn had err.. dawned changed my mind. Things always look better in the daylight and the bike deserved better than a couple of matches in the corner of some foreign field.

One of the problems with traveling by bike is the amount of time it always takes to get going in the morning - or after any stop come to that but it seems to niggle me more in the morning. I got up at 6.30am but despite my best efforts I didn't manage to get on the bike until just before 9.30am. Three hours! How can it take so long! I'm in a hotel so all I have to do is throw some clothes on, eat their already prepared breakfast and leave. In a car I'd stuff everything into a holdall which I'd toss into the boot with one hand while eating a croissant or something with the other. Even allowing a few minutes for brushing my teeth, about half an hour should do it. Not so on a bike. Everything has be packed exactly, every strap checked, everything placed where it should be or it'll vanish at some point during the day. It's a tough environment on two wheels and unless you want to leave a breadcrumb trail of belongings behind you as you ride it's a good idea to take the time and pack properly.

That sounded all well and good until I set off. Within ten seconds I realised I'd left my earplugs out. Another delay! It took a good ten minutes to put them in - glasses off, helmet off, unzip jacket to remove balaclava, find earplugs - which pocket were they in? Oh yes, one of the inner ones, so unzip jacket completely. Then struggle with one of the plugs that didn't fit properly and about fifteen attempts later finally get it in. Reverse the procedure with balaclava, jacket, helmet and glasses to put everything back on. Ok, that it , lets go. Not quite. When I took the helmet off I'd put it over the right hand mirror to keep it off the wet ground (did I mention it was raining!). The mirror had been knocked out of alignment and had come loose so I was going to need a spanner to tighten it up. So, dig out the toolkit from the depths of one of the panniers, spend a few seconds actually tightening the nut and another couple of minutes putting it all away again. At this point I was too warm from wearing all the layers of bike clothing while not moving so the helmet visor was steamed up. The quick workaround for that was to ride with it up but I soon stopped again as I had no idea where I was going. I knew the autobahn wasn't that far away but my game of musical junctions the night before meant I'd come into Wurzburg from a different direction. Now I didn't recognise any of the directions on the signposts and fearful of riding round at random until I ran out of petrol, I reluctantly had to stop and get the sat-nav working. Inevitably it decided to sulk and go on a search-to-rule when it came to finding the satellites. Actually it probably didn't, it just feels like it when you're sitting stationary waiting for it to auto locate.

Part of the reason I was getting impatient is that this was going to be a long day. I had a ferry booked from Calais the next day at 4.00pm so allowing for delays, waiting, booking in time etc I had a target arrival time of 2.00pm in my head and that meant my overnight stop had be no more than 200 miles from the ferry. Based on that my destination for today had to be somewhere between Aachen on the German border and Brussels. Brussels would have been nice but I really didn't think I'd get that far so I compromised with somewhere in the middle - and that meant Liege. There's no Etap hotel (the chain I was using) in Liege but there was a Formule 1 just off the motorway and that's what I'd booked. That meant a journey of around 270 miles and it was already past 10.00am. 270 miles on the autobahn doesn't sound like that far and it would be an easy day in a car or on a big bike. I've regularly done 750 mile days back from our flat in France and a couple of times have managed close to 1000 miles in a day on a Gold Wing but when you're down to second gear on some of the hills and celebrating when you manage to get beyond 50mph, 270 miles is a long trip. At least, being Monday the trucks were back and I could try to use them to speed things up.

An hour or two into the day I was riding in the wake of a truck near Frankfurt airport, buzzing along happily at 55mph when I glimpsed two bikes stationary at the side of the carriageway. I just had time to register that they were on UK plates before I'd gone too far to be able to stop. In any case you couldn't have chosen a worse place to break down. The edge of the carriageway where they were wasn't the edge of the motorway, it was a dividing concrete wall separating this part of the autobahn from another section going somewhere else on the other side. Whichever way they went it would mean crossing at least half a dozen lanes. Good luck, and I'm glad it's not me was all I think.

North of Frankfurt the motorway makes its way up and over the Taunus mountains. I remembered this area from the way down as I'd followed a fuel tanker most of the way on the up side and been pleased with how the bike had managed to keep up. This time it was different. As I slowly climbed higher I noticed that the rain was turning to snow and then settling. Within five miles the whole area was covered in snow - on the trees, in the fields, even creeping onto the edges of the carriageway where the salt was less effective. This is what I'd been expecting at the rally and I decided I'd like to try and get at least one picture of the bike in a snow field. Within a couple of miles there was a sign for a small rest area so I decided to pull in and see if I could at least get something on camera.



It was after taking these photographs that I noticed the first problem with the bike. The lights were no longer working. I'd been riding with the headlight on (it may be a legal requirement in Germany, I'm not sure, but it's a sensible thing to do on spray covered roads anyway) and they'd been working ok when I saw the reflection in a van about half an hour earlier but now both front and rear lights had out. I guessed it was probably a problem with the bulbs and as I was going to need to stop for fuel shortly I'd have a look at them then. Until them my emergency back-up plan would have to be used. That consisted of a battery powered bicycle rear light that I'd fitted in anticipation of this happening and my tent light fixed to the front of the bike with velcro and powered from one of the spotlight lithium batteries. At least they worked and about 10 miles later I pulled into a service station to started unscrewing things.



The headlight bulb had indeed blown - probably through vibration, something that's a constant problem with the high frequency buzz you get from small two strokes. Because of the cut price nature of the lighting system on the Bloop, if the headlight goes, the rear light gets all the current and has a subsequent life expectancy in the millisecond range. So I needed to replace both bulbs. I chucked in a new spark plug while I was at it for no other reason than I had one and I had the spanner handy. The bike was running fine before and didn't run any better afterwards but whatever, put it in the category of preventive maintenance or something.

That was it for the day really. I called in at the Limburg services for old times sake and over a cup of coffee chatted for a while to another couple of Brit bikers on their way home from the rally. As Liege eventually got closer I dug out the sat-nav, programmed in the hotel location and this time managed to come off at the correct junction. I arrived at the hotel reception just as it was getting dark and, having crossed that invisible line in the sand, was able to speak to the receptionist in French rather than, as in Germany, having to hope they could speak English. I parked the bike where I could see it from the bedroom window and watched a movie for the evening.

Next morning when I looked out the window I saw, firstly, sleet being blown in horizontally on what seemed like gale force winds and already plastering the side of the building. The direction of the gale force wind suggested it would be head on all day. Wonderful! The second thing that caught my eye was that the although the bike was still there it seemed to be surrounded by other bikes - in the same parking slot. Maybe I should have fitted a proximity alarm or something. Because the Bloop is so small and light it's not unknown for people to disregard it. A couple of times on the trip I'd left it at the petrol pump in the services while going to pay and come back to find someone moving it so they could fill up their 4x4. A few cross words had then ensued although as mine were in English the exact point I was making may not have come across exactly. If it had been a car or a Harley with a sticker saying something like "Satan's slaves, Mannheim chapter" it wouldn't have been touched. Now that I was back in the Francophone part of Europe let me put it in simple words - ne toucher pas le moto!

Actually it wouldn't have made any difference as the bikes were UK registered. They belonged to father and son, Rupert and George and they'd been the people I'd glimpsed stuck at the side of the autobahn near Frankfurt. It had taken most of the morning for the rescue services to turn up and get them back on the road so Liege was as far as they'd managed to get. Rupert was on a mid 70's Triumph - and I thought I had problems! Chatting to them over breakfast meant that I was late setting off again but at least the sleet had stopped by the time I got going and there was actually some blue in the sky. I needed fuel but even more urgently I needed some two stroke oil. I'd calculated in advance how much oil the bike would use but that was based on a somewhat optimistic expectation that I'd get 75+mpg. At 60mpg not only did it use more fuel it also used more oil and now the tank was empty. I'd been looking in the services to buy some but German services didn't seem to stock it - or at least the ones I'd been to the previous day hadn't. Maybe Belgium would be better. I hoped so otherwise I could be putting cooking oil or anything into it.

After a very slow plod - even by Bloop standards- along the autoroute I eventually came to a service station just outside Brussels. By his point I was starting to get very nervous. I had the 2L can of spare fuel but the oil level had dropped off the end of the sight window so I was really pleased to roll onto the forecourt with the engine still in one bit. They actually stocked the correct sort of oil so that was another plus but it was back to the pre payment system that I'd scratched my head over on the way out. To cut down on the delay I tried to use my visa card but the system wouldn't take it so I had to go into the kiosk, give the attendant €20 and the pump number, go back out and fill the tank and then go back in to get my change. Each time there was a queue at the counter so the whole process took about 15 mins. Only Belgium seems to have this system - why? Are there more drive-aways in Belgium? Have the Germans or the French been coming over the border, filling up and clearing off without paying? It's not as if fuel is cheaper in Belgium.

I eventually arrived at Calais just after 2.30pm. The day had brightened up and for once it was dry although the head wind had me doing the whole coastal section from Brugge to Calais in third gear. Waiting an hour for the ferry to arrive and unload I passed the time watching the UK security people examining the parked lorries for "hidden passengers" The dog seemed to be enjoying it even if the humans looked like they'd rather be anywhere else than on some windswept dockside. It didn't seem like they found anybody and I spent some time musing on whether finding someone or not finding anyone would count as a successful day for them. I also spent some time wondering what to about my lights. Both bulbs had blown again and they were my spares. By the time I got to Dover it would just be turning dark and while my emergency battery powered lights would be ok in the town there was no way I could come back along the motorway with them - not using the front one at least.



I decided I'd farm out the problem and call the AA. I was amazed when a van turned up in under half an hour - I hadn't even finished watching the movie on my ipod. I'd already stripped the headlamp down so I could show him the bulb - this time it was black internally which suggested some sort of fault and his response was initially as I expected - "I don't have any 6v bulbs". His next sentence surprised me though - "but I can fix it". Using the battery lights I followed him up to the local Halfords (I didn't even know there was one in Dover) where he found a suitably sized bulb and glued it into the bulb holder with plastic metal. A cable tie held it all in place for 15 mins or so while it set and - it worked. OK the beam pattern was a bit out but it was brighter than the original and easily good enough for the journey home. It's still in there now. So, thank you Mr AA man - you're a credit to your organisation and that bodge gets added to the list of fixes available to me in the future.

So that was it, just under 1900 miles over the course of a week in almost constant rain or snow on a bike that only a few months earlier came very close to becoming landfill. Apart from the bulbs nothing at all went wrong with it - I didn't even check the chain, and it's still running happily around here now. That's the end of the trip to the Elephant rally but the last entry on this blog will be a bit of a retrospective - a look at what worked, what didn't and with hindsight what I would do differently, but as I got there and back without any serious issues I didn't get it too badly wrong.

All over for another year

I didn't sleep that well on Saturday night, or at least I don't think I did. Or maybe I did and I just don't remember. It wasn't alcohol or anything but I just seemed to lie there, listening to the rain tapping away on the tent as the night passed. I don't remember falling asleep at all but the night didn't seem that long so I must have been seamlessly drifting between the two states and not realising it. When I finally decided to face the day it seemed like the air had a much colder edge to it so I shouldn't have been surprised by the scene that faced me when I unzipped the tent.

With all the rain I'd been listening to I'd been expecting the mud to be even worse but the ground was now quite solid. I was amazed at how quickly the transformation had occurred as it was still liquid when I'd gone to bed the night before. It was still snowing and it was going to need a bit of thought if it continued while I was packing up. First things first though, I'd start with a walk over to the bratwurst van to see if they were serving coffee.

Before I could do that I had to solve the problem of how to put my boots on. The previously liquid mud coating them had now frozen sold and with half sleepy fingers I couldn't undo the laces. Everything was frozen into a block of ice. It took quite a bit of time to warm the mud ice up enough with my hands to be able to loosen them and get my feet in. While I was preparing for the rip I read a blog that someone had written about last year's rally and one of the things they recommended bringing was an umbrella for when it was snowing. From previous experience that struck me as sound advice and my chief "sponsor", Poundland had provided one at minimal cost. This was the time I needed it as the snow was starting to settle in my hair and, of course, I no longer had my hat. Sadly I no longer had the umbrella either as it had fallen into a mud pool the previous day and vanished. Maybe it was just as well that this was departure day.

The bratwurst van was about a quarter of a mile away and on the other side of some of the worst mud on the site but much to my amazement it was now solid enough to walk on. Maybe not in the middle but certainly round the edges and the journey was a lot quicker than it had been previously. Despite the early hour the van was open and selling coffee and half a cup later I started feeling a lot more awake. I then thought I should go and have a look for the hat in the daylight. Martin's tent was only about 100m away and open sided so I could look around without having to unzip anything. As I approached there were two people sitting on the straw bales pointing at something they were examining together. It was the hat and they were looking at the older badges. One of them explained they'd just found it in the mud by the side of the tent and once they realised it was mine they were happy to hand it back. I was so pleased to get it back and a big thanks to whoever found it even if it's unlikely you'll ever read this.

Back at the tent a few other people were starting to pack up as well. Graham and Mark, two guys who'd actually thought through how to deal with the conditions, whether it was snow or mud, were packing their their tents as well. Their solution had been to bolt two bikes together so solving the problem of falling off when the going got slippery. Back on normal roads a few minutes work with some spanners to remove the trellis arrangement and they were back to normal. We were all packed at about the same time and I managed to cadge a lift with them up to the entrance - or at least my luggage did. It meant I could get everything back to the bike in one trip rather than three. Thanks for that guys, I really appreciated it. All through the time we were packing up there was no sign of life from Dave's tent - to the point where I began to wonder if there was anyone in there. I called out a couple of times but there was no reply so I never got the chance to say goodbye. Later on I began to wonder if he was ok but it's not been unusual in my rally experience (!) for Saturday night to still have an "effect" on Sunday morning - and so it turned out to be.

Back at the bike this is what greeted me -




Half an hour of packing frozen or soaking wet bags and then trying to struggle into the remainder of my bike clothes while it was still snowing and I was ready to set off. The Bloop started straight away - not quite much to my amazement as I'd been more and more impressed by its reliability, but these were conditions about as tough as it gets and a thirty five year old bike that had been stuck in a shed for twenty years was up and running where all around me I could hear the sound of struggling starter motors and flat batteries. It wasn't quite a schadenfreude moment though as I soon found out I wasn't going anywhere. The inside of the left handlebar muff had collected quite a bit of water while the bike was parked which had then frozen, trapping the clutch lever in the ice so I couldn't pull it in. It took a good five minutes of pushing and pulling before I managed to free it enough to be able to get into first gear.

My destination for the day was a hotel! Somewhere to warm up and dry out but I had well over two hundred miles to cover to Wurzburg before that would happen. A slightly more direct route back to the autobahn took about half an hour and I was heading north. First surprise - the autobahn was nearly empty. Eventually I remembered it was Sunday (on a trip like this the days tend to merge into one after a while) so that would explain the absence of trucks. No trucks meant no tows and the Bloop was now heading into the wind rather than running with it as it had been on the way down. For most vehicles that wouldn't make any real difference but for me it meant that it wouldn't pull top gear, even on the flat. I could buzz it up to about 50mph in third but when I changed into fourth it would gradually slow down. At 45mph I would change down to third and repeat the process. This was going to be a long day.

It didn't occur to me at first but an empty autobahn without trucks and with long straight unrestricted sections means that some of the cars come past at quite substantial speeds. That wasn't a problem as long as they moved over into the left hand lane to do it but a few of them couldn't even be bothered to do that, coming past my 40mph motorcycle at somewhere around 140mph and in the same lane - just moving over enough to clear me by inches. This happened again and again until the motorway filled up later on so it wasn't just one drunken reveller heading home while texting with one hand and retuning the radio with the other. They all had one thing in common though - every single car that did it was a BMW. This isn't a rant about BMW drivers, despite the same thing happening the other day when I was out road running, it's just an observation. No Audis or Mercedes or any other make did it despite many of them coming past at similar speeds.

About an hour after getting on to the autobahn I came across two bikes stopped on the edge of the carriageway. It was Graham and Mark. Mark had a rear wheel puncture and they were just about to start taking the wheel out to repair the tube. I stopped to see if I could be of any help but it was quickly obvious that Mark knew his way round a set of spanners and within five minutes or so the tyre was off and the damage to the tube was being assessed.

It wasn't good news though as the tube looked like it had been severely abraded. It needed to be replaced and they didn't have a spare. I'd brought a spare tube for the Bloop and although it was far from being the right size I was happy to donate it and they were quickly back on the road. Start to finish I suppose the whole episode took about 40 minutes, somewhat better than the day and a half it took me to replace the rear tyre on the CCM - and that was at home in my garage, not under a bridge on the motorway. I heard later that they'd made it back without further problems, the substantially undersized tube holding out ok.

Later on, as Wurzburg approached, I programmed the sat-nav with the hotel address and started counting down the miles. I knew I was getting tired when I managed to ride straight past the junction without realising it until it was 100m too late. I turned round five miles later at the next junction and rode back - and managed to ride past the junction again! This was getting silly. I eventually found the hotel after a twenty mile detour and arrived at the check-in desk seconds after a Japanese engineer with a somewhat complicated schedule who then spent half an hour trying to sort it out with the receptionist. I know he was an engineer and that he was visiting the BMW car plant in Munich and quite a few other details of his week to come as all the conversation was carried out in English. Some years earlier I'd sat in another hotel listening to a Chinese businessman negotiating with an Indian businessman using English as their common language. At least I didn't feel so bad when I had to use English to register after the Japanese engineer had finished.

It took about an hour or so to unload the bike and get all the wet clothing spread out on the radiators - I don't think I mentioned that it had been raining, but it had been - again. By the time this was done I was so tired I think I was asleep by about 8.00pm.

Super Saturday

Despite everything I actually had a reasonable night's sleep on the Friday night. Just about everything inside the tent was either wet or covered in mud (and in many cases, like my boots, both) and this time there was no handy hotel radiator to dry things out but I did manage to stay more or less on the dry line and by jamming a load of spare (= dryish) bike clothing at the foot end of the tent managed to both keep my feet above the water line and produce a kind of end stop that stopped me sliding downhill. I've had better nights in tents but all things considered it could have been worse.

It does come hard though when you have to finally leave the relative comfort of a sleeping bag - even one getting damper by the hour and still smelling of petrol, and face the sodden reality of your clothing and footwear. I've done a lot of camping over the years, often preferring to camp rather than stay in a hotel, so be reduced to this situation after less than 24hrs is a mark of how much I'd misjudged the conditions. I'd come prepared for snow covered frozen ground and much colder temperatures and most of my equipment would have worked well under those conditions. I might even have been able to get the bike inside and near the tent but of course this time it was about a quarter of a mile away and still containing a lot of stuff like my stove and food staples like coffee etc. To get to it meant trudging through the mud each way so it was easier to go and buy a cup of coffee from the bratwurst van. By the time this was done and some "housekeeping" in the woods adjacent to the next field undertaken it was mid morning. I didn't really have a plan for the day beyond having a better look round the site and seeing what other people were getting up to. There was a published agenda in the booklet everyone got on buying the ticket but it didn't exactly fill the day with must do activities. For example, there was a breakdown service available all day, but as I didn't have any problems I had no need of it. Looking at the state of some of the other machinery though, that may not have been the case for everyone! Other things on the agenda included a prize for the oldest and youngest participants coming together and a prize for the furthest traveled - won this year by someone coming from Dakar in Senegal - via Russia, and covering 14,000km. All I can say is that, having been to Dakar, the German climate may have come as a bit of a shock! The main event and the centerpiece of the rally in the past has been the torchlight parade on Saturday evening but more about that a little later.


 

For the time being my main task for the day was to buy one of the metal Elefantentreffen badges that I'd been told were on sale at the organisers kiosk down in the arena. This was the same kiosk that someone had come close to burning down the previous night when someone set off some sort of military style flare under the wooden steps next to the cabin and for a few minutes it looked like it might all be reduced to a pile of smoldering ashes, but some frantic work by about half a dozen people managed to put the flames out before any serious damage was done so it was open as usual the next day. I wanted the badge because I already had similar badges from the two previous venues where the rally had been held in the past - the Nurburgring in northern Germany where it had been from the start in 1956 until 1977 and the Salzburgring in Austria where it went to between 1978 and 1988. The rally then found the current site and 2013 was the 25th anniversary of the move. It moved from the Nurburgring because, according to Google translate's version of the german explanation in the booklet, "meet the elephants attracts more and more curious with cars and buses in from nearby rough of towns. A dispute of about 40 participants with the police is the Nurburgring from the". There's definitely something missing from the translation but you probably get the idea even though it doesn't mention someone getting shot!


Paul and Rob, two of our quartet from the Regensburg hotel were leaving on the Saturday so we gave them a hand hauling stuff up to their bikes. It wasn't the conditions or anything that was driving them away, they'd only planned to stay one night. That done and the badge bought Dave and I went for a wander around the site.




 It was very quickly apparent that many people were taking this very seriously and had come prepared for the conditions - whatever they might be. Straw bales and something to burn the copious amounts of wood for sale by the entrance were the "menu de jour" and treating it, as we had done, as a weekend's winter camping, was just a route to misery.




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Mind you, some people were even further towards the minimalist end of the spectrum than we were -
















Saturday afternoon saw an influx of daytrippers. You could easily spot them as they were normally clean rather than the usual Wehrmacht preparing for the next invasion of Russia look that anyone who'd been there a day or two was sporting. Late Saturday afternoon saw the pinnacle of that - a German TV crew covering the rally. I'm not quite sure where you go to buy designer clothing suitable for wandering around sewers but wherever it is the glamorous female presenter had found it and was suitably attired. Dave insisted on a photograph with her -



Shortly after than picture was taken they went off to cover one of the organised events, the tug-of-war. This was held in the middle of a sea of mud so the end result may have been determined more by boot choice than technique. I've no idea who was taking part let alone who won but the TV presenter lady and the cameraman were in the midst of it all filming and interviewing. Occasional cheers went up when one side or another won a point but by far the loudest cheer was heard when she fell over in the mud -



Some people do get all the best jobs!

The usual reason for falling over in the mud was an excess of alcohol and that was certainly the case with Martin -



Martin was a German farmer and was there with a bunch of about 15 friends. They'd come prepared and their lean-to style tent (visible next to the yellow bike in the picture above) was laid out inside with numerous straw bales and a DIY stove made from a washing machine drum. Dave and I got invited back to their abode and spent the evening talking complete nonsense about the linguistic similarity between the phrases "Isle of Man" and, well work it out for yourself, but you need to say it in a German accent to get the effect. A few beers would probably help as well as you need the look in the picture on the right below for it to make sense.















At some point in the course of the evening I managed to lose my hat. I'd been trying to dry it out and having put it on my knee rather to get it closer to the fire I'd been watching steam drift upwards as the fire warmed it up. Later on I began to wonder whether it was smoke rather than steam as it did feel quite hot and I must have put it down somewhere. Then I realised I didn't have it at all. It hadn't fallen in the fire so it must be around but even a search with a torch turned up nothing. It wasn't so much the hat that was the problem but the three Elefantentreffen badges that were on it. I could buy another 2013 badge the next day but the two earlier badges were irreplaceable. Later on when Dave and I went back to our tents he found some other later night German revelers to continue partying with but I just went to bed as I was really niggled by the loss of the hat. It had to be somewhere but if it had been trampled into a pool of mud it would never be found.

At one point when we were sitting around Martin's washing machine stove the torchlight parade came down the track towards us. This is the centrepiece of the rally and it's to "honour the departed", to quote from the brochure. On previous occasions this has been a huge procession snaking for miles around the Nurburgring in particular and I've taken part in it holding a large flaming torch on the pillion of a friend's bike. This year I saw two torches. If I hadn't known what it was I'd have just thought it was a couple of people trying to see where they were going by setting fire to a few branches. Maybe I missed it and the long procession was over the other side or something but if that was it it really needs an upgrade. Guys, you can do better than that.

The thick of it

I had the tent and everything set up by about 3.00pm so that left a couple of hours before darkness fell. Dave had set his (modern) tent up in what seemed like about five minutes (and was probably less) so we went off together to have a look round. It's hard to describe the layout of the site but in general if you can imagine a quarry about a kilometer across where the centre has been excavated down to around 50m and various degrees of terracing  forming concentric circles around the central hole then you've got the general picture. All you need to add to the picture is that the whole thing is set into the side of a hill so just about everything is on a slope. The entrance is on the uphill side with a tarmac road running along one side. Walk up that road for about two kilometers and you'll come to Solla, the local village.

If a picture is worth a thousand words then this one may be worth more than all my efforts above -

It shows the "inner sanctum" area in the middle of the quarry. The shanty town in the bottom contained a few burger vans (although this being Germany it was more Bratwurst sausages than our usual horse burgers), a few souvenir stalls where you could buy Elefantentreffen branded hats, t shirts, jackets etc and a couple of "new age" stalls selling fur lined tie dyes and crystal healing type hippy apparel. As far as I could tell the women err.. manning these outlets constituted a fair percentage of the total female population of the site on the Friday although things did change slightly the following day.  On my previous visits to the rally in the dim and distant past there was a "buy now or forever hold your peace" approach to commerce so I was pleased to see that the rally now has an online shop. If you really can't live without Elephant rally branded underwear (female only!) then brush up your German and click through to www.elefantentreffen-shop.de   

The most important part of the pit though is the covered bar area and inevitable to say as evening wore on this is where we ended up. Considering how many people turn up here (the picture above is only a small proportion of the site) I was surprised at how few places were selling beer. I only found this one and one other place nearer the entrance so my guess would be that the vast majority of people bring their own. The same seems to go for food (three bratwurst vans for 10,000 people) and most noticeably, toilets. I saw two toilets on the whole site, one of which was locked, so perhaps it's not surprising that the population was 99.9% male. When things really got into full swing the following night the seas of mud were expanding in direct proportion to the amount of beer consumed. I also noticed that none of the women I saw were drinking anything!

As Friday night progressed the bar area in the "arena" (to give the central area its official name" became a bit of a Brit alcove as we seemed to be gathering there either by accident or via text messages. It may well have been because it was better than the alternative which was an evening in the rain by your tent.  None of us had tents large enough to host a gathering and as the evening wore on and the rain gathered pace it was easier to stay rather than go.

Early evening (when I could still focus the camera)

Later on when things were getting a bit blurry

Much later when someone tried to burn down the organisers HQ

By the end of the evening it became quite a task to find our way out of the arena. Not only had the effects of the evening's "celebration" taken its toll but the mud was getting ever deeper and we had to somehow climb up the sides of the quarry and then find our way in the dark through a wooded area to a small hole in a wire fence that separated our camping field from the arena. Of course nobody had brought a torch.

   

Mud, mud, snow, rain and mud

Taking Dave's advice I decided to park the bike outside and carry everything in. I hadn't really anticipated having to do this and my luggage hadn't been chosen for its carriability so it was going to have to be done in batches. First batch consisted of the tent, the holdall containing my sleeping bag, air bed etc and the tank bag containing (mainly) documents and money. Loaded up and still wearing all my bike clothing we headed for the entrance. First stop was the ticket office where they relieved me of €20 and I got a little booklet (almost all in German), a wrist band of the type clamped round your wrist at music festivals and a large green rubbish sack in return. Showing the wrist band at the gate a few meters later got me inside and we were then faced with a choice of which sea of mud to squelch through.

 Panoramic picture above - the mud sea just inside the entrance

Again, because Dave had arrived a bit earlier he knew where "Brit corner" was located and we headed there. It was about a 300m walk, through liquid mud to start with but easing to ploughed field consistency after a while and eventually to snow covered grass. Trying to find a level pitch for the tent was impossible so it was a case of trying to minimise the slope. I'm normally fairly good at deciding where to erect a tent but this time I must have considered and abandoned ten different spots. Eventually I decided it didn't make any difference, I was going to be sliding out of the bottom of the tent no matter where I put it. 

Before I left I'd given some thought about which tent to bring. In keeping with the 70's theme of the bike and much of the luggage (the panniers and the white top box are 70's items) I was going to bring my Vango Force10, a tent I'd bought in 1976 and still use frequently but eventually decided that one of the others, a mid 80's Phoenix mountaineering tent might be a better bet. I bought this on Ebay about ten years ago when I was planning a trip to West Africa but it proved to be totally unsuitable for desert conditions; not surprising really as it was designed for wet and windy UK winters. Wet and snowy German winters might be the next best thing so I decided to give it one more chance. I soon began to think I should have thought a bit harder about it. It's not that it's a bad tent but it is infinitely fiddly to put up with loads of guy lines to untangle and something like twenty pegs to position and then reposition. Putting it up with everything in alignment and tensioned can take about half an hour and as it was now raining heavily that half an hour seemed very long. Then you have to crawl around inside to hang the inner tent. The idea behind putting the outer tent up first is that the sleeping compartment remains dry but by the time I came to do this the bike clothes I was still wearing were saturated from the rain and all the crawling around transferred so much water to the inner tent that it was soon soaked. I then discovered that the groundsheet seemed to be porous with water from the wet grass and residual snow coming up through it. There were no holes or tears, it was the material itself that didn't seem to be waterproof.

I partially solved this with the aid of a small tarpaulin I'd got from my main "sponsor", Poundland (I'd bought so much "use once and throw away" stuff from Poundland for so little money that it felt like they were sponsoring me). I'd brought it with the intention of using it in front of the tent as a base for cooking, storage etc but instead it went under the groundsheet as an extra waterproof insulation layer. Unfortunately it was only about half the area of the tent floor (what do you expect for a pound!) so I ended up with a dry strip down the middle of the tent and wet edges. Sleeping looked like it might be somewhat tricky that night. Not only did I have to try and stop myself sliding lengthways down the tent because of the slope, I also had to make sure I didn't roll left or right onto the wet patches. Pulling the sleeping bag out of its storage bag then added a third dimension. It stank of petrol. To carry the holdall down through the mud field it had gone on my back like a rucksack, with my arms through the handles. I'd forgotten that my spare petrol container, with 2L of fuel in it was in one of the side pockets and the change in orientation had allowed a small amount to leak out - straight into the sleeping bag. The ignitable volatiles evaporated fairly quickly but the smell persisted and the bag is still being aired as I write this a couple of weeks later.

The walk down from the entrance

Eventually, about two hours after arriving, I had the tent set up and everything under some sort of control. It was time to have a look around before the daylight vanished. 

           

The grim reality

Next morning the four of us had a fairly leisurely breakfast and continued to raid the coffee pot while we waited to see what if anything the dealer had managed to do. At about 10.30 Paul gave him a call and was told they were just finishing off fixing a rear wheel puncture on the bike. That seemed strange as the bike didn't seem have a puncture when it went off in the van the previous afternoon but the dealer said it had been flat when they came into the workshop that morning. So that was new chain and maybe sprockets needed, whatever could be done about the lump missing from the crankcase, and now a puncture. Our guesses at what the final bill would be kept going up. Mine had been the highest at €300 but that had been without knowing about the puncture. When Dave gave Paul a lift down to the workshop at around 11.00am to collect the bike the invoice totaled €360, but €40 of that was for the puncture. Painful but at least the delay had been minimal.

By 11.30 I was heading off down the autobahn with (according to the sat nav) about 60 miles to the rally site. It's the about bit that came to haunt me as the day progressed as although I had the exact latitude and longitude for the site I hadn't programmed them into the sat nav trusting that, as I got closer, other factors would come into play. Specifically the advice given on one internet site of "when you come off the motorway just follow the bikes" was something that had worked for me at previous venues and I was sure it would work again. Half an hour into the trip the others came past together in the "fast" lane just as I had tucked in behind a truck and was pleased at gaining my extra 5mph. This turned out to be my best tow of the entire trip and went on for over thirteen miles before the truck turned off at a junction. Soon after I started wondering about which junction I should turn off at. I had written it down but the piece of paper was buried deep in the luggage and I was reluctant to stop and find it. I thought I might recognise one of the names on the junction boards but when junction after junction went by without anything ringing a bell I finally gave in and tried to find one of the towns near the rally site whose name I remembered on the sat nav. When it finally found the satellites and worked out where it was it told me to turn off at the next junction in five miles time ...

You might wonder why I didn't have the sat nav running all the time and prevent all of this. The answer was down to the 6 volt electrics on the bloop being unable to power it so I only had the hour or so that the internal battery would last before it needed recharging from a mains socket and that usually meant a hotel. Actually I had tried to anticipate this and had made a small box of electronics that would run the sat nav from one of the 8.4 volt batteries powering the led spotlights. This had worked well in testing but it did run hot and fearing it would burn out with continuous use I wanted to keep it for times I might really need it such as finding hotels in the dark. As both of the spotlights had now stopped working their batteries were fully charged and available for stuff like this, running my tent light etc. Losing the spotlights wasn't that much of a problem at this point in the trip but it would come back to bite me later on.

When I came off the autobahn I had about twenty miles to go. The "follow the bikes" advice wasn't proving to be much help as there were none about. The only other vehicles on the roads seemed to be German van drivers all of whom seemed to want to read the details of the dealers name at the bottom of the numberplate or, if they didn't, were driving close enough behind me to do so. Eventually, at a "T" junction about five miles from the autobahn I saw a pink elephant. What else could it be other than a sign from ... the organisers, particularly as there was a direction arrow underneath. At least I was going in roughly the right direction.

Sadly the helping hand pink elephant signs seemed to have been scattered around almost randomly and a few junctions later I sat there with no idea whether to turn left or right. There were a few bikes around by now but going in both directions so that wasn't much help. Eventually I chose a direction at random and over the next fifteen minutes rode round the local town twice without having the faintest idea where to go. Towards the end of the second circuit I saw a group of loaded up scooters taking a side road that I'd previously discounted and decided to follow them. Within half a mile they'd vanished into the distance but a little later I saw another pink elephant so I guessed that this had to be the right road. The day had been almost pleasant when I'd left the motorway but as this road rose higher and higher into the mountains  the weather starting closing in. Heavy low clouds, fog, roads streaming with water and larger and larger patches of snow in the fields were now the norm. Eventually, as I finally approached the rally site, there was a long climb up through the woods that the bloop had to do in first gear and more and more bikes at the side of the road. Finally I arrived in Solla, a village about a mile from the site and a road barrier where bikes could go through but cars were prohibited. A couple of minutes and I arrived in Loh and the entrance to the site. Loh consisted of about three buildings and the entrance to what seemed to be an old quarry where the rally was being held

Just as I approached the entrance to the site I saw Dave at the side of the road. He'd been waiting for me and had managed to keep enough space next to his bike for me to park the bloop about fifty meters from the entrance. At this point the grim reality of the next few days was beginning to make itself felt.

Despite this being the twenty fifth time the rally had been held at Loh it was the first time I'd been there and I had very little idea of the layout. At the Nurburgring and the Salzburgring, the rally sites I'd been to previously, you could easily find somewhere to camp and get whatever bike you were on next to the tent. Loh was somewhat different. Most of the camping areas were on slopes of varying severity and while getting the bike in was not a huge problem, getting it out again, uphill, was more of a challenge. This year the usually frozen ground had turned into acres of mud and it was perfectly possible to sit there on the slope with the rear wheel spinning and digging a trench. Without help to push it out you could be there for some time! Many people decided it was easier to park the bike on the road and carry everything they needed in by hand.