Dragon’s
breath
Not content with riding the 1600 miles to the
Elefant Rally and back, I had decided that it would be interesting to
travel to North Wales for the annual Dragon Rally, which is held on
the following weekend.
We
arrived back home on the Wednesday evening, which gave us a few days
respite to catch up on the news that in our absence London and most
of the rest of the country had been brought to a standstill by some
of the heaviest snowfalls in many years.
Milky
decided against the trip, I guess he’d had enough snowy rallying
for one year. So it was that Raff and I set out alone on the Saturday
morning and headed up the A5 towards Wales. The first Dragon was set
up by the Conwy Motorcycle Club in 1962 as an alternative to the
Elefant for those that couldn’t, wouldn’t or just plain didn’t
want to, travel all the way to Bavaria for a bit of sub-zero camping
fun.
The
format is quite interesting, it’s a one night only event and once
you’ve paid your dues, they send you a receipt. This is followed up
sometime later by a letter detailing where the checkpoint is for that
year. You ride to the checkpoint, where your receipt is stamped and
this allows you access to the site. It’s only at this point that
they tell you where the Rally is being held. This year they were
expecting heavy rain – which is hardly any great surprise for North
Wales – so the event was to be held at the racetrack site on
Anglesey.
Whilst
riding up through Wales towards Snowdonia, I look over to my left and
do a double take. I’m looking at a field covered in snow, in which
are standing a herd of Buffalo! I grew up in the 70’s and as such,
was one of the cowboy and Indian generation. Western films were all
the rage and here was a scene straight out of those movies. I
expected at any moment, to see a tribe of Indians sweeping down from
the distant hills in pursuit of their favourite quarry.
Unsurprisingly perhaps, this didn’t happen, but the Buffalo were
definitely there. Raff was unable to corroborate this vision, so for
a while I did fear for my own sanity, which was already somewhat
tenuous, given my current and recent escapades.
The
trip was rather more enjoyable, not only due to the relatively
clement weather conditions, but also because the roads we’d taken
on our trip north and west were a lot more fun than miles of
unrelenting Autobahns filled with trucks. The directions to the
checkpoint were less than comprehensive, but we managed to find the
layby filled with bikes and a small caravan with relative ease;
where my ticket was stamped. There was a great variety of bikes and
outfits taking a break there, a group of Armstrongs looking
particularly purposeful. Raff’s ticket was already on site in the
hands of a character known as Sad Mike. We called him but he was on
the beer already, so we had to ride down to the site, collect the
ticket, return to get it stamped and then ride back to the site
again. (During all this toing and froing, we witnessed some truly sad
folks who showed up on their bikes, had their ticket stamped, went to
the site to collect their badges and rally paraphernalia, then rode
off again immediately, which didn’t really strike me as being in
the true spirit of the event!) After pitching our beloved Quechua
tent (it really does take about 4 seconds!) on what I have to say was
really marvellously flat, un-frozen ground, it’s amazing how you
learn to appreciate the simple things when you’ve been denied them
for a while we went to collect our goody bags and complimentary soup.
This is a great welcome to the Rally, the bags contain chocolate
bars, a badge, a sticker, a slate coaster and a miniature bottle of
whisky; superb! As an added treat, the elderly lady who served up the
soup did a really good job of taking the piss out of everyone, she
was entirely without mercy and had a wicked sense of humour.
We
wander off to find Sad Mike, who takes us over to his camp and shows
us his topbox, which has hollowed out foam in the manner of a camera
case, but he has filled it with bottles of spirits, glasses, coffee
and mugs. I do like a man who comes prepared, he’d even brought his
South American butler, Miguel, with him. We’re sitting around
swapping stories and generally get into the spirit of things when a
man wanders up and asks to borrow a lighter for his stove. As he
approaches I recognise him. It’s Tarka, a fellow Ural rider, not an
otter, whom I last saw 1,800m up a dirt track in the Italian Alps a
couple of years ago on the Stella Alpina rally! Tarka has two Ural
outfits, which might seem a tad excessive, but he’s deeply
passionate about them, as many owners are, so why not have two? I’ve
never heard of anyone owning two Ford Mondeos, but it’s quite a
common phenomenon in the world of biking, isn’t it? But anyway, I
digress, this is a large part of why I enjoy bike rallies so much;
they are all about meeting new people and catching up with old
friends, then trying to work out when you last saw each other and at
which event. Other people enjoy their rally in different ways, in
certain cases this can involve showing their nipples to each other
(blokes only, behave, it’s February and the Welsh ladies aren’t
that
crazy), pulling faces and generally hamming it up. But the one thing
that unites all rallies that I’ve ever been to, is the all-round
good natured bonhomie that surrounds these events, there is never any
trouble at all, aside from that caused by misadventure of course.
Everyone leaves all their things in their tents, or around their
bikes yet there are never any problems with theft. The only time I
come back from a rally without something, is when I’ve lost it and
more often than not, somebody else will find it and send it to me.
Many people have asked me why I would want to ride hundreds or even
thousands of miles to go camping in the snow with a bunch of bikers,
I still don’t have a good answer, I guess you either want to, or
you don’t. Let’s face it, if you go camping in the UK in the
summer, the chances are you’re going to get rained on a fair bit
and for preference, I’d rather have snow and cold than rain and
humidity; being wet and having wet bike kit in a tent is no fun at
all. People say they don’t understand, I say that they don’t need
to. I’m never going to climb a mountain or swim the channel, I very
much doubt I’ll ever run a marathon (are they called snickers these
days?) so maybe it’s the way I measure my mettle, who knows?
Wandering
around the site looking at the machinery that people have arrived
upon is also part of the attraction; I collect ideas for future
projects and just simply marvel at people’s inventiveness. You’ll
see bikes at rallies that are incredible feats of engineering and an
amazingly diverse range of machinery that you just wouldn’t get at
the regular weekend bike haunts. Not for here the rows and rows of
identical, immaculate GSXRs, CBRs, R1s and Ninjas (although there was
a rather large contingent of the ever present GS BMWs). Of course, as
a sidecar fan, these events hold a special interest for me, since a
combination is obviously the best method of travel in these
conditions and what better way can there be of carrying your camping
gear than on an outfit? Did I mention that my new Quechua tent fits
perfectly onto a Ural sidecar rack? Consequently there are plenty of
these otherwise unusual vehicles present to fire my imagination as I
gaze upon them admiringly. One such machine was based on a BMW engine
and had been entirely custom built, with a tubular space frame for
the bike and the sidecar. It had travelled from Germany and although
I’d not seen it at the Elefant, I’m sure it must have been there.
I hung about for a while in the hope of having a chat with the owner,
but I never did spot him (or her?).
After
a thoroughly entertaining evening we retired to the tents and
fortunately suffered none of the airbed disasters that had plagued us
in Germany, with the happy result that we managed a reasonable
night’s sleep. Wandering about in search of morning coffee we were
accosted by two vaguely familiar figures, who were somewhat disturbed
by their nipple showing escapades of the prior evening. We packed up
in the fine morning sunshine and headed off for home, keeping one eye
out for Buffalo on the way. We stopped in Snowdonia to admire the
spectacle of a frozen lake covered in snow, which was a truly
beautiful sight. The long ride home reinforced our exhaustion after
what had been a seriously tiring few weeks involving a lot of riding,
an acute lack of sleep and a general excess of merry making (if such
a thing is possible!?). Many people would describe both of these
events as extreme, but after the Elefant, the trip to North Wales
seemed like a stroll in the park, especially given the kind of
excellent on site facilities in Anglesey that persuaded most people
to spend the majority of their time in the bar. It was a bit like
going to the pub, but the pub is very far away so instead of
returning home, you camp in the pub car park with all your mates and
everyone else that was in the pub.
The
difference was also marked by the almost civilised behaviour of the
rally goers at the Dragon; no life threatening drunken riding here,
no fireworks either, just good old fashioned fun. I’m not sure
which I prefer, there was something appealing about the lawless
Elefant and by comparison, time spent at the Dragon left me wondering
whether we have travelled too far down the road to civilisation in
this country. At times it almost felt as though the attendees were
playing at life, rather than really engaging with it wholeheartedly,
free of the chains that bind us to our modern lives. I suspect that
when I attend the summer rallies in England, I’ll have a different
opinion, as my contrast will then be between my regular life at home
in 21st
Century London and time spent in a field with comparatively mad
kindred spirits.
No
sign of the Buffalo on the way home by the way!
Rod
Young
