Not Exactly Evil Knievel

While I was travelling around Asia, I was thinking how cool it would be to have a little motorbike, so that I could get a bit off the beaten track and make my own pace around the place. Millions of others were riding one, so why not me? I didn't actually rent one, because the only places I stayed long enough to have the time for a motorbike were huge cities where (a) I could walk or bus everywhere and (b) the traffic scared me to death.

Coming home, I started to justify a purchase to myself - it would be good for the planet, cheap on my pocket and an ideal way to zip in to work. I started looking on trademe for possible bikes, and just so happened to find an Auckland-based motorcycle training school with online bookings, with a spot available for the Sunday morning while I was there. So I booked.

Upon arrival at the carpark which had been set up with a number of cones in various compositions, I was presented with a motorbike which looked a lot like this:
The idea was that there were six tasks we (me and the other fellow who had signed on) would have to do - we would be trained on each and then tested at the end, to see if we qualified for the certificate of basic handling skills. Some of the tasks were really easy - riding around a curve, stopping on the curve, riding the slalom. The two tasks I found really hard were riding very slowly in a straight line, and stopping with the wheel in a particular spot (I very cleverly tried combining this task with the rapid stop task and managed to fall off!). I was so bad at the riding in a straight line that the tutor gave up on me, and left me to my own devices to master it.

But come testing time, I had (I went through in 10.01 seconds against a minimum of 10 seconds). I had also mastered the stopping on a spot task. The slaloms were no trouble. The quick stop was no trouble. I don't imagine the stopping on a curve would have been a problem. But I found that when I was being tested, I couldn't ride round a curve! To be fair to myself, I could really, just not the same curve as the tutor had in mind. He had set up some cones to mark out the curved "road", I had been through once and was doing the reverse trip when my mind started playing tricks - I couldn't decide if I was to go to the left or the right of the last cone. As soon as I was committed to going left, I knew it was to the right I should have been going, but by then it was too late. And so, that was an automatic fail with no re-take possible, unlike any of the other tasks because, really, do we want people on the road who can't ride round curves?

I'm not sure I'll try again - maybe I should go back to Asia or Rarotonga and just ride some, to get my basic skills up.