"A taxi?" says somebody, incredulous, "a motorbike would be much cheaper. You should get a motor bike." This refrain, along with, "walk?! No you cannot walk that distance. It is impossible" applied to even the most negligible of distances, is something we are faced with and have been faced with on a daily basis throughout all of our time in South East Asia.
Actually it is not the validity of this argument that I am questioning here. A motorbike hire does make sense. Generally. Walking, however, is possible, and is simply deemed impossible because no one in South East Asia walks even the shortest distance. I will give you the facts, and then explain the dilemma.
The pros and cons of the hiring and driving of motorbikes run as follows:
Pros
You can go further and visit more in one day
You can go to places not otherwise easily accessible
If you are seeing a lot of scattered sights in one day it is cheaper than several taxis.
Everybody does it
Cons
Unless you cover a lot in each day you can get a taxi to and from a particular area and walk between the various sights in that region for more or less the same cost as a motorbike plus fuel.
You can drink if you taxi and come back safely after dark.
Taxis know the roads and their vehicle better so arguably it might be safer than self driving
If you cycle or walk as first preference and only taxi where distances really are impossible, you are likely to be fitter and more environmentally friendly than your motorbiking counterparts.
This, however, is not the argument.
We have been and will probably continue to be polite but dogged refusers of motorbike hire. And all of the reasons above apply. In our style of slow travel we are not trying to squeeze so much into our day. We can see it a region at a time and have time to take slower routes on foot or by bicycle. So it doesn't make so much sense, nor is it necessarily cheaper.
And it's better for the environment. And. And. And.
Fundamentally though, despite plenty of conversations in which we tell and retell the above arguments to each other, trying to shore ourselves up against the daily onslaught of absolute incredulity both from travellers and locals alike, the fact is the main reason we have not done the obvious and hired a motorcycle is we just don't want to. We don't feel relaxed on them. We don't feel safe.
We are scared.
Once we admit that to ourselves, which we do today on a secluded, pebbly beach of which we are the only occupants, it becomes much simpler. I have always been fearful of motorbikes. I worked in a solicitors for a few years, specialising in road traffic accidents. If they involved a car, we were suing for whiplash. If they involved a bike they were serious and often fatal injuries. You can squeeze a lot of money out of the guilty party but not a restored life span or the use of your legs. These were extreme instances. But the injuries, and the accompanying photographs, stuck with me. The chances are you won't crash. But if you do the stakes are inconceivably higher. What I hadn't quite realised is that M rather shares this. He has a keen motorbiking friend who talks of how she winces when she sees travellers who aren't used to these vehicles bombing along at speed in bikinis. "Where is their gear?" she asks, "where is their protection?"
She has a point but in fact nearly everyone does it. And as travellers entering Asia do seem to be managing also to exit intact we can assume that mostly it's fine.
For M though, necessarily the driver, it isn't fun to have someone who is terrified behind you and he isn't a person who enjoys driving. We have tried out a motorbike in Vietnam and he found it heavy and difficult. He knows he would get better at it as time progressed but he's still not sure he'd enjoy it.
We haven't done the obvious and hired a motorbike not purely because we want the exercise or want to drink or for any of the other reasons we give our various interrogators. We haven't hired one because we just don't want to.
So far so good. On a deserted beach in loved and like minded company this works just dandy. But the choice of battle I refer to is this:
Do we conquer our fear of the motorbike itself and make ourselves enjoy riding it?
Or
Do we conquer our fear of the continual incredulity of practically everyone we meet when they find out we are not going to hire one?
It is, though it might sound otherwise, a genuinely compelling fear, the one that risks other peoples disapproval. That others will think we are somehow doing it wrong, that they will think we are making the wrong decision, that they will talk among themselves about the really odd English couple they met in (insert country) is a constantly fought concern for us both. What if people don't like us? What if they're right?
In actual fact what we have found is that usually people are gracious enough to look at things from another viewpoint. When we talk about 'slow travel', no one tells us we're crazy. Same goes for not staying in either posh resorts or over westernised hostels. It all depends on how confidently you say it.
In the end, we ask ourselves which would be the better skill to take home with us, the ability to ride a motorbike on England's fast paced motorways under frequent rain storms and therefore acquire all the relevant leathers - or the ability to explain without rudeness or apology, that you are choosing an unusual path.
Obviously, the more useful skill is the latter. And it's something we British are not naturally adept at. It's something we humans are not naturally adept at.
So we are not hiring a motorbike. Because we don't really want to. It doesn't work for us. Doesn't float our boat. It's just not our thing.
Is that OK?
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