Tour Cape Town on a gorgeous '60s motorbike

18 December 2014 - 16:00 By Paul Ash
subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now
Jim Whittington takes in the view from Chapmans Peak
Jim Whittington takes in the view from Chapmans Peak
Image: Paul Ash

It's a hip-shaking, magic-making and simply blissful ride, writes Paul Ash

There's a trick to kicking a big bike into life. Ask me, I once owned a big old Yamaha thumper which turned winter mornings to summer as I kicked and sweated and swore while hunting for that sweet spot that would turn the lump of cold dewy steel into 500cc of thumping happiness.

Jim Whittington, astride a black beauty that he has named Nina Noir, makes it look easy.

Ignition on. Check the amp meter - that tells you where the piston is. Squeeze the decompression lever in, and - slowly - kick it over while you watch the amp meter needle flicker from minus then up towards the plus sign.

"These bikes are notorious for never starting when you want them to," he says. He stands on the kickstarter and lets go with a long, lunging kick like the coolest wild-horse rodeo rider you ever saw. The bike starts with a tick-tick-rumble. Whittington laughs. "Can you believe it? First time ..."

Nina Noir is a 500cc single cylinder Royal Enfield built in 1963. She is Whittington's mount for the day. I am on the red Royal Enfield - "Marilyn Maroon" - who is a year younger than Nina but restored to the same exacting standards that Whittington applies to all the machines that roll through The Bikes Jack Built workshop in Cape Town.

Fuel on. Watch the needle. Stand. Kick. The red bike throbs into life. Piece of cake.

There is nothing as visceral as riding a motorbike. The world comes at you in all its variable pleasures and pain of heat, dust, smell, rain, cold and temporary release from the daily-daily. On a motorbike you are in the world, not looking at it with vague detachment through a centimetre of glass.

We roll down the Sea Point boulevard, drawing longing looks from drivers sweating in their cages. After Bakoven, where that exquisite coast road opens into a series of gentle but swooping bends, I give Marilyn her head and we begin to fly, flicking through the twisties at an earth-shattering 80km/h, tappets, engine, exhaust and slipstream roaring in my helmet like a winter gale.

The bike purrs like a big, throaty cat. I have sun on my hands and the smell of sea salt and kelp in my lungs, and the flash of blue sea and glistening boulders and the sweet, spicy fynbos rushing by. Rolling through the fine S-bend above where the old tanker Antipolis came to grief in 1977, I flick my hips and whoop and feel better than every poor citizen stuck in the grinder on this late-summer day.

 

When Whittington landed in Cape Town from Wales he was entranced and who wouldn't be? "Remembering what it was like seeing Cape Town for the first time and being blown away, I thought if you can get people on these bikes that are in themselves amazing and that people love and on top of that show them Cape Town at a leisurely thumping pace... it seemed too good a combination," he says.

The result is a touring arm to his business of restoring old Royal Enfields. Riders get to use bikes from Whittington's personal fleet. "I have too many bikes," he says. "Five?" He laughs.

The bikes are all 1960s-vintage, sourced by his team of searchers and scourers in India.

"There are three teams of people with strict instructions to find any treasure and snap it up," he says. "Anything pre-'65. They buy it."

The bikes are shipped to Cape Town where Whittington's team of mechanics gets to work on finding what he calls each machine's "inner beauty". The bikes are stripped and rebuilt from the wheels up. Some are custom jobs. Others are nut-and-bolt restorations, using new parts from Royal Enfield in India.

India's love of the Enfield marque cannot be overstated. After Royal Enfield moved its factory there from England in 1955, the bike became part of the fabric of the sub-continent and a symbol of aspiration and success.

"India adopted Royal Enfield as its own a long time ago," says Whittington, who first saw the potential of bike tours while travelling in India.

"I've been going back to India a few times a year to see my bike builders and to do rides over the Himalayas and it struck me there's not anything like it here using these old British machines that are very capable and amazing to ride," he says.

Enfields are easy to ride. They are well-weighted, low on the ground so you can get your feet down and they are not super-quick, which means that trouble - if it comes - comes slowly.

We fly down Suikerbossie and pause for pictures at the wharf in Hout Bay. A small crowd gathers to stare at the gleaming machines. A security guard tells us that he rides a scooter "from here to the Flats in 20 minutes". Whittington raises an eyebrow and smiles. "There's always one," he says.

Riding an Enfield can slow your day too. "We joke about the fact that we can't get through traffic lights without having to stop and chat to people," he says. "We spend so much time working on the bikes that it comes through. Something happens when people see them."

We pull off on a little lay-by at the south end of Chapman's Peak to watch the surfers. A Frenchman picks his way down the edge of the road to look at the bikes. He is on holiday after a triple-bypass operation. He is riding a scooter. He loves the Enfields. "Next time," he says with a lost look in his eyes.

Our route takes us through Kommetjie and Misty Cliffs, Scarborough, up through the sunstruck fynbos to Cape Point and down past Smitswinkelbaai.

The pace is leisurely and drivers - as if repelled by a magnetic force - slow down and laugh and gawp and follow slowly, maybe hoping the magic will rub off on them.

We stop at Boulders Beach to see the penguins. A KLM pilot and his shiny-eyed flight attendant companions coo over the bikes. Their eyes flicker with something which is not quite sadness but something else. Maybe it's the sun, and the smell of sea air and the sight of penguins waddling like Charlie Chaplin over the rocks. I know what it is. It's the recognition of a fleeting moment of freedom.

"You see," says Whittington, starting his bike with that kick that makes the hosties go weak at the knees.

We have a late lunch at Kalky's. With a steaming plate of fresh hake and the best chips on the peninsula, it is not hard to see how the elements have all come together. An old bike, good air, pretty country and a simple lunch on a harbour quayside and a ride on an old bike through some of the finest country in the world. Who wouldn't fall for that?

If You Go...

Cape Peninsula and winelands day trips cost R1500, including lunch, riding equipment and the use of a fully restored and gassed-up Royal Enfield. E-mail Jim Whittington at jim@thebikesjackbuilt.com or go drool over the bikes at thebikesjackbuilt.com.

If you want your own Enfield, prices start at R85000 for a practical bike that you can use every day of your life.

 

subscribe Just R20 for the first month. Support independent journalism by subscribing to our digital news package.
Subscribe now