Ask any motorcycle aficionado, who dwells in South Africa, to name a big capacity Adventure bike and the reply will be obvious. BMW GS, KTM anything and perhaps the odd mention of Yamaha’s Super Tenere, right? But I doubt very much that anyone will talk about the bike we have here, well maybe a few, which is a little sad to say the least.
There I was, crammed into a ridiculously thin seat of Qatar’s ‘finest’ airplane, and we all know how that feels, as in terrible. Then an announcement reveals we have a delay as Johannesburg decides to keep us planted on the runway with a farewell thunderstorm, nice! Predictably a huge dude sits next to me but he is holding a South African bike magazine, great, but at least I can chat about motorbikes as the temperature rises inside the cabin, then, after an hour and a half of stagnation we’re all off to the Middle East on a diet of plastic food with a large dose of turbulence to wash it all down – tremendous.
Words by Clinton Pienaar
Although this is a brand new bike, Ducati goes back to the roots of what made the Monster special in the first place and stayed close to the essence of the original bike.
When I first heard about this ‘all-new’ engine I did have a few reservations to say the least. I mean, it’s the ninth generation of their famous big V-twin and what could H-D possibly have done to change their game? Surely it’ll just be an engine designed to meet ever evolving stringent emission rules (as in hyper-boring) and therefore bore me to death but, I’m still alive, so by now you’ll have figured I was wrong!
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