The Bura

Author Bio:

Andy T or “Trib” was a dispatch rider for a few years, and then went into advertising, but never stopped riding. He hasn’t had a proper job since 2007. He and his partner Julia have been doing long bike tours for the last ten years. They stick to proper roads, stay in hotels, stop for coffee a lot, and try not to ride for more than a couple of hours a day. When on a tour, Trib and Julia write about it on Facebook to entertain their friends. email tribbikes@gmail.com

The Bura

At about 11 in the morning, in Istria, my clutch cable snapped.

The year was 2019, and Julia and I were 35 days into a bike trip. We’d started in France, headed up through Belgium and Holland to Denmark and Sweden, and then came down through Poland, Germany, Austria and Slovenia. We’d spent a couple of nights in Trieste, which is in the top right corner of Italy, and now we were heading for Croatia. Naturally, we took the back road.

In the top right hand corner of the Adriatic, there’s a mountainous promontory called Istria. There’s a strip down the middle that gives Slovenia a seaport. So on the way out of Trieste, heading upwards, the first border you cross is into Slovenia. Then, at the highest part of the road, there’s a checkpoint where they want to see your passport before letting you go onwards into Croatia.

This was before Croatia joined the border free Schengen Zone in 2023.

Checkpoints are always stressful. But at this one, everything was OK. I was feeling quite relaxed after going through. And then the cable snapped, as I pulled away. I wobbled over into the parking area, couldn’t get into neutral, and after a few last thumps, the engine stalled.

I should explain about the bikes. Julia and I have one each. Hers is a Kawasaki Vulcan S, a smooth and reliable middleweight cruiser. Mine is an MZ Skorpion Sport, a thinly disguised racer. Back in 1995, a Skorpion won the European single-cylinder championship, beating Ducati. In the Owner’s Group, quite a few members only run them as track bikes. It’s a ‘thumper’, a big single, so it’s low on horsepower, but it has that big single thing that only thumper fans understand. Also it steers like a razor blade and can change direction like a midge: another thing that only Skorp people understand. Because of the handling, owners forgive its downsides: which are that it vibrates like hell, so it’s not comfortable at any speed and all Skorp owners do speed; also, there’s always something broken, which we ignore.

Both bikes were modified to be strictly single-seaters, with luggage brought forward and no pillion seat. This affects the story: we can’t both get on one bike.

On the Skorp, breaking the clutch cable is a known weakness, so it was dumb not to carry a spare. But the cable was almost new when we started, and I didn’t expect it to fray to bits when we’d only been up to Sweden and back. In the past I’ve run other bikes without a clutch: you push start it in neutral, get rolling, jump in the saddle and kick it into gear. But the Skorp is a high-compression single, with a high first gear, and you can’t do that.

Although it says MZ on the tank, the engine is a Yamaha. So to get a replacement cable, all I needed was a Yamaha dealer. Google Maps could do that. But there wasn’t enough signal, at the top of the mountain, to download data: enough for a text, but no more. The solution was, for one of us to ride down the mountain to the nearest village, find a café with WiFi and a cab firm, then jump in the cab and rescue the other rider. From this café, we could ask Google for the nearest Yamaha dealer. Simple. For an absolute backstop, we were about three hours (maybe four) from our friend Rod Young in Croatia. Perhaps he’d have some ideas. So we sent him a text.

We decided that it was going to be Julia’s job to ride down the hill, establish a base, and come back with a cab. Better than sitting about on the top of the hill; it was a cold grey day and there wasn’t even a bench to sit on. So Julia rode away. Meanwhile, I took off the broken clutch cable, and waited. Surely, 20 minutes tops. Around an hour later, she was back. Not in a taxi, but in a car driven by a lady office manager. She explained.

Part one of the plan had gone well: she’d found a comfortable café-bar, open all day, with food and WiFi.

Part two of the plan, get a cab, had come up against a problem. Apparently we were in a land without taxis. The barman explained. There are no taxis in the entire region. No-one uses a cab. People just know each other and they give each other lifts, when they’re free, in exchange for petrol money.

There were a couple of bar hangers in the bar, but they were no use: either they didn’t have cars, or they weren’t planning to leave any time soon. The man behind the counter said that there was only him there, so he couldn’t help either. There was no traffic on the road, and everyone else was at work. Perhaps Julia might get a lift when people finished work at the end of the day. Perhaps she should ask in the factory across the road. So Julia crossed the road to a random factory, and stuck her head round the office door. The ladies in the office were sympathetic. The manageress took an early lunch break, and agreed a modest price. Julia hopped in the lady’s car; she ran a few lunchtime errands; and then they drove to the top of the hill to pick me up. Finally we headed back to the café where Julia’s bike was parked, and the office manager went back to work.

So now we’d managed the first part of the plan. I had a coffee, and worked on the next part. The bar had WiFi and food, and was open all day. Julia could sit and do stuff on her laptop. Google said that there was a Yamaha dealer in Rijeka, the nearest big town, an hour away. They were open till five. Great! I could get a cable from there, and Rod didn’t need to ride to the rescue.

Navigation to the bike shop was a challenge. The phone signal was still weak. I could load the route in the bar, using WiFi, but if I deviated i.e. got lost, I wouldn’t have enough data for Google to redraw the map. So I wrote down a list of points on the route, just in case.

I said goodbye to Julia, and took off on her bike. My route worked out fine, until I got to Rijeka. It’s a big modern town, strung out along the coast between the mountain and the sea, with a fast motorway running across the top, and a series of exits off the highway into the town. I missed the first exit, of course, which meant that I ran off the route, so it wouldn’t re-draw: it just left a blue line, which I wasn’t on, across an otherwise blank screen.

There was some sort of rush hour going on. Also, being somewhat stressed, I was caught out by a sudden jam-up on a fast road. I did an emergency stop, which sent the back wheel skittering sideways. This made me feel guilty: I could have dropped Julia’s bike. That would be extra dumb. I finally found the town centre, and went round the one-way system a couple of times. I lost all hope of finding the Yamaha dealer. But then, by accident, I re-joined the blue line on my map, and suddenly I was outside the shop.

The Yamaha dealership was big, smart, and useless. I told them about my Yamaha engine, and the year of the bike. The model was discontinued in 2003, when MZ went bust. Only sixteen years ago. They only did parts for modern Yamahas, they said. If the bike wasn’t on their computer system, they wouldn’t be able to look up the part, and therefore they couldn’t supply it. They weren’t going to just rummage on the shelves for a cable to match my broken one. That would be wrong, and possibly dangerous. Sorry, not sorry.

Alongside me at the counter, there was a short chap in overalls. He said he could help. He owned a smaller bike shop that specialised in Kawasakis. It was sheer coincidence that he was in this shop for some Yamaha parts, at the same time as me, and could understand English.

“Follow me” he said. This meant following a bike mechanic, on a scooter, through the back streets of Rijeka. He made no concessions to the fact that he knew the way, and I didn’t. He just rode at his normal speed. I was once a dispatch rider, so I’m used to getting a move on in traffic. However the next few minutes were rather on the wild side. I did my best, but his helmet was getting further and further away in the distance. For the second time in half an hour, I was losing all hope of finding the shop: when suddenly, we arrived.

This time we were in a proper bike shop, with oily floorboards and heaps of parts. We stretched out the broken cable that I’d brought, and found some Kawasaki cables that were the same length, with fittings that could probably be bodged to fit. He gave me a couple of cables, to improve my chances of getting away. Didn’t charge me. “I wish you good luck.”

Now I had some spare cables on board, and a bike, and all I needed to go was get back up the hill. I made a complete pig’s ear of navigating back to where Julia was, because I hadn’t loaded a reverse route, as I should have done. I was using the waypoints in my notebook; only I didn’t stop to check them often enough. At one point I ran for five miles on the motorway, heading east instead of west, heading for central Slovenia, before turning round and heading back into the hills.

In the end I found some town names I recognised; and finally, I got back to Julia’s coffee bar. By now, she’d been in the café for about four hours. Had lunch. People were starting to drift in, after work. It was also a bar, so you could get a proper drink: only Julia had to stick to coffee, with miles to go before she could sleep.

I still needed to get back up the hill to my bike. Aha, you might say, why not ride up on Julia’s bike, and then fix yours? But that would leave two bikes at the top of the hill, and only one rider. The only solution was to get a lift, or walk, to the top of the hill, fix it, and ride back down. (And if I didn’t fix it, walk back down.)

I considered walking. I hour 15 minutes, uphill in bike boots. But the barman introduced me to a couple of lads in the bar, who were having a few lagers after work. They had a car. They could give me a lift up the road. They just had to finish their drinks first. No rush. So I finally got to the top of the hill, at the end of the working day. I fitted a Kawasaki cable; it was slightly different, but not too much trouble.

Tools packed, helmet on, pressed the starter, bike fired up. Got on. Engine stopped.
Got off. Looked at it. Pressed starter. Engine started. Got on. Engine stopped again.

So the sun’s going down, I’m on the top of a hill with no traffic and almost no phone signal, and the bike won’t start. Or rather: it starts, then stops.
I wondered what I’d done to kill it. The only change was, I’d fitted a new clutch cable. I hadn’t done anything to the electrics or the fuel. The only thing that was different about the cable was a metal adjuster tube, a few inches down from the top end. Weirder still why did the engine start first, then stop when I got on?

I said the sun was going down. I started the bike again, got on, and it stopped. Then I noticed a tiny blue spark off my new the cable. An electrical short. In broad daylight I would never have seen it. That metal tube in the new cable, the only different thing about it, was touching something it shouldn’t. I found a zip tie and used it to pull the cable an inch to one side. I started the engine. This time when I got on, it stayed running.

So why did it start, then stop? The answer became clear. When I started the engine, the handlebars were turned to the left, pulling the cable to one side. When I got on, I straightened the bars, the cable moved to the right, blue sparks, engine stopped.
That zip tie stayed on the bike for the rest of the tour.

But what was shorting? I worked that out later.
On the Skorp, the clocks are on big metal bracket that’s rubber-mounted to the frame. Before we went on the tour, the rev counter had packed in: another known fault. So I’d taken it out and fitted a cheap Chinese rev counter in the empty socket. However while doing this, some idiot i.e. me, had trapped the signal wire against the mounting bracket. All the time the motor was running, the bracket was powered up to 12 volts. The whole thing was now a giant kill switch, wired straight to the ignition. But because it was rubber-mounted, nothing happened. Until something metal touched it: for instance, my new clutch cable. Then it shorted out and killed the motor.

Anyway, with one zip tie keeping everything going, I was now running down the hill to Julia’s café, with the sun setting over the sea to my right.
We had a council of war. We were booked into a beach side hotel in Jablanac, a small town further down the coast. Only three hours away. Time now about 6pm. They’d stop serving dinner at 10pm. 4 hours to do a 3 hour run, easy.

So we headed back past Rijeka, on the hectic motorway in the dark, then down to the winding coast road, one of Europe’s great riding roads, and brilliant on a sunny day.
Only it was dark, with a touch of rain, and now a wind started getting up. A powerful, blustery wind that could pick a bike up and send it sideways, especially a touring bike with a load of luggage on the back. The wind seemed to vary: sometimes it was blasting us head-on, sometimes it blew us about from the side, sometimes it disappeared.

The Dalmatian coast road follows the line of the coast: out round a headland, in along the side of a bay, over a small bridge some distance inland, back up the other side of the bay, out to a headland and round again. On a map, it looks like the edge of a jigsaw puzzle piece. This accounted for the mysterious variation in the wind. The road was heading south, then east, south, west, south again, and so on.

So sometimes the wind was blowing us from one side to the other, and sometimes it was in our faces; and when we thought it had died down completely, it was, in fact, pushing us along from behind. If you’re travelling at 60mph with a 60mph tail wind, you’re riding in still air. There was nothing else on the road, and it was unlit, with no fences or crash barriers. Just two bikes, a wet, snaking road, hills to the left, sea to the right, and us exchanging the odd comment over the intercom, as we wrestled with the wind.

Julia and I were talking about it on the intercom. Clearly we were in two different places, as the Californians say. For me, although I wouldn’t choose to go out on a wild and stormy night, once I’m in it, I love it. Even more so if the road is seriously twisty. Add some more adverse conditions, such as a bit of hail, or in this case some wild crosswinds, and I’m delighted. In contrast, Julia was getting ever more rattled, slowing down, and swearing a lot.

It was even more annoying for her to be riding in all this, and to be linked by intercom to a lunatic just ahead, who kept saying ‘woo hoo’ and ‘yee hah’, claiming that it was like windsurfing, only on a motorcycle in the dark; saying ‘just lean into it’, and singing along to Riders On The Storm, when it came up on the helmet speakers. She said it was unhelpful and could I shut up, so I had to sing silently.

At one point, the road went through Senj, a seaside town. The buildings blocked some of the wind, it was brightly lit, and we could see people sitting down to dinner in restaurants. We pulled over. I asked Julia whether we ought to stop and have dinner: call the hotel, tell them we were going to be late.

She said ‘no’. If we got off the bikes, climbed out of our waterproofs, and sat down to dinner, or even a coffee, she’d never get back on again. Not that night. The only option was to carry on. So we left the brightly-lit town behind and headed out again into the rainy, windy dark.

Finally the turn sign appeared, showing the road to Jablanac. A steep zigzag down the hillside, mostly single track, with at least five hairpin bends. And then the harbour with little boats, and our hotel. It was way past ten o’clock: the restaurant should have been closed. But the owner was still up. “I cook for you” he said. They gave us time to unload our gear and put on something dry, and then we sat down to grilled fresh fish with sautéed potatoes. We were the only diners.

“We thought you wouldn’t come” the owner said. “It’s the Bura. The road was closed to motorcycles”. We had no idea what he meant. “The Bura is a big wind that blows along this coast. When the Bura blows, the road is closed to motorcycles and trucks. The police put out signs. They should have stopped you.”

We said that we hadn’t seen any signs, or policemen.

“Maybe they were staying inside, out of the storm. And maybe the wind blew so hard, it blew the signs away.”

The next morning the wind was gone, the sky was blue, and Rod turned up on his bike, to guide us back to his place, an hour so away. The afternoon before, he’d sent us a warning, by text, to say that the Bura was blowing, and the road would be closed. But we hadn’t checked for messages.

Now we’ve found out that the road we’d come down was meant to be closed, because of the wind, Julia and I have different reactions. On my side, I thought closing the road was a bit pathetic: it was more entertaining than frightening. Though I suppose that a granny on a Vespa might get blown about a bit, and an adventure rider on a BMW would be in the ditch.

However Julia was both shocked, and pleased. Firstly, shocked. She doesn’t like doing dangerous things by choice: if she’d known that riding was banned that night, we would definitely have stopped, and it wasn’t up for discussion. But she’s also pleased: because she has a new skill. The last ten miles or so felt easier, not because the wind backed off, but because our reactions were better, and she started to get the hang of it.

And from that time forward, whenever we hit a monstrous crosswind, she just says: “This is bad. But it’s not as bad as the Bura”.