Aris Biketrials exploits

Wan Aris(centre)with the current world champion (right)and his minder at the 2009 world championship in China.

I guess my interest and skills has brushed on to my sons and daughter. Here is my eldest son playriding on his trials bike. The video was shot during a weekend trip to Frasers Hill.

There was no ride this weekend. I decided to spend sometime with my family instead. We spent some quality time together and reflected back on what we used to do when they were younger. Aris and Danial started cycling when they were 3 years old. Aris is the elder one of the two. I bought him a mini moto when he was 8 years old and started fun racing. He was good and used to win many local races organised by a mini moto club while his younger brother was more keen toward riding dirt bike.
Being in the motor sport circle,I knew that motor sport could not be taken seriously and used to tell my sons just that. We would just do it for fun and to learn the basics for their future biking either for personal transport or recreation.
Motor sport is expensive no matter what people say. I knew that I would not be able to support them financialy should they decide to go racing seriously. Thank god they understood the situation.
The basic skill that they acquired have provided them with the ability to ride with good judgement on the road. All the safety aspects of riding are followed i.e the wearing of helmet and safety gear,machines understanding and inspections etc.
They raced BMX for a short while before I introduced biketrials into their training regime. Finally Aris found his niche and he likes the sport very much. Sensing that he has natural skill and special interest in the sport judging from his diligence in training,I gave him full support and encouraged him to enter competitions. He managed to become the overall champion in the open category in the 2009 Singapore Biketrials National Championship. I paid for his trip to enter the final round of the 2009 world championship which was held in Ping Tang,China. It was a good experience for him.
I hope to be able to support his participations in the world championship this year and maybe get sponsors for him to enter full rounds.

ER6 Adventure bike

An example of bike modification by an American adventure rider. The bike started as a cheap Kawasaki ER6N and ended up beautifully as an adventure bike. The most important thing is vesatility,practicality and CHEAP. I have started doing the same thing to my bike little by little as my finance permits since I bought the bike. It is my 50th birthday present and was bought about 2 years ago. The American completed it sooner though I started earlier because in America parts are easier to find and does not cost an arm and a leg to purchase..unlike here.

Dirty Old Man

Ha ha ha what a title. On the contrary I do think Im a dirty old man. I ve been dirty on most weekends all my life.......or rather been playing in the dirt....on my mountainbike or dirtbikes. Lead me to a dirt road or trail, It feels like Im going back to my natural environment everytime. It feels so natural and comfortable not unlike duck goes to water. In the course of my pursuit for recreation I have been road cycling and road motorcycling too but the satisfaction or rather lack of it always lead me back to riding offroad eventually.
There is a craze lately for bike riders to go for a long distance adventure ride overseas. I would love to get dirty doing offroad adventure overseas. It would be a fitting climax to my recreational riding career. It is a known fact that many part of the world are connected with paved roads. You can do a world tour entirely on a road bike but I am a dirt rider and want to do a dirt road tour. Due to that reason my ideal adventure would be riding in the African continent ala Paris Dakkar. It would be perfect to start in Capetown at the southernmost tip of Africa all the way up to the gulf states. The finance and preparation involved would be humongous but not impossible. Bike preparation,paper work ,carnett requirement,shipping etc,it is endless until the day I leave with anxiety not knowing what is going to happen. It would be part of of the whole adventure.
Ending up in the holy city of Mecca would be a perfect ending to my adventure....It would be the mother of all adventures. That perfect destination might cleanse this dirty old man for good....

Shah Alam to Gunung Brinchang Road ride

My last camping road trip was sometime ago. I have not been out camping lately and I need a break from my normal routine. A group of friends are planning to do a Northern India adventure ride. They have been preparing their bikes and need to test their set up. Bike set up testing is an excuse to go to Gunung Brinchang for a night camping.Reason being its a mountain climb and its cold up there.
Four of us started from a fuel station along the NKVE at 8pm. We rode real slow on the North - South highway heading towards Tapah. Only one bike had a fill up in Tapah and we proceeded ascending the snakey road to Tanah Rata. Night riding is one of my favourite. It was a real pleasure to able to ride with less trafic on the road. The cool air is priceless. We reached Tanah Rata at 12 pm. We had hot tea at one of the stall. Our plan to camp was thwarted with the threatening sky and we looked for a room instead. We found an appartment in Brincang and checked in at around 1 am. Shortly after checking in, it was raining so hard that our decision to check in at the apartment was a million dollar decision. Had we camped, we would definitely be drenched either with rain water or our own sweat cocooned in our tent.
In the morning,we rode up to the summit of Gunung Brincang which stood at 2000 metres above sea level. The view of the surrounding mountains from the summit was simply magnificent.It was really cool and refreshing. On our returned ride down the mountain we met a group of MTB riders huffing and puffing up the climb,oh boy was is a tough climb and I almost could feel their pain having being cyclist myself. I have faced the same situation many times. The toughest climb being on a coast to coast tour, crossing over the main range from Butterworth to Kota Bharu.
Midway on the descend,we stopped at a resting point to snap some pictures with the tea plantation as the background. Next stop is the fuel station in Brincang before we rode down hill to Tapah for lunch arriving at 12.30 pm. The final part of the ride started at 2.pm after the KLX 650 gas tank was refilled with the fuel carried in the spare container. We were forced to make another fuel stop due to the small gas tank of the XR650 which had to be refilled again. It seemed like the main problem for these bikes are the small original gas tank. Permanent solution would be to replace them with bigger capacity tanks. From the station we continued our journey home on the south bound highway without much drama. The only glitch was the wide berth of the panniers made it difficult to lane splittings when traffic was heavy.

Trialsin or Biketrials

Cycling is a universal sport. Earlier in my blog,I have mentioned that learning to cycle is a natural process in growing up. Most people in Malaysia will give up cycling when they reach puberty age. Parents start to drive their kids to school,tuition classes even for shopping. Some buy their children motorbikes and even cars. How lucky todays kids are. It should not be so. Cycling should be continued until late into our lives. It is a healthy form of exercise and environmentally friendly activity. It is also an effective commuting tool. Human powered mobility will be the thing for the future as fossil fuel is becoming more scarce each day. It is going to become a major sporting event some day. Those who excel in cycling can proceed to cycling competitively and even professionaly.They are many forms of cycling disciplines. Track racing is becoming popular locally as our own rider Azizul Hasni Awang who is one of top riders in the world. He is fully responsible for making the Malaysian public sit down and take notice.Others are BMX racing,freestyle,road riding,mountainbiking and downhilling but mostly as recreations. There is one discipline in bicycle activity totally unknown in Malaysia which is termed as Biketrials. It is a popular form of bicycle activity and competition in Europe,America and Japan. There is a World Championship series being held every year since the early eighties.The riders taking part are fully sponsored pros who make good living as fulltime riders.Currently this sport is being promoted aggresively in Asian countries by Japan. World Championship rounds are held in Japan,China and Singapore. I used to ride mototrials and biketrials and fully understand the sport. I would like to further promote this beautiful sport and create a bigger talent pool. It is more of an unfullfilled wish for me having failed to promote them years ago. It was simply too early for our public to understand then. Presently with the availability of internet and other medias they began to get the idea. I am training my children to take up the sport profesionaly.They can progress to Mototrials in the future if they so desire.To my friends who would like their children to learn and take up this sport, they are welcomed to get in touch with me. I can share my experiences and maybe change the way our children spend their free time towards a more productive one and keep them off the streets. At least it will train them to build up self confidence which are lacking in our children today.Maybe there is a world champion material lurking among them. We can share our passion for offroad riding with our children by combining these two sports. We will provide a good base for them to progress in a proper manner while we guide them all the way.....our way. Biketrials is not expensive and the cost of maintaining the bikes is practically zero. Parents just need to invest in the bike and some protective gears,spare sometime during their training sessions,thats it.

Easy ride

Sometimes you just ride for the sake of riding.This weekend we just did that. After three weekends of hard riding we decided to do easy trail ride just to warm up our monkey butt. There were six riders at first but one rider could not proceed due to a small technical problem. Two new KLX riders joined the ride for the first time.We took the easy trail via Setia Alam and Kg.Budiman heading for Puncak Meru. We met a group of mountain bikers at the top of the hill. After some public relation small talk,we headed for Puncak Perdana on the tarmac to continue our way back to Shah Alam. The single track trail crossing was taken in reverse and we exited at Setia Alam and proceeded to section 9. Just a short ride but still enjoyable by all riders just the same.

Lakeside trail-3 Sundays in a row

The persistent rain lately must have turned the trail into a wet and slippery path or so I thought. Most of the riders who turned up for our normal weekend ride collectively agreed to try the trail. This time there were ten of us and only Meor and I have ridden the trail before. I anticipated a hard ride due to the wet condition. We started the ride at 10 am and reached the trailhead a short while later. As expected it truly was wet and slippery. There were plenty of pyhsical work to clear the obstacles. We made it out safely to the trailend 2 and half hours later.

Bicycle sport-The beginning

It can not be denied that most people know how to cycle. Learning to cycle is a growing up process,its universal. Babies learn to walk and cycling is their next natural progression. Parents would buy bicycle even before their babies could walk. Either tricycle or kids bicycle with training wheels were available in every home with kids.
I got my proper bicycle when I was four years old. It was a Raleigh with 20 inch wheels.I rode that bicycle until I was about 12 when puberty set in and I`ve grown too tall for it. It was replaced with a regular gentleman Raleigh with normal sized wheels. I would have bought a mountain bike if it was available but unfortunately MTB was only invented very much later. Even BMX was not introduced yet. My normal bicycle was my MTB cum BMX. I did jumps,pulled long wheelies and trail riding on the bike. When I started secondary school, I met a bunch of new friends who shared the same interest. We used to do stunts on our bikes before and after school. We got really good at it and started some sort of a new craze among the town kids.We began to teach.
One of our classmate who is now a profesor at a local uni used to bring imported magazine to school(cant disclosed the title to protect the innocent).There were many motorcycle advertisement in it. Some of the motorcycle ads shown pictures of motorbikes which were different from what we normally saw on our street. Little did we know that those bikes were called scramblers which were meant to be ridden offroad. It sparked our interest in offroad motorcycles. We did our research and tried to understand this offroad sport the best we could.Imported motorcycle magazines were hard to come during those days. We had no choice but to subscribe motorcycle magazines all the way from UK and USA. Most of our pocket money were spent on magazines and we had not been able to see a scrambler live yet. In the meantime,we perfected our bicycle riding skill,did adventure rides and raced offroad among ourselves.There are many happy memories with regard to cycling in the small town of Kuala Terengganu, the place I came from.Heck, even today, good cycling athletes come from this place. Hmmm....tradition started by us ,maybe!!!
Time moved on, bike movies and television shows further exposed us to dirtbikes. We fully understood the discipline of riding but...how were we to buy a bike?.Scramblers mainly Japanese brands,began to be sold in bike shops but we were only able to watch and daydreaming about pulling stunts on those bikes. We could only immitate riding a scrambler on a Honda C90 which belonged to a mates father. When he was away for haj his bike became our practice machine,courtesy of his good son,naughty us...sorry uncle,may god bless you.
Actually we were more exposed to trials riding rather than Motocross. Magazines that we subscribed were mainly from UK and covered a lot of trials competition and tested a lot of trials bike. It was only natural that we drifted more toward immitating trials rider and we could do trials moves on our bicycles.
We each had a motorcycle in our fourth form but not scramblers. Most of us came from working class background and our parents could not afford new bikes but It was good enough for us. I could still jump and wheelied my Honda Benly 125. We were envious of guys who rode scramblers. Each of us swore to work(study) hard,get a good paying job and fulfill our dreams.
After fifth form, we went off on our ways to continue our studies. I was the first one to have bought a scrambler, a Suzuki RM 125 N(MX actually). I attended a motocross school and started racing. Two of my friends bought scramblers with their scholarship money. Another good friend had a different schedule being in different college but he also bought a bike. We terrorised the small town whenever we could get together. We did mile long wheelies and jumping around at the beach front and the golf course. We were known as The ACRO RIDERS.