Thursday, May 15, 2008

Around North Borneo in 6 Days

Motor biking is a passion ever since i had a chance to ride on a bike that was 18 years ago when i was 16 years old. It was a Yamaha TY trial thats when i got hooked on motorbikes, just recently i organize a touring using a locally assemble motorbike DMX 150. Our total mileage was 1400kms a round trip of North Borneo the bike performed pretty well considering it was localy assemble bike. Not that im saying Malaysian Bikes are not trust worthy but i have had my share of buying local bikes only to end up broken down after 36 KM of riding....thats the truth.

Our journey took us to some really rough and rugged terrain in the rain forest of Borneo to one point we had to push the bike due to deep pools of mud. Surprisingly the bike never broke down or had any major problems and beleave me when your taking paying customers you dont want any problems. we travel more than 500kms of gravel and muddy roads along the east coast of borneo fuel was pretty economical on this bike handling was pretty good on off roads on a seal road you can feel the vibration right to the bone. Top speed on seal road is 120kms on off roads gravel 80-100 max. Our main priority in this touring was to visit the lost world of Maliau basin, a river cruise at the kinabatangan river, visit the sepilok orang utan, hotsprings at poring and visit the world heritage site of Mt Kinabalu..which we manage to do so.

I would grad the bike as 2 star not to bad for a malaysian mad Motorcycle, handling average, taking corners not really a steady bike but really did well on muddy and gravel roads.