The Beast Itself, A Beautifully Named Euromot

So far Buenos Aires has been a insane city to live and leave and Rosario could be a great city to live forever, so much so that I was going to go back there straight away, but I after being stuck in Santiago longer than anticipated I decided with a bit of impulse mixed with boredom to buy a motorbike in order to do a spot of independent sightseeing. 

It came about really after meeting a few inspirational people in Buenos Aires back in March.  Two Aussies who had bought bikes in Santiago and a young English lad who was planning to buy one too (he did and by all accounts is having his own adventures somewhere).  At the time it planted a seed and when I had a flight that I booked but no longer needed to Santiago, I thought I would go anyway and use the time to try to buy a bike.  Chile is the best place in S. America to buy a bike because even as a foreigner you are legally able to take it out of the country for up to 6 months.  Other countries do not allow this.  

Looking for a challenge I finally settled on buying a Chinese made copy of a Suzuki motocross bike.  Known over here as a Euromot! and it really is a sterling machine, if you ignore the known faults that is.  The real reason though is that European and Japanese bikes are stupidly expensive in South America.  So yeah it could be a challenge but we’ll see.

I really need to try something different as at this point after several years of travelling I am tired of meeting drunk idiot tourists everywhere I go, with me being the biggest one on many occasions, and this is not why I came back to South America.  It doesn’t matter where you are when you are like this, you can be like this down the local.

Right now I want to see the locations on my own terms and meet the people when I get there.  There’s nothing better than doing all this on a bike, you can stop where you want and go where you want to go, the slower the better, which won’t be a problem for me as my cruising speed will be around 70-80km/h.  I also love the thought of the scrapes I might get to have.  In summary I can’t wait to get going.  Overall I hope this will also help me learn Spanish, currently the biggest challenge for me yet.  

Here is the beast, although mine is in red when I get it.