Honda Africa Twin

The 650 V-twin is deceptively smooth for its era — pulls cleanly from 3,500 rpm and feels confidence-inspiring on gravel tracks where you're rarely exceeding 80 km/h anyway. That Paris-Dakar pedigree isn't just marketing; the upright ergonomics and wide bars genuinely work when you're threading through Moroccan piste or navigating Welsh green lanes. The drum rear brake, though, is a genuine liability in the wet — it's vague, inconsistent, and makes you wonder what Honda was thinking when disc brakes were already standard fare elsewhere. At 192 kg fully fuelled it's also no featherweight off-road, and 48 hp means you're working the gearbox hard to maintain pace on motorways above 130 km/h.

The jump from 650 to 742cc made a genuine difference — that extra torque in the midrange transforms mountain passes and loaded touring, letting you pull through corners without constantly chasing gears. The 52-degree V-twin has a distinctive, slightly uneven heartbeat that feels alive in a way modern parallel twins frankly don't, and the new rear disc was long overdue — the RD03's drum was embarrassing on a loaded bike descending Alpine grades. Suspension is plush enough for rough pistes but vague if you push hard on tarmac, and 208 kilos doesn't disappear just because the seat is tall; drop it in soft sand once and you'll understand every Africa Twin owner's back-country anxiety. Still, Honda got the ergonomics and wind protection right in a way competitors hadn't figured out yet, and 30 years on these things still feel purposeful rather than nostalgic.

I put 22,000 km on an RD07 across three Balkan summers and one Atlas Mountain crossing, and the engine's relaxed parallel twin just refuses to embarrass you — it pulls cleanly from 2,500 rpm, never overheats in traffic, and sounds properly purposeful without theatrical noise. The 21-inch front wheel earns its keep on corrugated pistes and gravel switchbacks where 19-inch pretenders start wandering; this bike genuinely goes where you point it off-road, which is rarer than the marketing suggests. That said, 60 hp and 223 kg wet means mountain highway overtakes require planning rather than impulse, and the carburettors on earlier RD07s hunt and stumble below 3,000 rpm in cold mornings until they're properly sorted with fresh jets and a carb sync. The seat also turns punishing around the 300 km mark — a Corbin or Sargent is essentially mandatory equipment.