Honda XL 1000V Varadero

After 4000km, you know biking's the only way to go

A group of friends and I came up with the hare-brained idea of visiting the four corners of South Africa by motorcycle. We started a couple of weeks ago with a ride to Cape Agulhas, the southernmost tip of the continent.

Because it requires no imagination to be uncomfortable, my wife and I rode Honda's new XL1000V Varadero for the 3700km, five-day round trip.

The recently upgraded Varadero is a big, comfortable, handsomely-styled fast tourer with the versatility to take on gravel roads. At R97 800, it's competitively priced against its nearest rival, BMW's R1200GS, that sells for R114 950

There are times to sightsee and times to shoot for distance - and that was our mission heading out of Johannesburg at sunrise for the first and longest leg, an 1100km slog to Port Elizabeth.

It's not without trepidation that you tackle such a long haul, even on a comfort-orientated tourer, but we needn't have worried. The bike proved so comfy that when we reached Port Elizabeth we both felt fresh enough to have ridden straight back to Jo'burg.

The seating position is upright and relaxed, the pew nice and wide - Honda seems to have learned its lesson from the narrow, designed-for-teenage-ballerinas, saddle on the smaller Africa Twin. At 830mm the seat's not suited to the vertically challenged but it was fine for my 1.82m.

The high screen is manually adjustable to any of three positions and is very effective – to the extent that I had to ride with my visor slightly open to prevent it from fogging up

We arrived at our overnight stop in Port Elizabeth at 6pm, parked the bikes and went for a well-earned rest. Inexplicably, a grumpy granny in an adjoining room complained to the manager that we had "revved our motorcycles all afternoon."

Not everyone's a bike fan...

After first day's long ride the 600km day trips along the eastern Cape coast seemed almost child's play; the Varadero really is one of the best long-distance bikes out there.

Cruising power

Its 996cc, fuel-injected, V-twin motor thumps out 69kW at 8000rpm, with 98Nm of torque at 6 000rpm. If you're used to a superbike, you'll know that's not kick-ass power but there's lots of strong, smooth and linear cruising strength that takes you to 210km/h at a push and cruise at 180km/h two-up with the luggage cases full.

Ah yes, the storage. The 35-litre panniers and 45-litre locking top box (a R12 000 option) easily swallowed five days' worth of (economically packed) luggage for two, although the panniers' latching system was a bit fiddly.

The weather gods were mostly kind as we rode the picture-postcard Garden Route over the next three days but the Varadero's tall screen and hand guards came in handy and helped keep the occasional chilly spell at bay.

The eastern Cape's notoriously strong winds caused some problems; a couple of times side gusts hit us so hard we were blown into the next lane but a nice thing about riding in winter is the absence of bugs plastered across your visor and the bike.

Long ranger

The 25-litre fuel tank is another feather in the Varadero's touring cap; fuel consumption on the six-speed Honda varied, depending on pace and the wind strength. The best we got was 5.6 liters /100km and the worst 10.2, with an average of 7.9 liters /100km.

That worked out to a generous tank range of 316km – there were some bikes in our group that could barely manage 190km.

Handling is about what you'd expect of a tourer; there's no knee-scraping on the menu but the big Honda turned in quite crisply for a bike weighed down by two people and their luggage. With both crew seated well forward to compensate for the inevitable tail-heaviness, I could get it leaned well over in the mountain passes.

The brakes - big dual discs up front and a third at the rear - are well up to the task, with a progressive, not over-sharp, feel. Honda's linked braking system automatically feeds a percentage of braking power to the rear wheel when you snatch the front brake, or vice versa. Not everyone likes the system – experienced riders prefer to have total brake control - but in normal road riding it wasn't obtrusive.

The instrument panel is large and easy to read with two trip meters and a fuel consumption computer. The indicators perform double duty as flashing hazard lights, which came in handy to say "thank you" to cars that moved over to let us pass.

Courteous drivers

Out on the open road we were taken aback by how courteous motorists were. Closer to the cities it was a different story altogether, where the more stressed drivers got into lane blocking (the "Irish Chicane", where a car in the fast lane stays close alongside a car in the slow lane to prevent anyone overtaking even on a double carriageway – it's illegal on a racetrack but on the public roads it's just very bad manners) - and the whole road rage deal.

Perhaps there's a thesis in this.

The Varadero's high, wide handlebars, generous ground clearance and semi-knobbly tyres made it suitable for gentle off-road work. Our route took us through a 30km dirt section where the bike felt quite stable but with M'lady on the pillion it wasn't the place to try anything fancy like hard braking or sideways slides...

We reached Cape Agulhas safely, where the Indian and Atlantic oceans shake hands, and with photos snapped to prove it we headed back via George, Knysna, Plettenberg Bay and Port Elizabeth.

Some rear tyre wear was the only evidence of our nearly 4 000km marathon – plus my jacket needed a good wash after being used as target practice by a Plettenberg Bay seagull.

So why such an odyssey on a bike?

Because there's a charm and magic about doing it on two wheels instead of cocooned in a tin box. Because the wind blows harder, the sheep look fluffier and the yellow fields of rape on the Swellendam-Cape Agulhas road look more vivid.

And when you stop in small towns people shake their heads and ask: "You rode the bikes from WHERE?"

Plus that seagull had a good laugh at my expense. - Star Motoring

Source Motoring.co.za 

Review

Bikes like this can be deceiving. They look big and heavy, but turn out not to be. They look comfortable but transpire to be medieval torture devices on wheels. They have big, well regarded vee twin engines but are actually gutless. And they have huge fuel tanks but short range.

Some bikes like this may deceive, but the Varadero does not. It looks big and heavy, and it is positively enormous. In its defence, it isn't as heavy as it appears, though. It looks comfortable but it is, in fact, sublime. The 1000cc vee twin delivers a very sprightly urge and the huge fuel tank gives intercontinental range.

That may be the shortest review I have ever written, so perhaps I should elaborate. Collecting the Varadero from Honda I was surprised and just a little intimidated by its sheer size. Although I am sure that it actually compares pretty well with similar offerings from other companies, the colour and style seem to conspire to increase the impression of size. Loading it onto a trailer to get home showed that although there is a lot of bike to handle, it is quite handleable. Which is handy, because dropping a press bike off the trailer in front of the workshop is considered bad form. It was obvious that my normal route would not be enough - slightly below 100 miles was hardly going to be an endurance test after all - so I grabbed my camera and some bits and pieces, chucked them in a bag on the back and headed for the coast. First gold star for the Varadero. Very easy to securely strap a bag to the back using a cargo net.

The game plan was simple. Ride until my bum got sore, then find a good place to take some pictures, grab something to eat and go on from there. Easy peasy. Except for one small problem. When I hit the coast, some 80 miles later, I was still comfortable, warm and relaxed. Best I press on, then. The first reason for stopping was hunger. Grab a sandwich and keep going. All in all, I did just under 300 miles that day, without a single twinge, ache or grumble. That's impressive.

What's also quite something is the fact that I didn't need to put any fuel in for 260 miles. And I wasn't hanging about. In fact, I was making the most of another attribute that the Varadero is blessed with. That engine is related reasonably closely to the SP-2 that took Colin Edwards to the 2002 WSB championship. OK, so it may be in a slightly milder state of tune here, but it's still a peach.

Climbing aboard is easier than it might at first appear, although there is no disguising the fact that this is a very large motorbike. However, despite being no more than average height, I didn't find it a stretch to reach the ground and the low centre of gravity made it easy to hold the bike up. Starting is as straightforward as you like, this being a Honda and all, and the light clutch and easy gearbox make pulling away and getting moving equally fuss free. The wide bars give huge leverage for cornering, and although at low speed the front feels a little vague, no doubt as a result of the long forks and plush springing, town behaviour ir both predictable and safe. Full lock, feet up u-turns are possible although I really wouldn't want to try and catch the beast in the event of it going wrong as once a varadero starts to fall over I suspect that there is little this side of The Incredible Hulk that will stop it.

Now of course, you take a bike this size, stick 25 litres of fuel in it, give it giant-trailie geometry and tyres and then pop a motor in producing the best part of 100bhp and you are inevitably going to get a few handling foibles. In fact, to be honest, a bike like this is unlikely to be much fun on the twisties and may, in fact, be positively scary. Which goes no way at all towards explaining why I could happily scrape the footpegs on roundabouts, attack twisty roads as hard as I would on most bikes and utterly fail to tie the thing in knots under hard acceleration. Bizarre.

So what makes the Varadero work? There seem to be lots of features which, in isolation, would at best be pointless and at worst look daft. The motocross style handguards, for example, should seem silly on a bike that nobody in their right mind would take off road, while the rather odd looking half fairing doesn't look big enough to make much difference. But between them I was able to wear summer gloves and a light jacket on a pretty chilly autumn day. And they kept the last of the bugs off my visor as well. The old fashioned analogue clocks look as though they should be hard to read while the high-tech LCD panel above promises information overload. But no - the clocks are clear and easy, and the LCD tells you exactly what you want to know, no more, no less. Unless you really don't want to know the time, of course, in which case you will hate the fact that the clock is displayed, large and clear, all the time. Those skinny, throwback mirrors may look like something off a 1980 Superdream but they give a clear, vibe-free picture of the road behind. So the Varadero is rather more than just the sum of its parts.

I'm not saying that the Varadero is above criticism. Personally, although I found linked brakes to work well on the VFR we tested before, on something this size and weight I found them to be slightly lacking in bite. I'm sure that's really down to my braking technique, but it was a little disconcerting nonetheless. I also feel that the total lack of underseat storage as a result of the fashionable high level exhausts was a bit of a disappointment for an otherwise utterly practical bike.

But overall, to say I was impressed with the Varadero would be a masterpiece of understatement. As far as out of the box usability is concerned, this is one of the best bikes I have ever ridden. Don't let the looks or the size out you off. You can't see it from the saddle, and as any man will tell you it's not the size that matters...

Source  Motorbikes Today