Over the last few years a small group of us have made the trek, every February, to the Dragon Rally in Snowdonia. We’re not hard-core rallyists but we enjoy the Dragon and it was in the beer tent there, some years ago, that I became aware of the famed ‘Elefanttreffen’ hat and the respect that its wearer commanded. Each year we’d talk about how easy the Dragon was and how we should do the ‘Elefant’ which, over 44 years, has acquired the reputation of being one of the most gruelling rallies in Europe. We’d heard tales of camping in snow amongst thousands of other bikers but, beyond that, we knew very little about the rally so each year we’d end up at the Dragon promising to make an effort the following year. Well, in the summer of 1999, two of the lads actually dug out details of the rally and we finally had some solid dates and a location. Further trawling of the internet told us that it wasn’t ticket only and that it cost £10 to get in. ‘Blimey!’ We thought, ‘that sounds cheap’. The game was on, we were going to get our hats.

Over the months we enlisted some more prospective ‘Elefanters’ and in total there were seven of us on five bikes. The combined efforts of our computer route planners failed to find a route of less than 950 miles so Jethro’s original plan to take his sidecar outfit was scrapped on the grounds that there probably isn’t enough petrol in the average filling station to cope with its terrible consumption. This meant that we now had a disparate fleet comprising of a Yamaha XJR1300 (Julian and Viv), a CX650 (Gareth and Liz) and a Honda CB500 (Jethro). Simon meanwhile went mad and bought an imported DR650 for the trip because he didn’t want to take his Ninja! The obvious choice for me was my commuter bike, a Suzuki VX800 twin cylinder, shaft-drive motorway basher. However, as the date approached I began to feel guilty about not taking a thumper. Until a month or so before the rally I’d had a DR350 but I’d sold that so I found myself thumperless, which is not really the done thing for someone who runs a club for thumpers. I decided that I’d build a bike.

My garage contained the remains of three XBRs but bolting all the bits together wasn’t as easy as you may have thought. Two of the frames were out of the question, one is attached to a sidecar and another has been modified to take a single saddle. The third frame had been damaged in an accident: the lock stop was mashed and the rear frame rails were bent. I won’t describe the brutal way that the tubes were bent back but the lock stop was easily repaired with an arc welder. So now I needed an engine. I’ve got a modified 650 motor under a bench but the gear selection is reversed to the XBR’s and I didn’t have time to make a linkage. There was a perfectly good engine in my (broken) sidecar outfit so that was the one I used and, in the process, I re-united the engine with its original frame, which meant that the log book was correct for the first time in ages. A lot of late nights were ahead of me, well not a lot really because this all took place less than two weeks before we were due to leave. I won’t go into the details of the full bike rebuild. I will say that when I’d bolted the oil tank, airbox, swingarm, battery carrier and back wheel in place only to discover that the carb wouldn’t go in without them being removed, I may have lost my temper, in fact I may have lost my mind. My fellow ‘Elefanters’ thought I was mad anyway for leaving the rebuild until so close to the date of departure and it became obvious that this was going to be an issue, but more of that later. Tyres were a bit of a problem; I wasn’t keen to invest in a set of new Bridgestones and then waste them by belting along autobahns for 2,000 miles. Luckily I had a virtually new back tyre on the sidecar outfit that wasn’t ‘squared off’ and I had a front tyre with lots of tread… but this had started life as a square section tyre, hmmm. I put them on anyway and hoped for the best. Bolting everything together is one thing but getting it all working and through an MOT is another. I got the MOT and roadtax on 24th January; we left for France on the 25th.

When I got to our meeting place, a service station ten miles from the Severn bridge, the back light had stopped working. The looks on my chums faces weren’t pretty, they weren’t going to be charitable towards a bloke who had clocked up all of 60 miles on a freshly rebuilt bike before leaving for a 2,000 mile journey. A faulty earth was fixed and we set off to meet Simon at Chievley services, just off the M4. It was raining but it soon became apparent to me that my right boot looked wetter then my left boot; I had an oil leak. I didn’t want to make my friends any more worried so I pressed on. By the time we trudged up to the bar on the ferry it was obvious how much oil the bike had deposited on my leggings and boot but we had drinking to do and tomorrow was another day.

It was still dark when we rode off the ferry but a quick check confirmed my suspicion that the leak was coming from the oil tank breather pipe where it connects to the rocker box. The pipe slides over a short tube and is held in place by a small ‘Jubilee’ clip, this didn’t seem to be tight enough but running the engine didn’t reveal a serious leak so I decided to top up the oil and fix the problem later on. The start from Le Havre was slow and chaotic but we found the right road and headed off into the French countryside. After a couple of hours we stopped at a lovely little cafe for some ferociously strong coffee and then headed off again. By now it had become apparent that our route (mostly on back roads) was flawed because lorries kept holding us up. We had to struggle another 80 miles to Reims to get on the Péage where, at the toll booth, I discovered that the oil leak was lots worse and we had to stop. My chums were pretty pissed off at this but it took only ten minutes to hurl the luggage from the bike, remove the tank, move and tighten the clip and establish that the bodge had worked. Even so, it was dark when we got to Saarbrucken. Mooching around a strange city centre is no fun and in the end we stopped and sent Gareth and Julian off, on foot, to find a hotel. They returned to say that they’d found one about 100 yards away and that Gareth had haggled the price down from 75DM to 49DM (about £15). We were pretty impressed and Gareth became our nominated haggler from that moment on. That night we had a German meal in a Chinese-style restaurant run by an Indian couple (eh?), went back to the bar, had a few more beers and then headed off to bed for an assured deep sleep.

The morning start in Saarbrucken was freezing, minus 8 degrees in fact, but before setting off I had to tackle the oil leak. I added two cable-ties to the oil tank breather pipe, alongside the ‘Jubilee’ clip, and this stopped most of the oil loss although the bike smelled of oil for the rest of the trip. We headed off with a wave to Axel, our friendly hotel manager, promising to return in four days. Within 20 miles we were riding through snow-covered fields and hills. Trying to cover 100 miles between stops is hard at those temperatures, the cold got to me after only 30 miles or so, making the remaining 70 miles ‘interesting’. Anyone who comes out with that old chestnut “but it’s a different type of cold” should be shot, in my opinion. The only thing that took my mind off the pain was trying to convert kilometres into miles whenever we passed road signs. Because of the cold (and our hangovers) we had some leisurely stops - where we met up with some bikers on their way to the rally - but our time wasting meant that we got to Regensburg, our next stop, well after dark again. We were pissed off and cold but Gareth again found a hotel, knocked the price down and even organised a garage for the bikes! We had supper in the hotel and enjoyed some bizarre apple-based spirits before retiring to our quaint wood-panelled rooms.

The morning start in Regensburg was even colder than the morning before, the first few yards of riding brought loud cracking noises as our tyres shed thin films of ice. We knew we had only 80 miles to go so we were a lot happier, at each stop we saw more and more bikers in the cafes and some Belgians cheerfully offered us a swig of their brandy, which we shouldn’t have drunk but we didn’t want to appear rude. We arrived at the rally site just after midday and set out to find a camping spot. Only when we actually set our gear down on a hillside did it dawn on us that we needed to dig a hole in the snow before we set our tents up. After borrowing shovels we finally pitched the tents and decided to explore the site, which was awesome, covering several hillsides and extending down into a shallow valley. We wandered around in awe of the vehicles that some people had ridden to the rally, these included: a four-wheel drive BMW flat twin, another extraordinary vehicle made out of a coffin and a Yamaha YPVS, a 50cc Vespa with Rome numberplates, an MZ that had the optional snow scoop rear end fitted in place of the back wheel, an R1 sidecar outfit with trailer, a 3-wheel Guzzi pick–up and, most amazingly, a 3-wheel rickshaw style taxi. The German love affair with the SR and XT500 seems to be waning with lots of riders now opting for large twin cylinder trailies like the Transalp and Varadero (with the obligatory aluminium luggage). There were still lots of XTs there though and the favoured method of parking seemed to be to drive the bike into a snowdrift and leave it there. You can’t help but think that taking a thumper trailie is cheating but we envied them nevertheless. A couple of the newer MuZ thumper off-roaders were there and I have to say that they look very attractive, except for the massive (German market?) silencer. I didn’t see any SRXs but I did see another XBR (excuse me taking a cheap shot in the XBR vs SRX war). Classic singles were thin on the ground but I did see a few of those famed Zundapp WWII army sidecar outfits and they do live up to the nickname ‘Elefant’. Jethro told us that the rally is named after these beasts but then he said a lot of things under the influence of German beer. We bought our hats, ambled around the site, had a few more beers and gluhwiens and then we went to bed, under a cold, clear sky. Simon and I were sharing a tent and we had the most awful night's sleep, we were laying on bloody uneven snow and we were very cold.

It was snowing the next morning but it didn't look too bad so we set off to find an army surplus shop that we'd seen on the way in. We trekked for a mile, through increasingly bad snowfall, to get there. What worried me was that the Germans (who live there!) were now leaving in droves and they were taking about half an hour to slither up the icy road. After spending an indecently long time in the warm surplus shop we headed for the nearest village and found a bar where we enjoyed some gluhwien and currywurst. We bought some supplies and braved the blizzard again for the long walk back to the campsite, where most of the party retired to their tents. I didn’t have the luxury, I had to do some work on the bike (adjust chain, top up oil). In the meantime the snow had turned to rain and I returned to find that my chums were still tucked away. I berated the slackers for their lack of enthusiasm, shouting “we’ve come over 900 f***ing miles for this and you’re stuck in your f***ing tents”. In the end Gareth and Simon gave in and got up. Together the three of us slithered, slid and swore our way to the bottom of the valley and, guess what? We had some more beer and gluhwein. The rally was definitely in full swing by this time and we saw all sorts of drunken madness. It was getting dangerous down there with sidecars and trikes hurtling around in different directions, often with four or five people on board. We trudged back up the hill and tried the bar at the entrance to the rally site, but after exhausting our supply of money we had to return to the tents for more cash. That’s when the fun really started; we should have known that we were drunk when we found that we could barely stay upright on the trip back to the tents but no, we returned to the icy bar. One of the features of rallies is that you start off having a miserable time and then suddenly you start having a riotous time; this is entirely drink-related. As our mood improved we started getting friendlier with our fellow drinkers. We met a film crew, some German nutters and, finally, some Brits. The British at the rally, by the way, seemed to be either Welsh or Northerners. We had a good old chinwag and we all had a good time... and we fell over a bit. At some point it dawned on us that we were dangerously drunk so we slapped our new chums on the back, said ‘goodbye’ and left. The 'walk' back to the tent was extraordinary, Simon had a bad fall and convinced himself that he’d broken a rib, which he didn’t stop moaning about until he went to sleep some hours later. I had plenty of falls, including one excursion into a very cold stream. I needn’t have got wet but I lay in the stream giggling for half a minute before trying to get up. We slept better that night.

I didn’t want to get up in the morning and consequently took hours taking my tent down. We loaded up and started off on the 375-mile trip back to Saarbrucken which was absolutely dreadful, it rained for virtually the entire journey and it was still bloody cold. At a petrol stop, Jethro found that he couldn't disable his alarm, meaning his bike wouldn't start. His alarm box is secured with four ‘torx’ screws and watching Gareth trying to ask all the bikers in the café if they had any suitable screwdrivers was quite amusing. Jethro eventually opened the alarm using a Leatherman tool and he fixed the problem in half an hour or so. After we returned to Wales the incident was mentioned to the Datatool alarm distributor who immediately asked “was it a German petrol station?”. It turns out that German petrol stations have some feature that disables Datatool alarms, if Jethro had pushed his bike 200 yards it would have started. Anyway, off we went again and, after a wrong turning that took us to a nice restaurant for lunch (silver linings, eh?), we carried on, knocking off a hundred miles or so between stops. Incidentally the restaurant was a great big roadside place but they said that we couldn’t pay with a card, although there was a swipe alongside their till; this may have been the only time in the trip that we were treated badly because we were Brits.

Saarbrucken was such a welcome sight when we got there; it's hard to convey how relieved we felt at this point. Julian found the hotel again (the Saarbrucken Continental) and we all retired for an hour of showering and laying wet clothing on radiators. We went to the same restaurant (well, it was only over the road) and tried to stay in the hotel bar until closing time. Simon, Jethro and I managed to last until 3.40am but we had to throw in the towel. The 'following' morning was dry and a lot warmer. We made good time and, as a bonus, managed some free stretches of péage because protesting French truck drivers had taken over the booths, God bless ‘em. The plan was to hit Paris before dark, get onto the Boulevard Peripherique and go around Paris to the Rouen road. All was going well until we approached the signs saying ‘Paris-centre’, ‘BP-sud’ and ‘BP-nord’, for some reason, yet unexplained, Julian – in the lead - took the lanes for Paris-centre. It was a nightmare; we'd driven into central Paris and couldn't retrace our steps. Some words were exchanged and I still have nightmares that involve me saying “ou est le boulevard peripheriqué?” to strangers, in a panic stricken voice. You know the plan I mentioned? Well we ended up on the insane inner ring road, in the dark. Thankfully we somehow got onto the Rouen road and within two hours made Le Havre. We had to ride around truck blockades but we made the ferry port with an hour to spare and had an uneventful crossing. After disembarking, at 6.00am, we belted out of Portsmouth but, with the prospect of an easy ride home, we did it again, we took the M3 towards London, not the M27 to Southampton. Our next coffee stop, somewhere between the M3 and Winchester, was a strained affair. We eventually reached junction 24 of the M4 at 9.30am and I peeled off for work, why waste a day’s leave, eh?

The bike had behaved flawlessly (oil leak aside) and I’m very proud of having taken my thumper to the Elefant. I shouldn’t have built it only a week before we left but needs must, etc. etc. The one big advantage that I had over my chums was the low petrol consumption; I was using a quarter less petrol than the next frugal bike. The downside was the lower cruising speed that the single dictated. I have crossed France at 90mph on an XBR but I was too unsure of the rebuilt bike to risk this and kept the speed down to 70mph. This didn’t endear me to my chums. Surprisingly the tyres didn’t affect the handling as much as I thought they might and they still have tons of tread left; which suggests that they may not be as sticky as I’d like. I’d fitted a new linkless O-ring chain to the bike and this needed very little attention (although I still fussed over it) but a Scott Oiler would have been a good idea. An even better idea would have been to fit mitts and/or heated grips but time ran out so I had cold hands for a week. Gareth, who did fit grips and mitts, didn’t make himself popular by saying that his hands were too warm. Incidentally, Gareth wore one of the new Proline thermal undersuits and he now swears by it, he didn’t get cold once. Because Proline were good enough to give him a suit to try out I suppose it’s only fair if I print their number – freephone 0800 7315053 (or see adverts in the bike press). The Elefant Rally (Elefant Treffen) is normally held over the last weekend of January at Thurmansbang-Solla, near Passau (see the BVDM Club’s website for more details: http://www.bvdm.de). We all swore that we wouldn’t go again until 2002 but two weeks after we got back we headed off to the Dragon rally where we all got drunk and started talking about doing the Elefant next year… here we go again!