R 1200 GS vs Super Tenere - Adam Riemann goes outback

So we're somewhere on the road to Tibberborough. What's going on? If you pan around here, you might be lucky to see some of the black swans, indigenous to this area. What's a baby swan called? Anyone? A cygnet! Okay, there's a cygnet out there, it was here. And it's a little steam train. Let's do it. Let's fire things up a bit, look at that. Olive oil blend, but yeah. Okay, chuck that into the sauce. We're going both tins here. Knife me. It's not the tree of knowledge, it's the tree of wood. It provides us. Just don't cut your thumb off, Adam. I'll do my best. Your best? Losers always whine about their best. Winners go home and f*** the prom queens. Never heard that quote. You know what's funny? I remember a shot from the 1980s in Wheels magazine. They got a brand new Rolls Royce, brought it out this way, and took a roo shooting. So the guinea pig of the Adventure clan is the Yamaha Tenere. It's a 660. That being said, it is, in my opinion, one of the best 600 Adventure bikes you can actually get. It feels like a trail bike, especially when you're on the sticky, the sandy, muddy stuff. Today we tried to cross a river, and the 660 plowed straight through it, and the 1200s just struggled to stay upright. In fact, both of them went down because they were just too heavy. It'll do the high speeds on the highways with gear, and it will also maintain a good speed through the dirt and the corrugation. And for the novice Adventure rider, or for someone who's going on their first Adventure ride, you just can't go past it. That's it. Bust it, lion. Bust it, but not yourself. One of the bikes on the trip is the BMW F800 GS. It's kind of like the middleweight Adventurer of the group, and it's been termed a sprint box by a couple of individuals on the ride. It's unbelievable. The motor is really strong down low, but then you hit the six grand mark, and that's where things really get rocking. She's a handful through the sloppy stuff. When things dry up a little bit, and on the gravel roads, it comes into its own. You really do have to pick your lines when things get really hairy, but apart from that, she's pretty capable, and you can point it at almost anything. If you want to just forget the roads and just follow your GPS over land, it's more than capable of taking there. Boy, have we nailed the first cast. Well, you can't even tune her up. She's sure going. The Yamaha Super Tenere, which is a 1200cc bike. It's really a bike that's for the serious adventure rider, someone who's not just starting out. They've been doing a bit of adventure riding and got the taste for it and really want to explore the boundaries of adventure riding. Its main competition is the BMW 1200 Adventure bike. I think Yamaha, for their first effort, has done a fantastic job. Once you get on it and start riding it, you really start to feel that the bike has been put together with true off-road riding in mind. And then Nicolas Cage goes, Carla was the prime queen, and Sean Connery has this weird look on his face where he looks like he's constipated. Okay, BMW's R1200GS Adventure. My God, what a beast. In fact, we've actually named it the Rhino because if you can imagine strapping yourself to the back of a Rhino and just charging through the bush, the desert, the landscape, that's probably the closest experience you'll have to this ride. There's so much muscle and power beneath you riding this bike. But in saying that too, it's the biggest, heaviest, most intimidating dirt bike you'll probably ever throw a leg over. In a lot of ways, to ride the thing properly, you've got to show the thing no fear and just grab it by the horns and get up and go with it. And when you do that, it acts like any dirt bike you've ever ridden. You've just got to allow for the fact that with a fully laden rider, fuel, all your gear, you're like this 400 kilogram mass hurtling through the desert at anywhere up to 200 kilometers an hour. That mass is hard to knock off line. I think it's why the BMW is such a smooth, comfortable ride. I mean, it sort of sits there. The bulk of the bike will just sit and take the hits really well, like the rocks and all the bumps in the roads out here. We're on a lot of unsealed road and roads that are in bad condition. And in comparison to a lot of the smaller bikes on this ride, the 1200 just sits there like you're sitting in the seat of a four-wheel drive. You don't feel a lot of the bumps and the corrugations beneath you. It's the king of the outback in that sense. I'm not that much of a grease monkey. Let me just get rid of a bit. We've got an Isuzu D-MAX LS. It's a dual cab, four-wheel drive, three-liter turbo diesel. We're using it as a support vehicle on this ride to try to back the boys up on their bikes, carry some extra fuel for them. It's being used also as a possible recovery vehicle just because we're going to some remote places in case something happens to one of the bikes, one of the boys. And we're just testing its four-wheel drive capabilities as a potential dirt bike hauler for any of the readers out there who may be looking for a new rig. As you can see, the salt is perfect. When in Burke, do as the Simmons do. As the Burkeans do. Two to three, mate. This will be an experience, I think.