I chose Israel for my last vacation getaway. Apart from the obvious reasons like all the history of the world and religion associated with this area I had other incentives like scuba diving in Red sea for instance. In any case I went and spent 10 days there.

What I could not help but notice was the abundance of people riding scooters and motorcycles everywhere. Scooters prevailed and the most of the motorcycles I saw were a dual purpose 125 to 400cc Kawasakis and Suzukis. I spotted some older sports bikes on occasion and even did see a brand new Yamaha R6 parked right next to my hotel in Tel Aviv.

Apparently motorcycle safety isn’t regarded highly in the promised land. The helmets are loosely fit on almost all the riders. I even saw one rider lift up his helmet to have a smoke as he was riding his scooter. That’s not the proper helmet fit if you can easily lift it up over your face. Almost noone wears protective gear. Some scooter riders wear shorts and flip-flops.

The street riding style is somewhat cautious with motorcycle riders being more cautious than the scooter riders. More than once there were riders on freeways just going in there lanes when there was more than one opportunity to split lanes and advance in traffic. May be it is against the law? Surely that didn’t stop hundreds of automobile drivers there. And definitely didn’t stop some scooter riders from riding on sidewalks to avoid splitting lanes on the narrow streets of Jerusalem.

In any case I was happy to see that the riding club has a lot of members in Israel as well. Makes me feel like I am a part of a secret society of some sort. The one that welcomes everyone to join. And the one where members chivalrously wave to each other each time they meet.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 29th, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Motorcycles, Street, Travels, Riding, Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.