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Let me be upfront with you. My introduction to motorcycles was not a safety course in a parking lot. There was no experienced rider walking me through clutch control on a closed course. There was no gear fitting at a dealership, no YouTube playlist, no patient friend on a newer bike riding alongside me at a reasonable pace.

There was a rusted Honda 1982 XR200 with holes in the exhaust pipe, a pair of flip flops, and twenty miles of Peruvian jungle road between me and a dial-up internet cafe where I was hoping a girl I liked had written me back on Hotmail.

That's where I learned to ride.

I grew up splitting my time between Cusco and Puerto Maldonado, deep in the Peruvian Amazon. The rainforest is not kind to machines. It is not kind to much of anything, honestly. It rots, rusts, swells, and reclaims whatever you leave sitting still long enough. The bike came from a neighbor. My dad traded him some cash and a few days of field work for it. I didn’t know much about it at the time other than it was red, or had been red once, and that the exhaust had seen better decades. It ran. That was the main thing. I loved it.

You are probably not going to learn to ride the way I did. Your first bike probably has two functioning brakes, e-start and an exhaust that's tuned properly to not sound like a new world war whenever it finally started. You are probably not going to be navigating knee-deep mud ruts while running on adrenaline and teenage optimism. That is fine. The lessons are mostly the same. I just got them in a more compressed format.

The Email Run

Once a week, if I was lucky, I got to ride into town to use the internet cafe. Dial-up connection, boiling hot, sweat pouring off me while the page loaded one agonizing pixel at a time. I was seventeen and there was a girl back in the States I had met before we left for Peru. We had been writing back and forth through Hotmail for months by that point, one email a week, the kind of letters you actually think about because you know you only get one shot at it until the following week.

She always wrote back. That part worked out, for a while anyway. We kept it going for years, trading weekly emails across hemispheres. I grew up and grew away, the way you do. Never quite made it back to her part of the world. We still follow each other online and check in now and then to see how the other one is doing. She was a sweet girl.

Anyway. The point is I had motivation to get to town.

The road, and I use that word generously, was twenty miles of dirt track through the jungle. In dry weather it was rough and fast and genuinely fun in the way that only slightly dangerous things are fun when you are seventeen. In wet weather, which was most of the time because it is a rainforest and that is what rainforests do, it became something else entirely.

When it rained hard enough, the ruts would fill to knee height with mud the color and consistency of chocolate concrete. You had two options. You could stop, which accomplished nothing. Or you could put both feet out to the sides like skis, hold the throttle open, and commit. The rear tire would kick up a rooster tail of mud behind you. The front would go wherever it wanted. You just tried to stay roughly upright and keep moving because momentum was the only thing you had going for you.

One afternoon a thorny vine caught between my pinky toe and the edge of my flip flop and peeled the skin raw before I could react. The rear was already fishtailing, mud everywhere, and I had about half a second to decide whether to deal with the toe or deal with the bike. I dealt with the bike. The toe dealt with itself, which is to say it bled considerably and I ignored it until I got to town.

That is more or less how things worked out there.

The Toenail Incident

The gate story is a favorite, in the way that stories that hurt a lot become favorites once enough time has passed. 

I was heading out one morning and stopped to open the gate at the edge of our property. Simple enough. Except I had pulled up too close, which meant I needed to back the bike up to give myself room to swing it open. I grabbed the handlebars and yanked the bike backwards. What I had forgotten, in the effortless way that seventeen-year-olds forget things, was that the kickstand was down.

The kickstand caught my big toenail on the way through. Removed it. Cleanly, efficiently, with no regard for my feelings on the matter.

I was wearing flip flops. I want to be clear that this was not unusual. This was standard operating procedure in the Amazon. You ride in what you have. Riding gear wasn't a thing, so we had flip flops. 

I got the gate open, got back on the bike, and rode the twenty miles into town. The dirt roads out there have a way of kicking gravel up at low angles, and every piece of gravel that found my exposed toe on that ride made its presence known. I did my shopping. Blood ran down my foot, pooled in the bottom of my flip flop, and left a trail behind me through the market. Nobody said much. It was not that kind of place.

I filled a fifty-kilo burlap sack with groceries, tied it to the back of the bike with a length of rope, and rode the twenty miles home before dark.

The toe got infected. I drained it myself with a needle when it needed draining. Let the dogs clean it up after. It healed. I kept working.

Nobody made a big deal out of it because it wasn't a big deal. It was just another day in the jungle.

What This Has To Do With You

Here is the thing about learning to ride in the jungle at seventeen with no instruction, no gear, and no particular fear of consequences: it teaches you some things fast and leaves out some things entirely.

The fast lessons were about momentum, commitment, and what happens to a rear tire in mud. The missing lessons, the ones about technique and trust and knowing where your limits actually are, those came later, once I got older and got on bikes again in the States. Once I had something to lose and started thinking about it.

The tips below come from both places. Some are jungle. Some are parking lot. All of them are true.

What I'd Tell a New Rider

Start on a smaller bike than you think you need. A 250 is not embarrassing. A 450 will embarrass you. There is a version of this where you buy too much bike, scare yourself in the first month, and never ride again. Do not be that person. Learn the machine before you upgrade it.

Stand up. Almost always. Sitting down on a dirt bike is for flat, smooth, leisurely riding. The moment the terrain gets interesting, get off the seat. Stand on the pegs, bend your knees, let the bike move underneath you. You have infinitely more control this way than you think you do. You cannot stand too much as a beginner. Default to it.

Practice falling, at least mentally. You are going to fall. This is not a possibility. It is a scheduled event. The dirt bike world has a saying that is true: a low speed tipover in the dirt is basically nothing. What gets people hurt is panic, bad decisions, and speed they have not earned yet. Stay within your zone, fall small, learn from it, keep going.

Do not touch the exhaust when you pick the bike up. It will be hot. You will forget. You will remember immediately and permanently.

Learn to change a tube before you need to. Carry a spare. More importantly, practice the change at home with only the tools you plan to carry. Do it until it is not a puzzle anymore. A flat tire in a remote spot is an inconvenience if you know what you are doing and a much longer day if you don't.

Carry a basic tool kit. You do not need much. You need enough. A few basic tools, a spare clutch cable, zip ties, and the knowledge to use them will get you out of more situations than you expect.

Don't try to keep up with people who know more than you. They have already made the mistakes you are about to make. They are not waiting for you to catch up by going faster than you should. Ride your own ride. The people worth riding with will respect that. The ones who don't are not worth keeping up with anyway.

Your tires have more grip than you think. You build trust with your tires the same way you build trust with anything: gradually, through experience. Take corners a little more each time. Feel where the edge is before you find it the hard way. You will have some small slips along the way. That is how you learn where the line is.

The clutch is not just an on/off switch. Learn to slip it. On a hill where you are bogging and close to stalling, slipping the clutch lets you bring the RPMs back up without downshifting. It is one of the most useful tools you have and most beginners ignore it for the first year.

Look where you want to go, not at what you want to avoid. This sounds like the kind of thing people put on motivational posters. It is also physically true on a motorcycle. You will go where you look. If you stare at the tree you are trying to miss, you are going to hit the tree. Pick your line and look at it.

Gear up. Every time. Helmet, gloves, boots, knee protection. I rode in flip flops in the Amazon because that was what I had. You have better options. Use them. Medical bills are expensive. Injuries slow you down. Neither one is worth skipping a helmet.

Learn on dirt before you ride on road. Dirt forgives you in ways that pavement does not. You slide instead of scrape. You fall softer. You learn throttle control, balance, and recovery in an environment that gives you a little more margin for error. If you have any access to dirt, start there.

It is easier to ride fast than slow. This surprises people. Low speed balance is genuinely harder than it feels like it should be. Do not be discouraged when you tip over at a crawl. It happens to everyone.

Have fun. It is okay to make engine noises while you ride. I still do it. The bike will tell you what it needs if you listen to it. Ride within your limits, build your skills honestly, and find people to ride with who make you better rather than just faster.

I rode that rusted XR200 through the Amazon for years. Holes in the exhaust, no gear, flip flops, mud up to my knees, bleeding into the market, fifty kilos of groceries roped to the back. I also jumped every dirt mound on the way home because I felt impelled to do so, like if I didn’t, I would die. Almost ate it more times than I can count, and did it again the next week.

I do not recommend my exact approach. But I do recommend getting on a bike, learning it honestly, falling a few times in the dirt, and figuring out what the machine can do before you ask it to do more.

The rest takes care of itself. Mostly.

Mad Lads Moto carries the gear that makes the difference between a story you tell and one you'd rather forget. Helmets, gloves, boots, tubes, tools, and everything else a new rider needs to start smart. Browse the shop and get what you actually need before the first ride.