Let me take you back to 2017 and introduce you to a slightly younger, very much dumber version of myself. Back then, I’d been riding bikes for quite a while, mostly off-road and the frequent commute ride, but I decided that it was time for me to step up to a real motorcycle. One with a reasonable amount of power, and one that could get me on the freeway.
I’d been riding my trusty KTM 200 Duke for a little over a year at this point, using it to commute to work on a daily basis. But given the Philippines’ 400cc freeway rule (long story short, only bikes registered as having displacements 400cc and up were allowed access to the freeway), I felt that I was seriously missing out by not having a so-called “big bike.”
So what did I do, I bought myself a KTM 390 Duke, as it was a bike that had 400cc proudly stamped on its registration papers.
It was a used one, albeit very lightly, and by lightly I mean it had less than 1,000 kilometers on the clock, and had been sitting in a neighbor’s garage for the better part of six months. And by sitting, I mean really sitting. No rides, no warm-ups. Heck, the bike wasn’t even on a paddock stand—something that was made clear by the leaky left-side fork leg and the deflated tires.
Nevertheless, I snapped it up for a steal, wide-eyed and bushy-tailed for all the adventures we’d go on. And to a certain extent, the bike was great. I learned tons of valuable lessons on that bike, did a bunch of stupid shit, and got in a whole bunch of trouble.
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