It is 2002. I needed a bike for my African adventure.

For my first long trip in 2000 I'd bought a brand new KTM Adventure. I kitted it out with the usual Touratech panniers and a few other goodies. It was fast and fun but there was one major problem.

It vibrated so much I couldn't hold my teeth together.

'Oh don't worry about that' I was assured by the salesman 'they all smooth out after a few thousand miles'.

Well, I did and it didn't.

After five thousand miles in three months it was no better.

I couldn't sit on it for hours at an end on my trip and I wanted to leave in a few months so I sold it at a huge loss and bought a Honda XR650L instead. In comparison, the XR was blissfully smooth and a lot easier to ride.

However, after riding from London to Beirut and back, I was really pissed off with it. It was slow, heavy and didn't handle very well. I ended up revving the bollocks off it to make it go as fast as possible but it just wasn't interested. I didn't want to take the XR650 again.

I wanted less weight and more power.

For my next trip, riding north from Cape Town and hoping to get all the way home. There was only one bike to get. Another KTM Adventure, but one that didn't vibrate so much as my first one.

It is the perfect bike for a solo Africa trip. Fantastic suspension, long range fuel tank, fast and designed to crash so that things don't break off.

By buying a second hand one I'd be able to compare bikes and try and find a smooth one. I started combing the ads and ended up testing several bikes before finding a smooth one.

The first one, which I'd been told about by my local dealer, had had virtually no maintenance. So much so that he called the dealer up asking for a drive new chain as his had just snapped. Funnily enough I didn't buy that one.

The second one had already done twenty five thousand kilometres of paved road east but I was assured over the phone it was in fantastic condition and it was priced to sell. The only draw back is that is was almost in Wales . Since there aren't alot of Adventures about I questioned him again about it's condition, asking what was wrong with it, what had been replaced etc and receiving plausible responses set off in a car towing a trailer.

When I arrived he had been lying. It really looked like it had done one hundred and twenty five thousand kilometres. I was so angry at him wasting my time I just got in the car and drove home again.

A few weeks later I saw another ad. The bike already had Touratech frames and a few other goodies - just what I was after. I called the owner and started asking him questions about it. It had a Touratech IMO 300, the super dooper trip computer with ten different screens. The more I found out about it the more I liked it.

'Where are you and what will you take for it?'

The bike was in Kent . The price was right. He'd hardly used it in the eighteen months he'd had it.

Then a dim light went on somewhere in the back of my brain.

'It sounds rather like my old bike'.

'What's your name?'

'Jeremy Bullard'.

'It is your old bike'.

For some strange reason I really liked the idea of buying it back, even though it vibrated a lot. Since it was now older and had depreciated I'd actually be saving lots of money by buying it back by recouping some of my original massive loss.

The craziness of actually buying my own bike back really appealed to me.

As a friend pointed out to me:

'Why did you sell it in the first place?'

Reason finally prevailed and I kept on looking for a smooth one.