Motorcycling in Mallorca

I explored Mallorca for eight days on a Harley-Davidson Sportster 883, recording the places I visited with my Insta360, iPhone camera, and my humble Moleskine journal. It was a magical experience – to live like a wandering cowboy (or, I quote, “a character out of a Spaghetti Western” as I heard someone describe me at a cafe in Llucmajor) astride my trusty, old steed, rumbling down the beautiful Mallorcan countryside from one majestic spectacle to the next.

I am hardly the first to experience and document the beauty and unique aesthetic appeal of Mallorca. There is nowhere you can go that does not lend itself easily to Instagram stories and reels; plenty of well-designed ones start appearing on your feed the moment you say ‘Muh-your-ka” in your phone’s presence. The level of skill and breadth of experience needed to create a content dense Instagram reel is beyond my appetite and skill level as a “traveller”. Besides, my goal was to just record what promised to be a singular experience for my posterity, and for others who may be interested.

To that end, I was very particular about my choice of motorcycle: it had to be a Harley. It just couldn’t be any other way. Mallorca is one of the last few places that have retained their history and authenticity with un-self-aware pride, and the same can be said of Harley-Davidson motorcycles. I couldn’t bear the thought of being on a modern European bike like a BMW or Ducati – it would be like turning up to a cocktail party in a sweatshirt and sneakers. It just wouldn’t do.

I was fortunate to score this Harley from Mallorca Riders (link opens to their website), a small motorcycle rental company based in the beach town of Santa Ponsa, and run by the affable and ever-helpful Rossi. Rossi delivered the bike to me in Palma, at walking distance from the hotel, and loaned me a half-face helmet (another very particular requirement of mine) at no extra charge. I also got a map of the best routes for motorcycling and destinations to stop at along the way. Renting and getting the bike delivered was a completely hassle-free experience. The Harley was gleaming when I got it and had the odo set to zero. I never had trouble with the battery or starting the bike up. Considering how old this bike was, and how much it must have been ridden, it does put the myth of Harley unreliability to rest, assuming proper owner care and maintenance which Rossi very evidently had done.

There are few better ways to explore than on a motorcycle, especially in Europe where it is actually treated with respect as a mode of transport. The problem with modern motorcycling, as with anything else, is that the actual experience has become overshadowed by the things that were supposed to enable it: safety gear, luggage, navigation technology, and recording devices. Most motorcycle touring has riders put on too much gear, carry too much stuff, use too much technology (phone mount, GPS mount, helmet Bluetooth device, monitoring systems, etc.) and focus too much on recording for later with GoPros and Insta360s, that the quintessential experience that makes it fun often gets lost. What is the quintessential experience? Put on your helmet and gloves, swing your leg over the bike, start the engine and just rev out. Ride down the roads with the wind blowing in your face, feeling like you’re flying or surfing.

Riding in Mallorca with just the bare essentials: a half helmet, gloves, armoured vest, and backpack with my beach hat tied to it, made me realise how much all of this stuff just weighs us down. It is counterintuitive to the whole experience. Motorcycles make it easy to park and get off where cars would have trouble reaching. But with all this gear on a big cc bike, you just don’t feel like stopping to observe something unplanned or going into narrow lanes or taking wrong turns because you don’t have a phone mount.

Motorcycles give you an elemental feeling of being connected to your machine, hearing it go under you, your legs inches from the rapidly moving pistons and searing exhaust. But with music playing in your helmet and with your eyes always on the navigation, you barely hear the engine and feel it work as you play with the clutch and throttle.

Motorcycles give you a feeling of living dangerously, with every moment a possibility for disaster if you lose awareness. They make you feel alive as you carve corners on winding mountain roads, sway from the wind blast of a passing truck, and cut through traffic splitting lanes. But with all this gear, you are draped in the illusion of safety and cut off from this visceral feeling that needs to be vicariously recreated through recorded video that you won’t ever watch again, and that your friends will only politely watch with you once.

This is not to say that wearing safety gear is not important, or that recording motorcycling experiences is bad. I do all of these things. But after a certain point it becomes a simulation of the experience rather than the experience itself. Finding this point is an exercise each rider must undertake individually.

In my mind, it was clear: this is how I wanted to ride. The essentials, on a bike that did the job and was simple to operate and work on, and which could do a respectable 120 kmph without falling apart. Anything more than that detracted too much from the experience for me to consider it valuable. Besides, the roads I truly love are the ones that take me to beautiful places, that require some skill to navigate, and that don’t need me to hurry. You don’t need a big motorcycle and lots of gear to enjoy that; in fact, the Harley 883 was just perfect. Some riders want to go really fast, some want to go really comfortably. To each their own, but I do think we would benefit from a simpler experience if only to recalibrate.

The more I got to see Mallorca on my Harley, the more obvious the similarities between the two became. Mallorca is a place that is almost frozen in time, to the extent that it almost feels undiscovered. Many of the major tourist capitals of the world have their native culture hidden away behind a facade that exists solely for tourists. One has to really live or know someone in a city like London or Barcelona to understand how people live there, and what their culture is like, if there is even anything unitary like that.

Mallorca on the other hand, has preserved its architecture and way of life while integrating only the essentials that are required to facilitate tourism. It is as if it is aware that this is the exact quality people seek, and it has preserved it just so. There are no billboards, advertisements, or chain stores outside of the few major urban centres, chiefly Palma. The most obvious evidence I saw of a tourism-dependent economy were souvenir shops, boutiques, and multilingual menus. Most of the cafes, restaurants, and hotels are owner-operated small businesses with few concessions to tourist conveniences of taste and language. This is in stark contrast to similar places in India and elsewhere that have their own enviable historical culture as the basis of their tourism value, but that have ruined it with the blight of modern digital printing, billboards, unplanned development – all obvious signs of a tourist economy gold rush that Mallorca so sensibly, and beautifully, avoids.

An example of this subtle balance of tourist convenience and native authenticity is the way you can get to places in Mallorca. Most of the island roads are single or double lane, interspersed with roundabouts that have signs to all the major areas of interest. If you do a little homework on the major sites nearby your destination, you will reach there without needing GPS. I know because that’s exactly what I did. I didn’t have a mount to put my phone on the handlebars, so I would just try to read the signs and then stop ever so often on the roadside to check my phone and make sure that I was right. If you missed a turn you could always turn back from a roundabout a few hundred meters down the road.

What does this have to do with Harley-Davidson motorcycles? Harley brings the same self-assured, authentic approach to motorcycles that Mallorca brings to its culture and tourism. Harley motorcycles integrate only as much technology as is necessary to keep up, but never let it compromise the true nature of what makes them appealing: the authentic, air-cooled, big V-twin, cruiser experience. Both retain this somewhat antiquated and minimally convenient character out of a sense of inner security about their worth.

There is no need to please, to mar one’s true nature in search of fleeting validation, to keep up with the times just because that’s what you do – like a flower blooming in the wild, Mallorca would continue to be what it is even if no one went there to see it. And this is what I feel motorcycling should be too: something that requires no justification or validation to exist and to be enjoyed. At a basic level, it is not about the bike itself but what it enables you to do. In this case, my Harley took me to beautiful locations on this idyllic island in a visceral way. Would it have been possible on any other motorcycle? Of course. Would it have been the same? No. Harleys, especially this “smaller” one embodies the essential motorcycle experience the same way Mallorca embodies a way of life: it defies explanation, something that needs to be experienced to be understood. Both keep only that which is essential to be approachable, and dispense with the rest, providing a canvas on which one can imprint one’s own memories and experiences.

Of course, concessions are made: just like there are some not so “authentic” parts of Mallorca, there are some not so “authentic” Harley-Davidsons. Authenticity here refers to the quality of retaining one’s essential character and not altering it to suit the preferences of others. But these are never the whole experience, and never a large enough part of it to dominate the essence of what makes both so unique and desirable.

These things were on my mind as I was riding around the island on this amazing little bike. I ride a “big” Harley-Davidson in India: the 1,800-cc Heritage Classic Softail. It is a bike I love, but I am acutely aware of how unnecessarily big, powerful, and heavy it is, so much so that managing it on a ride gets in the way of the actual experience of riding it. It still retains the classic character of a Harley-Davidson motorcycle, but you can feel the excess and limitations caused by our modern expectation for things to get bigger and better every year, or at least change in a meaningful way.

This expectation often get in the way of experiencing and preserving something timeless and essential. Exploring Mallorca’s beautiful sights and timeless way of life made me feel instantly at home, no longer nostalgic for how things used to be (of course, in my imagination), but actually experiencing that fictional experience in the here and now. The Harley was my perfect partner in this journey.