What makes you happy? Ten pints with the lads or gals, a ‘fit chick’ or a ‘Brad Pitt replica’ telling you you’re the most attractive man/woman he/she’s ever met, the death of your mother/father-in-law, a behemoth lottery win, Zuma’s resignation, the end of draconian enforced toll roads, a day’s fishing (+ ten pints), an hour with a new HD porn film, a large bag of weed, and the list goes on? But if you want something in the two-wheeled world to make you beyond happy every time you ride it then you just have to play with the all-new Yamaha MT-07.

What can you tell about a test/press bike after 6 months of being hammered and dragged through the ringer by every Tom, Dick and Hand-me-down without a license? I was soon to find out as I was given the opportunity to ride the official 2014 Yamaha YZ450F press bike six months into its life, to see if life on the prairie was all just herding sheep or if it was Apaches with arrows and war paint! What I discovered about the bike and myself was a little bitter sweet.

The BMW R1200 GS Adventure has always been synonymous with the romantic notion of travelling around the world and exploring strange new lands as you ride unshaven and stinky into the sunset. This was entrenched in our inner man brain when a Jedi Knight and his friend, who no one knows, rode these bikes a long way around and down and I think up as well, making us common folk believe that we too could be that adventurous. And now BMW has a brand spanking new water-cooled, electro riddled, sci-fi gizmo smattered version to temp you off the couch and into Africa and maybe the universe. But is it as good as the legacy its predecessors have created?