Some more thoughts.
If your Honda or BMW break down anywhere, Honda BigWing and BMW Motorrad operate 24-hour roadside assistance numbers for their respective brands, just one number for the whole country. You can find their numbers on their websites and save them in your cellphone. Both can help you in English. They will arrange for a motorcycle towing company based near you to come to you in an hour or two and bring you and your bike to their nearest official dealer, where the towing cost will be added to your repair bill. I don’t know if they mark up the rate that the motorcycle towing company charges them, but they don’t need to; they collect you to keep your repair business in-house. It’s expensive but reliable and easy. I have used both.
But how long Honda and BMW official dealers will take to repair your 15-year-old bikes, or whether they can do it at all, is the next problem. And even if they can fix older models, you could be waiting weeks for the parts to come in, with no fixed date of arrival. Meanwhile you fly home to Singapore and await Part B of your trip. I’ve done it several times. I used to think it was normal!
The last time was in 2017 when I rode my 1998 BMW from Singapore to Thailand for the umpteenth time. It broke down with an electrical problem. I called BMW Roadside Assistance, and a few hours later the bike and I were at the nearest BMW official dealer. So far so good. Free cappuccino. They replaced the burned out fuse. The new one popped. They asked me where the computer connector was. I said it didn’t have one. I think the bike was older than some of the mechanics. Nobody there had a clue how to fix a 19 year old motorcycle. They said they needed a few days to work on it.
I checked into a hotel and called every day to ask if it was fixed. Only one person, a salesman, spoke English. After five days, he said it was fixed, so I went back to collect it. It wasn’t fixed; that was a misunderstanding; an electrical expert would come from Bangkok to fix my bike, in a week or two. I flew home to wait. And wait. I called the BMW dealer every few days. Two months later they said it was fixed. I flew back to Thailand, now in the rainy season. It wasn’t fixed. All they did was change the sparkplugs—and expect me to pay for their incompetence! I flew back to Singapore. Repair took three more months, and a non-BMW repair shop. At least they never charged me for the towing.
If you live in Thailand, know the excellent local shops that can fix anything (and even improvise parts) or are a mechanic with a sheltered working place and tools, have friends with pickup trucks, and have time to wait for parts from overseas, classic bikes are a lot of fun and don’t cost much to own and maintain. But in my experience older bikes are not ideal for a foreign tourist to wants to ride every day.
If you live in Singapore and have to follow a schedule or a budget, you would have more fun and save money in the long run by flying up and renting a late-model mid-size adventure bike in Chiang Mai, and heading into the mountains on the first day. If a rented bike breaks down, the dealer will help you.
So this is a long answer to your original question.
