For silver Isaac Chan, there’s nothing quite like the joy of cruising on a motorcycle along the open road. “Unlike driving, you get a full 360° view of everything around you as you ride. You also get to stop whenever you like, relax, and meet new people,” says the 54-year-old president and founder of Kruzer, a homegrown motorcycle club that will soon be marking its 20th anniversary.
“It’s all about the journey, lah. If you’re going to zoom from the start to the end and zoom back, you might as well hop onto a plane,” he adds, pointing to the name of the club, which is derived from cruiser. “Cruising means that you take your time to see the sights and enjoy the entire experience for what it is.”
Clearly, it’s a sentiment that resonates with his crew. After all, many of them have been along for the ride since the club’s inception back in 2005, carving out time from their daily schedules and responsibilities for multiple week-long overseas jaunts every year.
Every once in a while, they venture even further afield, relying on the collective experience of the group and a shared passion for adventure to keep Kruzer rolling onward.
“There are people who like to look at older people riding huge motorcycles and say, oh, mid-life crisis. But actually, most of us started long ago in our early 20s or 30s, continued through our mid-life, and are now becoming full-fledged seniors,” says Isaac with a laugh.
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Kickstarting Kruzer Motorcycle Club
In the early noughties, business owner Isaac and his fellow motorcycle junkie, Jocelyne Yeo, now 60, were already well-acquainted with the allure of travel on two wheels as life partners. But then they started to look for a crew.
"It was a massive community, with a mix of all kinds of bikers."
Online discussions quickly led to real-life meetups, followed by mass overseas motorcycle rides.
Kruzer anchored on inclusivity and safety
Thus began Kruzer – a motorcycle club where the riding experience, not the ride, is what defines cruising.
In that vein, they welcome taking a slower pace to overseas motorcycling adventures, striving to take different routes, with fresh stops, every time – no matter if it’s at the expense of speed.
The club also welcomes motorcyclists, and motorbikes, of all shapes and sizes – from jittery, chrome-laden sports motorbikes bristling with energy and bouncy on firm suspensions, to low-slung, handsome cruisers that offer more style than speed, and even smaller, low-capacity motorbikes typically used for city travel.
It’s a style that seems to work for Kruzer, as it has slowly grown over the decades from an initial crew of 30 to around double that today, purely through word-of-mouth recommendations from fellow motorcyclists.
More than 100 trips over the years
Kruzer’s activites revolve around overseas motorcycle trips. They run around two to three trips a year now – down from the four to five trips they’d typically do before Covid-19.
Their locations of choice are Malaysia and Thailand – both of which are easily accessible, and both of which provide “almost unlimited” travel possibilities, even after dozens of visits.
Riding through Ladakh
That said, even Isaac admits that it’s been difficult to scale back the Kruzer crew’s expectations after the group plied the world’s highest motorable road in Ladakh, a mountainous region tucked within the disputed Jammu and Kashmir area of northern India.
"No matter how far you go in Malaysia or Thailand, most of what you'll see is jungle, with some mountains in the distance."
Naturally, navigating treacherously beautiful terrain in a foreign land far from the nearest hospital comes with a heightened sense of risk.
"But we can’t eliminate all of the risks. When you’re riding, a boulder could just roll down the side of the mountain, and that’s it. On the other side, you’re riding with a 50-foot drop off a cliff – if you go down, you’re not coming back up."
Nevertheless, make the trip they did. In 2014, the couple, with 13 of their group members in tow, flew to Ladakh, where they rented motorbikes and steeled themselves for a 16-day journey, most of which would be completed at an altitude of 3,000m above sea level and up, and not on paved roads.
It was such an exhilarating experience that the group returned two years later, and once more in 2022 after borders reopened. They’ll probably return there once again, even though Isaac has begun contemplating other possible locations for grand touring trips.
"Once you’ve tasted the best, you can’t really go back down, right?"
For now, Isaac has no plans to slow down, either from his role as Kruzer’s president (where the bulk of his work revolves around planning the club’s trips, along with other administrative tasks), or from riding his motorcycle.
