I love motorcycles. I've been riding them since 2007. I started with the Kawasaki's K-Bajaj and then Suzuki's max-100R. At that time, motorcycles were still rare and a luxury to most rural people in India. Often heads turn when you arrive on a motorcycle. We call motorcycles as bikes and I will use the word Bike for the rest of the post.

Fast forward to 2016, when I moved to Chennai for work, I never wanted to buy a bike here. I was trying to use public transport and the traffic condition here was intimidating to the village boy. But soon it became evident that I'll have to trade a lot of time waiting for public transport. I was doing a degree along with a full time job and time is what I can't afford.

I was a noob rider for the first 7 to 8 years with the 100cc bikes. I did not know much about riding or motorcycles. I like to go fast whenever there is an open road, that's what I loved about motorcycles. I decided to get a bike and researched about 150CC motorcycles and went with the Yamaha FZ-S V2. The bike costed 98k on road and along with loan I paid 1,18,000 Indian rupees. The other popular options were TVS Apache and Bajaj's pulsar. I did not know at that time that I'm making a great choice. Because this bike never failed me at anytime and taught me a lot of stuff I know about riding and bikes.

This picture is from 2017 when I got this bike. This bike made me realise how liberating it is to own a personal vehicle. This bike helped me in career, relationships and in a lot of other areas. I explored lot of areas in Chennai and did night rides almost everyday.

I started long distance riding on this bike as well. Slowly learned about the importance of gears and motorcycle safety and started gearing up. During the lift of COVID lockdown, I made numerous trips between my native and Chennai on the highway. That highway riding experience created a situational awareness which made highway driving very easy for me when I got the car. I started driving very easily on the highway even before I'm comfortable in the slow city traffic.

The best and the longest trip I done on this bike was a 750km trip within 17 hours on mixed weather. I started early morning and in the afternoon got stuck in one of the heaviest rainfalls of that year in Chennai. it was flooded everywhere and I can't get to my residence in Chennai even can't find any place to eat. I had to go back to my native again on the same day in a downpour.

It was a great inconvenience and butt hurting both figuratively and literally. But if you're geared up properly, riding in the rain is one of the best experiences on a two wheeler. It is dangerous but very enjoyable. If you never rode long distances in rain, try it and you'll love it.

For the past two years, I felt I've reached the limit with this bike and almost always pushing it to redline when I get the chance. I constantly keep it in 6K-8K RPMs where it redlines around 8.5k-9k. I also wanted to start touring even longer distances where a 150CC can't cruise for a long time. So I planned for an upgrade. The original plan was to ride this to 1 lakh (100k) kilometres and I'm pretty close.

I sold this bike to a friend when the odo clocked at 87,016 kms. This was the last ride I did on this bike and the last view was amazing.

The bike is still in great condition. The engine is smooth and still responds as it was on day 1. I love how the Japanese makes great machines that are very reliable. Thank you Yamaha for this great bike.

Thank you FZ for teaching me so much stuff and being a very reliable companion, Good bye.