Grown-up kids go ape for this cheeky little Monkey

Honda’s bike, the Grom, took off like an angry wasp; now, it has launched the Monkey.

John Lethlean makes light work of the city streets on a Honda Monkey. Picture: David Geraghty.

You may have seen them buzzing around the streets of our cities like angry mosquitoes — small, brightly coloured baby motorcycles with big blokes (usually) on them. Mini bikes for grown-ups: they’re a thing.

A few years back Honda introduced a bike called the Grom and it took off like an angry wasp. It was a whole new category of two-wheeler. Now, lots of manufacturers make something in the “Grom” category and, like the Hoover, “Grom” has come to assume the generic handle of a whole market segment, Honda or otherwise.

And whoever’s riding one usually has a smile on his dial beneath a full-face helmet.

The Grom is, at face value, a ben­ign, small and immensely man­oeuvrable sports bike designed to fit the frame of an adult. In fact they are gutless and quite slow — part of their charm and challenge — but nevertheless entertaining 125cc baby motorbikes with manual transmissions and lots of modern tech, such as ABS.

They are ridiculously reliable, undemanding of garage space and cheap as chips to run (provided your chips are from McDonald’s not some fancy French bistrot.) Now, in deference to retro-mania sweeping the bike world, Honda has gone deep into its nostalgia department to produce the Monkey.

And it will tug at the memory strings of a whole generation of riders for whom their first experience of bikes was throwing a leg over a primitive little thing called the Mini Trail, back in the 1970s, probably the vehicle that introduced more people to motorcycling than any other two-wheeler in history.

Honda sold 100 million Mini Trails — or the Z50, more accurately — around the world. It was a 50cc, three-speed bike designed for kids and, while I never owned one, it was almost certainly the first bike I rode, probably around 1970.

One look at the Monkey — for the Mini Trail was called the Monkey in some markets, such as the US — and I am back in a paddock outside the town I grew up in, where kids with mini bikes and the rest of us who coveted one used to hang out for hours on end.

Fast-forward to 2019: Honda’s Monkey is in effect a Honda Grom that looks as if it came out of Haight-Ashbury wearing flowers in its hair, like the Mini Trail that inspired it, pure early 70s nostalgia. While it has the frame, engine, transmission and suspension of the Grom, it’s the chrome and two-tone tank, the seat and handlebars that give it the cosmetic DNA of a beach buggy driven by the Banana Splits.

The Monkey might easily have been called the Honda Conversation Starter, although that would almost certainly have hampered sales.

Everywhere you park it, somebody will walk right up and start chatting. It usually begins with something like “cool little bike” or “that’s cute”. One burly collector of old motocross bikes (or so he told me) started our conversation with “sick ride”.

Indeed, it is a “sick ride” if that translates as enormous fun, highly manoeuvrable and outrageously convenient, particularly in Melbourne, where councils still, in their wisdom, allow sensible footpath parking, thus freeing up real parking spots for cars.

There is quite possibly nothing that can be registered for Australian roads that will scythe through traffic like an angry Monkey. Its low mirrors, narrow, short footprint, quality brakes, tiny weight and low centre of gravity will have you considering all sorts of traffic jam-busting moves you wouldn’t even contemplate on a scooter, let alone a motorcycle.

Being a mere 125, you have to be prepared to wring its neck, however. It’s part of the fun.

But it does have a few downsides. One, it cannot take a pillion; riding this two-up to the beach would be fun.

Two, there is no storage whatsoever. A trip to the shops will require a backpack, at the very least. Ditto commuting.

Three, it would be a brave, or stupid, person who tackled a freeway on the Monkey; its natural territory is the inner burbs and city.

And four, the price: a hefty ride-away ticket of $5999. For that kind of dough, you could buy something far more practical and versatile such as a scooter that would tackle the freeway every now and then with a top-box for your milk and veg.

But the retro bike market isn’t about practicality or versatility: it’s about fun, branding, tribal association and personal style.

And the Monkey delivers all that. Nothing has made me smile so much in years.