Honda calls this "Banana Yellow." Lulz...
Honda calls this "Banana Yellow." Lulz... Photo: American Honda.

Tell us Your Monkey Dreams

2017 Suzuki VanVan 200
Plenty of launching.

Our man Fish, Founder and Prez of the CityBike Foundation for the Preservation of Front Tires, will be heading to SoCal for the Honda Monkey press launch next week. If I know Fish—and I do, all too well—there will be plenty of launching.

I say “SoCal” like it ain’t no thang, because normally it isn’t. It’s no secret that we’re dedicated Northern California folks, having previously referred to Southern California as “Mordor,” “hell,” and other similarly unflattering pseudonyms.

But here’s the thing: Honda is really going bananas for the Monkey launch. ?

Fish will be boarding a helicopter—yep, a goddamn helicopter—to fly out to Catalina Island, home of the once-legendary Catalina Gran Prix, to Monkey about among the bison and butterflies.

I’ve said it before—the people that accuse Honda of being boring just don’t get it.

Question Everything

The entire CityBike Wrecking Crew is pretty excited about the Monkey, and we know a lot of you are too. Fish will have a couple of days with the Monkeys on Catalina Island, so what do you want to know about the bike? If you had a Monkey and a couple days on Catalina, what would you do? Are you planning to buy a Monkey, and what are you gonna do with it?

What if Kip had a space suit *and* a Monkey?

What should we ask Honda? This Monkey business is happening on an island, so there’ll be no escaping our pestering—at least not for a couple days.

Just so you know, we’re already planning to ask if the Monkey will eventually be available with a DCT tranny. We do love Honda’s dual-clutch transmission.

My own Monkey dream? I’ve started drawing up plans (in my head) to install a front-mount hitch on the appropriately army green CityBike Support Jeep, so I can mount abbreviated bike carriers on the front and back and strap a banana-and-cherry set of Monkeys on there for a perfectly balanced compact overlanding rig. If you’re not familiar, overlanding is apparently what a lot of aging adventure riders are doing now that they’ve discovered that riding 600-pound “dirtbikes” is harder than all those high-contrast, mud-flinging action photos led them to believe.

Have Monkeys – will travel, if you will. I’ll burn those tiny tires in every state in the West, in between off-road adventures of the four-wheeled kind.