Royal Enfield Himalayan Review

On the whole, for a three grand bike, it has been excellent. To date, I have had zero issues with the engine, clutch or gearbox which are often the reasons for massive delays waiting for complicated parts to be shipped to the likes of rural Tajikistan on a round-the-world trip! It has always started when I have needed it to, from the scorching deserts of Turkmenistan to the freezing plains of Patagonia, the Himalayan has always been raring to go.

That is not to say that I have got off scot-free, however, no one ever does, regardless of bike! After an incident in Kyrgyzstan where I went into the back of some moron who was driving with broken brake lights, the frame was clearly weakened at the headstock. 

A few thousand kilometres of dirt and road riding later, and I find myself four thousand metres up on a freezing morning in Tibet. I clearly remember hitting a fairly sizeable bump in the road and immediately feeling a radical change in feedback from the front forks. After pulling over to check I hadn’t bust the inner tube, I rode gingerly for a further twenty kilometres before glancing down and, to my astonishment, noticing a finger sized crack in the frame that very nearly severed the headstock. 

Fortunately, the Himalayan has two such joints so it would not have been completely game over even if it had gone all the way through. I rode the rest of that 400+ km day at 30kph on a bike that effectively had a half broken neck! After convincing a mechanic in our remote Tibetan village stop to have a crack at patching it up, I nursed the bike a further 600km to the Nepalese border before the world’s ugliest weld unsurprisingly gave way again. I spent the evening brainstorming solutions, including crossing the border to Enfield’s Kathmandu dealership for repairs, thus foregoing the rest of China and the considerable money I had already spent on guide costs! Finally, and quite reluctantly, I accepted the help of a team of locals to manually lift the 200kg+ steed in the dead of night onto the back of a truck bound for the Tibetan capital of Lhasa. Once there, we found someone to do a proper repair job, including welding on a series of metal bracing brackets.

Around the same time, the genuinely impressive team at Enfield communicated to me that, given this was the first such problem ever encountered on a BS4 model, if I made my way to either Hanoi in Vietnam or Chiang Mai in Thailand, they would cover all necessary servicing and repairs. A month later, I pulled into Enfield Chiang Mai and, true to their word, they replaced the frame and several other parts such as the chain and filters completely free of charge. Since then, I have had no major issues at all.