Words & photos: Derek and Helen Skaife
Wanting to try somewhere new,
Derek and Helen Skaife took the
high road in the Himalaya.
W
e decided 2017 would be the
year we would have a change
of scenery from riding the
NZ roads, and try somewhere
different. There was great
discussion... would it be
Route 66, Vietnam or maybe
Mexico? Then one of the guys
mentioned he had heard of
a bike riding tour up into the Himalaya, so to cut a
long story short... he got himself the job of finding
out more details.
A few weeks went by, we studied the route, did the
homework, paid the deposit and we were going.
Our trip was to be 13 days of riding with a few extra
days thrown in at the start and end of the trip.
Himalayan roads are some of the roughest and
most dangerous in the world, and I remembered
seeing them featured in a programme on TV called
“World’s most dangerous Roads” so I immediately
assumed we would be riding modern adventure
bikes or maybe enduro bikes. Cool, that sounded
like me. Well, I was close. It turned out we’d be riding
in conditions that would be a test for any off-road
bike, but we’d be doing it on... Royal Enfields.
Some of us had heard of Royal Enfield, some had
even seen one once, so a bit a Googling was in order.
Seems that the Royal Enfield was originally made
by a British company in 1901 and taken over by BSA,
with Norton having a hand in there somewhere
along the lines. In 1955 the Enfield company did
a deal with an Indian company to assemble the
bikes under licence using parts made in Britain,
but by 1962 India had acquired the tooling to
make all the components themselves so from this
time to the present day India has made the same
bikes, with what look like very few changes from
when they were originally constructed in 1955.
It turns out that they are cult machines in India
- a bit like India’s Harley Davidson. The company
makes a big range of bikes, but the most popular,
and the model we were to ride is the Bullet,
which is a carburetted, single cylinder 500cc.
My father-in-law rides a 1950s 500cc BSA and when
I saw the Royal Enfield it looked a lot the same