This World Motorcycle Day I took the Royal Enfield Himalayan to Kailasagiri Hill. While the hills are about 80 kms away from Bengaluru the actual off-road part is about 5-7 kms. Huge thanks to Royal Enfiled for giving us the bike.
Currently in our review fleet at IAMABIKER we had the Himalayan, R15 M, V-Strom SX and the new RC 390. Considering the medium to difficult off-road section for the last few kilometers, the decision to take the Himalayan was a no brainer. While I was confident that the bike could handle the off-road, I was initially a bit worried about the 60-70 kms of highway riding especially since I had a pillion. But once out on the highway I was easily able to cruise around the 90-100 mark. I am not a speed freak so for me these speeds were good enough as I like to soak in the scenery as well when I am riding out.
To my surprise at these cruising speeds the fuel efficiency also was much better than what we got during the review. Of-course during the review we are always pushing the motorcycle hard to test it out, but with much more relaxed riding, the Himalayan gave better mileage, definitely above 30 kmpl.
Probably the one thing that I would change is the front windshield / visor. For me it kind of blocks vision of the road as my height is 5’4. For the speeds that this bike can do as well as its relaxed overall acceleration I feel the wind shield is not necessary. In fact I think the naked looks suits it better.
The off-roading part was such a breeze, honestly I really don’t see any other motorcycle in this range that can give such confidence off the road. See, you can take pretty much any decent motorcycle off-road, but you need something that negates a lot of the terrain difficulty in order to maintain any sort of speed. The Himalayan allowed me to just stand up and cruise through. In a lot of the easy areas I did not even have to tell my pillion to get off, such was the confidence.
Usually while we review bikes, we take the bikes to the same stretch of road / off-road so that we have a direct comparison as to what is good and where and how each bike handles the stretch better. One thing that I can say for sure is that, it’s going to take some effort to beat the Himalayan experience riding up Kailasagiri Hill.
