There’s not much going on in Seney, Michigan. It’s plopped on the map about an hour and a half northwest of the Mackinac Bridge, smack in the middle of the Upper Peninsula. Supposedly, Ernest Hemingway used to fish, drink and fight there. I’d bet Andy’s Seney Bar gets pretty wild on a Saturday night in snowmobile season, but in reality, not much is left over from its storied, allegedly rowdy past. Cellphone service cuts out a few miles north of town and doesn’t pick back up until you get to Grand Marais. It feels like it could be any decade.
The region’s time-warp factor made it the perfect spot to test two new vehicles—the Royal Enfield Himalayan adventure motorcycle and the jeeplike Mahindra Roxor—that, in their straightforward simplicity, feel like throwbacks from some bygone era. Interestingly, both happen to come from India—not a nation Americans have historically turned to for off-road machinery, but perhaps one we should be paying more attention to.
That, and Seney is a sort of nexus for off-road and snowmobile routes. There are too many to count; you could spend a lifetime crawling the trails and never see them all. In my innumerable trips to the Upper Peninsula, a place my parents now call home, I had explored precisely zero.
So, rather than letting those trailheads remain an untapped possibility, I roped Wesley Wren and former Autoweek intern extraordinaire Zac Palmer into a weekend expedition—a chance to see a bit of the great unknown and learn about two unexpected, intriguing machines. If the Himalayan and the Roxor’s shared national origin is a pretty flimsy hook, sometimes a half-baked excuse is all you need to get out there and start exploring.
There was a company called Royal Enfield that manufactured motorcycles in Britain from 1901 to 1971, but that’s not the Royal Enfield that builds the Himalayan. That would be India’s Royal Enfield—a distinct entity linked to the first by name and arcane licensing agreements—which started building British-
designed motorcycles in 1955 … and never really stopped. Its single-cylinder Bullets are, with their quaint looks and peashooter exhausts, living fossils. Despite bargain pricing, though, they’re too small and too crude to really take off in America.
But while no one was looking, Royal Enfield decided to reinvent itself. The Himalayan represents the company’s first clean-sheet design since the Raj era. True to historical RE form, it’s about as simple as you can get. It’s powered by exactly one fuel-injected, 411cc cylinder that produces a manufacturer-stated 24.5 hp, which is not what you’d generally call an impressive figure. Yet this isn’t a musty old Bullet tarted up for adventure-touring duty; its engine is an all-new design, not a continuation of the notorious thumpers of yore. It’s mated to a five-speed transmission and cradled in an all-new frame.
So what made this thing perfect for exploring the mosquito-infested back roads of Hemingway country?
Nothing in particular, really. Or maybe everything. We’re used to adventure bikes being cushy, tech-laden and expensive machines. The Himalayan is their antithesis. It’s small, underpowered and rather inexpensive. It looks and feels like nothing so much as a big dirt bike that wanted to play on the pavement, too. But with just under 9 inches of ground clearance and nearly 8 inches of front fork travel, it can handle some gnarly terrain and keep you fairly comfortable while doing so.
I’d done no serious trail riding before our U.P. adventure. If I’d been on a bigger, heavier bike, I might have been a little hesitant to rip down a trail miles from civilization. The Himalayan, by contrast, is approachable. I had some nail-biter moments—I have much to learn about riding in sand, a surprising amount of which we discovered deep in the pine woods—but every time I take a low-speed spill, I heft the thing back up (it’s no featherweight, but at 421 pounds it’s lighter than a typical adventure bike) and keep on trekking. Its relatively low output can keep a novice from getting into too much trouble.
That said, the Himalayan is something of a compromise. It’s not hardcore enough to chew through really nasty terrain like a dirt bike, and while chunkier rubber might help, more specialized tires would affect its roadability—and the majority of my miles spent on the bike were on pavement, where I appreciated its not-too-aggressive Pirellis. It’s light enough to pick up off the ground, but it’s too heavy to yank out of deep mud solo—after burying it up to the exhaust in peaty goo on some nameless trail, I was glad to have the Mahindra, and its winch, to bail me out.
Further, the Himalayan is manifestly not an expressway cruiser. It starts to get gassed as you crest 65 mph—especially when you’ve got panniers packed with cargo on the sides—and it simply doesn’t have any guts in reserve after 75 mph. Good luck passing anything in fifth gear at wide-open throttle.
Would I ride a Himalayan coast to coast? Sure, if you gave me a week to do so and let me stay off the busier interstates during rush hour. This is not a bike built for 1,000-mile days.
On the other hand, it fits right in on the highways of the Upper Peninsula, and it’s nimble on the urban and suburban streets in and around Detroit. It’s the long, fast stretches connecting the two on which it never quite feels at home. Think of the Himalayan as versatile daily transportation that will happily carry you down trails on the weekends—so long as you aren’t in a terrible hurry to get to them.
Any compromises the bike presents become extremely easy to overlook when you check the price tag: $4,499. That’s not merely affordable—for a new motorcycle that can tackle just about anything but the fast lane with confidence, that’s downright cheap. The RE-brand aluminum panniers I borrowed add about $600 to the package, but they’re rugged, well-designed—they install and detach in minutes—and seem to be worth every penny.
For decades, charm and cheapness were about the only things Royal Enfields had going for them. With the Himalayan, you can add modern design and competent, up-to-date engineering to the list of attributes. The follow-up act is a series of impressive twin-cylinder road bikes, a first in the company’s history (you will read about them on these pages soon).
I’m not in the business of product planning, but I’d bet that if you took one of those twin-cylinder motors and stuck it in Himalayan’s frame, and then kept the price comfortably south of $8,000 or so, you’d have something really special on your hands. Either way, the Himalayan is a worthy and, frankly, unexpected bike. If you have any preconceived ideas about Royal Enfield—or maybe especially if you do—check it out. Riding is believing.
Nobody who has spent time in an early Jeep—whether we’re talking about a military-issue wartime Willys or one of the civilian CJs that followed—can help but marvel at its brilliance: It is an elegantly simple, unrelenting mountain goat of a vehicle. Its successors and imitators are objectively better in many ways, but we know in our hearts they’re not the same.
So why couldn’t they keep making ’em? Aside from crash safety, or cabin comfort (or the lack thereof) or their tendency to death-wobble you into the Great Beyond if you try to drive them at anything above country back road speeds, those first Jeeps were just about perfect.
But there is a company that still builds something that looks awfully like the originals. In fact, that company—Mahindra—started building Jeeps under license in 1947 … and, like Royal Enfield, never really stopped. And it now assembles and sells a version of that vehicle, dubbed the Roxor, right here in the United States.
The Roxor is undeniably CJ-like—at 148 inches in overall length on a 96-inch wheelbase, it’s about as long as a CJ7, though it’s narrower at 62 inches wide. But the powertrain is suitably modern: A 2.5-liter four-cylinder turbodiesel provides 62 hp and a very respectable 144 lb-ft of torque—plenty to drag its surprisingly hefty 3,035-pound curb weight around. It’s mated to a five-speed manual. Naturally, the Roxor is four-wheel-drive-equipped; a two-speed transfer case completes the picture. Top speed is a governed 45 mph.
So how’d Mahindra sneak this one by the safety nannies? Simple: The Roxor is sold as an off-road vehicle, aka ORV, not legal for highway use. Depending on where you live and where you recreate, this might not be too onerous a limitation: Beyond the suburban bubble, many jurisdictions have made concessions for ORV use. Near Seney, for example, we could drive the Roxor legally on the side of county roads with no problems.
Of course, you don’t buy one of these to traverse the pavement at 45 mph. You buy one because it’s damn near unstoppable off-road. The Roxor proves itself almost immediately on the trail, blasting down open stretches with confidence and scrambling over fallen trees and other obstacles with ease (like the Himalayan, the Roxor has 9 inches of ground clearance).
It isn’t totally unstoppable, though. On one occasion, I tried to send it through a mud pit that was a little deeper than anticipated. Buried up to the sills, there’s no hope of recovery—until we bust out the Warn winch mounted on the front bumper.
The real beauty of the Roxor isn’t just the fact that it can tackle almost anything you can throw at it (and winch its way out of what it can’t); it’s how it does it. Compared to, say, the modern Jeep Wrangler, the Roxor feels amazingly open and nimble. Its manageable size and clear sightlines make picking your way through tricky terrain a cinch. You feel like you’re in the wilderness, not just passing over it.
But like the Himalayan, the Roxor isn’t quite perfect. For one, it’s in a strange space size-wise. Dwarfed by modern SUVs, it’s still fairly large for an ORV. In Michigan, for example, some trails are limited to vehicles no wider than 50 inches. The Roxor can’t legally use those.
Second, it’s not exactly impulse-buy cheap. Roxors start at $14,999. While you can easily spend much more on side-by-side ORVs offered by other manufacturers, that’s still a good chunk of change to spend on a non-road-legal truck. You could buy a beat-up CJ7 and cobble together a rig for less. But do you want to be tinkering with old junk, or do you want to be exploring the great outdoors?
It's often said that there’s no more blank space on the map, that there’s no new territory to discover. It’s a dispiriting notion, but fortunately, at a personal level, it’s untrue—there’s a whole world ready to be discovered by you. That’s why we get such joy out of overlanding and off-roading even when we’re following trails rather than blazing them. To creep down some unknown path, going no great distance at no great speed, is meditative. Even when it sucks, it’s fulfilling and fun.
And if we accept that off-road driving is a sort of discipline, something more meaningful than getting from point A to point B (for it is surely not the most efficient way to do that), then there’s something to be said for abandoning all but the basics and doing it the old-fashioned way. Swapping GPS for paper maps. Abandoning air-conditioned comfort for a motorcycle or an open cockpit, never mind the mosquitoes and biting black flies. Choosing the right vehicle for whatever task at hand is always important, and when heading out of society and off the road, that means—for me, at least—ditching as much gratuitous technology as possible.
It’s surprising that so few new vehicles truly allow you to do this. Manufacturers like to vibe on nostalgia, working tirelessly to bring the appeal of their foundational products into their modern offerings. Sometimes it works; more often than not, it feels like a thin veneer. It misses the point because it’s not just about aesthetics. We crave the endearing simplicity, the earnestness and the approachability of old vehicles as well.
The Roxor and the Himalayan aren’t necessarily trying to be retro, but in their straightforwardness, they nail what made classic Jeeps and vintage bikes so cool in the first place. They’re approachable and honest—what you see here is what you get—and that makes them easy to bond with. They’re capable enough to get you there and back, and they do it without imposing on the wilderness they’re designed to take you deep into.
Even better, they’re relatively affordable. You can buy everything you see on these pages for well under the price of a new Wrangler. Pick up one or both, and, like me, you’ll start coming up with any excuse to get out there and start venturing those trails you’ve been ignoring. They’re out there, waiting, ready for you to go and discover them.
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