What were you doing in December, 2021? If you’re Royal Enfield, you were celebrating your successful South Pole journey on two Himalayans, which you’d just completed. The project was officially called 90 South, and the folks at Enfield had decided to embark upon it in order to celebrate the company’s 120th anniversary in a big, adventurous, and unforgettable way.
As soon as they successfully completed their goal, Enfield was of course keen to tell everyone about it. Since it’s the 2020s, we of course were hoping for a good video (or even a series) about it—but at the time, all that were available were some short clips. Of course, recording and editing video takes a lot of work, and the team was clearly spending the majority of its efforts on successfully riding to the South Pole, which we totally get.
It’s now December, 2022—and as it turns out, Enfield was doing two things at once. While the Enfield team was focused on completing the journey, it hired a separate team from BBC StoryWorks to shoot video of the entire effort and assemble it into a short docuseries. The first episode is now available, almost exactly a year after the journey was completed.
If you think about a trip like this, several questions may come to mind—not the least of which is, how do you even start to prepare to ride in conditions like this? The Enfield team’s answer was to go to Iceland and start testing both the riders and the machines there. Although it wouldn’t be exactly the same, they thought it would be a reasonable proving ground to get themselves better acclimated to the task they were attempting to accomplish.
In the end, Santhosh Vijay Kumar and Dean Coxson completed the journey—but as you’ll see in this video, originally Adarsh Saxena started training in Iceland to go to the South Pole with Santhosh. Closing text at the end informs us that even the best-laid plans sometimes have to change, but the important thing is to get up and keep pushing through the challenges as they spring up. That’s a good attitude to have, in both motorcycling and in life.
