Without any shadow of a doubt, the greatest motorcycle adventurer of them all is Shinji Kazama. I first wrote about Kazama-san back in 2011 when preparing the altitude review for this site ... the detail of that is available here about a third of the way down the page: https://andesmotoextreme.blogspot.com/p/altitude-review.html
Shinji Kazama raced in the Dakar. 4 times. He won the 500cc class one year. Clearly that wasnt enough adventure for the man. So he went to Mt Everest and set a world record for motorcycle altitude going past the Nepalese Everest Base Camp. Unsatisfied with that, he went to the opposite side, the Chinese Everest Base Camp the following year, and got higher again, the first motorcycle above 6000 metres.
But that wasnt enough either, so he took a Yamaha TW200 (they still make them - check out the recent Canadian review by "Mr FortNine" Ryan Kluftinger here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2a-sUdaNJ8) and rode it across the polar ice cap to the North Pole in 1987. Naturally once you have done that, there is only one thing left to aim at ... the most barren place on earth, the South Pole. Again he took a Yamaha TW200, this time heavily modified, and rode that bike to the South Pole. in 1992.
Doing research on Kazama-san was near impossible in 2011. There was next to nothing in English. In recent years though I have seen a flurry of blog articles on Shinji Kazama, and I have to say, they are long overdue.
So here are a few of them:
https://www.motorcyclistonline.com/remarkable-resilience-shinji-kazama/
https://medium.com/gasolirium/the-man-who-reached-the-poles-by-motorcycle-32a3e1b99583
https://elsolitariomc.com/blog/2017/11/13/the-polar-adventures-of-shinji-kazama/
Shinji Kazama raced in the Dakar. 4 times. He won the 500cc class one year. Clearly that wasnt enough adventure for the man. So he went to Mt Everest and set a world record for motorcycle altitude going past the Nepalese Everest Base Camp. Unsatisfied with that, he went to the opposite side, the Chinese Everest Base Camp the following year, and got higher again, the first motorcycle above 6000 metres.
But that wasnt enough either, so he took a Yamaha TW200 (they still make them - check out the recent Canadian review by "Mr FortNine" Ryan Kluftinger here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2a-sUdaNJ8) and rode it across the polar ice cap to the North Pole in 1987. Naturally once you have done that, there is only one thing left to aim at ... the most barren place on earth, the South Pole. Again he took a Yamaha TW200, this time heavily modified, and rode that bike to the South Pole. in 1992.
Doing research on Kazama-san was near impossible in 2011. There was next to nothing in English. In recent years though I have seen a flurry of blog articles on Shinji Kazama, and I have to say, they are long overdue.
So here are a few of them:
https://www.motorcyclistonline.com/remarkable-resilience-shinji-kazama/
https://medium.com/gasolirium/the-man-who-reached-the-poles-by-motorcycle-32a3e1b99583
https://elsolitariomc.com/blog/2017/11/13/the-polar-adventures-of-shinji-kazama/
Below, Footage of Shinji Kazama as he rides to the North Pole on "North to Nowhere"
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