THE MOST GLORIOUS MOTORCYCLE RIDER I HAVE EVER SEEN

 

I feel I have found the most glorious motorcycle rider on earth.

I could be wrong, which does happen, and there may well be a rider somewhere who is still more glorious than this bloke. But I somehow doubt it. This bloke is…well, he’s elemental in his pure, unhinged motorcycleness.

You all understand how YouTube works, right? You watch something, the algorithm then makes suggestions you also might like to watch. Which is how I found Mad Max, the Road Warrior.

 

He is from Russia, and lives in town called Bogorodsk. I think he was about 20 when he made the series of videos four years ago that so captivated me. Those videos have had millions of views, and he has close to 40,000 subscribers on his channel, Road Warrior.

 

I hope you will shortly understand why that is so. I sure do.

 

So, Max inherited a bike from his father. But not just any bike. He inherited an IZh Planeta. And it is entirely possible that if you don’t live in Russia, you’d not have heard of this marque.

Even pronouncing it is difficult for western tongues. Let me attempt to walk you through it. In Cyrillic it is written thus: “ИЖ”. The backward N is an I, and the thing that looks like a beetle is the ZH sound. The closest English equivalent is if you try to pronounce the word “shit” but swap the s for a z.

 

The Soviet Union created the IZh in 1929. And by the time it had ceased production in 2008, more than 10 million bikes had come out of the Izhevsk Machine-Building Plant – which is now known by a name you will recognise, Kalashnikov.

 

The bike Max inherited from his father was a 1996 model. It was the Planeta (planet), and it was 350cc of single-cylinder two-stroke Soviet nightmare to motorcyclists here in the west who, by 1996, were already riding Honda Fireblades.

The Russian Federation, which inherited the ruins of the Soviet Union, was an economic and social basket case in the Nineties. The reasons for this are well-known to people who follow geo-politics, and not within the scope of this piece.

 

But things were still getting made in the Russian Federation, because things must always get made in countries who have understood that manufacturing is crucial to their existence. But that is also beyond the scope of this piece.

 

Just know that despite the crazed oligarchs, gangsters who made the Italian Mafia look like mincing love-pooves, rampant alcoholism, and a society that understands and accepts “sacrifice” on a level I hope no-one in the west ever has to, shit was getting made.

Shit like the IZh.

 

And I very much want to tell you about Max and his IZh. And their utterly astounding journey. And to understand this fully, you first need to know what an IZh is.

 

To put it kindly, it’s a bucket of shit. No western rider would consider a Soviet-made 350cc two-stroke, making (on a good day) 28bhp, a thing they’d want to ride anywhere, let alone where Max did.

 

Among Soviet riders, the IZh Planeta had a reputation for poor performance and questionable reliability, and that’s when viewed through stoic, bear-anything Soviet eyes.

The IZh is many things, and it is Max’s world and he loves it, but it is not what you would term a touring motorcycle. Its maximum speed is a shade under 80km/h – if and when you manage to kickstart it. It vibrates like only a single-cylinder two-stroke could, and you couldn’t call it comfortable and be thought sane.

 

But it is, most importantly, simple, and relatively robust, like a Soviet tractor. Max actually pours two-stroke oil directly into the petrol tank after he fills up…and then usually wheels it off to a corner of the petrol station to either fix it, or pass out after trying to fix it for five hours.

Max himself, from what I have been able to gather, is (or was) a typical Russian teenager living in a big town called Bogorodsk, some 40-odd km from the city of Nizhny Novgorod. Still lost? Nizhny Novgorod is 400-odd km due east of Moscow. I am only telling you this so you will grasp the sheer scope of Max’s journey.

 

At this point, I’d like you to try and appreciate how vast the Russia Federation is. Here in Australia, we also ride bikes huge distances. We are a continent, after all. But Russia is more than 2.2 times the size of Australia. It has eleven time zones. The Soviet Union was even bigger. The people living there comprehend distance in a different way to Australians, and certainly very differently to how an Englishman or a Frenchman would.

 

I trust I have set the stage for you.

One day, Max decided he wanted to go on a road-trip on his IZh. He told his parents this, and they tentatively agreed, making him promise he wouldn’t ride too far or take too many risks. He was young, and relatively inexperienced as a motorcyclist. Most of his riding had been on a moped and a small Chinese dirt bike, which he’d bounced along some pleasant tracks near his home.

 

Max assured his parents he wouldn’t go far, but that he would be gone for a fortnight or so. He didn’t have a lot of money, so how much shit could he possibly get into? His parents were concerned, but 20-year-old boys are gonna do what 20-year-old boys do – and that is to measure themselves against the world. There was no stopping him.

 

Max, unbeknownst to his parents, had decided he was going to ride to Lake Baikal. Why Lake Baikal? Well, it is the deepest and oldest freshwater lake on earth, holding some 20 per cent of the world’s fresh water – more than all the North American Great Lakes combined. This 30-million-year-old marvel is sacred to the native Buryat people, and locals still implicitly believe Christ himself visited this part of Asia.

It’s worth a ride to see that, for sure.

And Russians all seem to want to visit the lake as some kind of pilgrimage during their lives. Max was no different. He was going to Lake Baikal. On his IZh. In Autumn.

 

To get there, he would ride more than 5000km. Across the Ural Mountains. Into Western Siberia. Then into Eastern Siberia. On a 350cc two-stroke made by grim-eyed communists fuelled by vodka made from potato peelings and hatred of the bourgeoisie.

 

Remember that Max has fuck-all money. Max has fuck-all mechanical knowledge. Max has fuck-all motorcycle-riding experience. But Max is going to ride 5000km to Lake Baikal on his IZh Planeta. And then back. A trip of more than 10,000km. Fuck, yes! Sound the trumpets!

 

Max so very much reminds me of myself at that age. Fearless and brainless in equal measure. Like Max, I was cos-playing at being a “biker”. I too had virtually no mechanical knowledge, scant riding skill, and fuck-all money. And I too lied to my sainted mother about what I was planning to do on a motorcycle she was convinced would kill me sooner rather than later.

The fundamental difference between Max and myself is I was not cursed with an IZh. My first bike was an immensely reliable and lovely to ride Yamaha 650. Oh, and I was a committed atheist, whereas Max declares himself an Odinist. He has even scrawled “DIE IN BATTLE OR ON THE ROAD AND GO TO VALHALLA” on his petrol tank and wears a Mjolnir amulet around his neck on a chain as a talisman.

 

In terms of camera gear, Max has a Chinese Smartphone, and a small Chinese pretend-GoPro affixed to the chin-piece of his helmet. His gear is some no-name leather jacket, a pair of textile pants, some motocross armour, and that’s about it. No microphones, no drones. Nothing a professional motorcycle travel-blogger would normally carry to make his videos. He has a knife, some food, some spare parts, some tools, a blanket, a mat, and a few bits and pieces he might need on his journey. He had thought about what he was going to do, and prepared as best he could, I guess.

 

In terms of the filming, this was no-budget, bare-arse, amateur stuff. And such shit is normally unwatchable. What makes Max’s work so utterly engaging for me, is his brutal honesty. He exposes his soft and very naïve underbelly throughout the videos. His exclamations, his often-irritating cackles, and his home-spun philosophies are confronting, sometimes banal, sometimes funny, sometimes very informative, sometimes annoying, but always searingly real and honest. And ever so Russian.

 

He is the ingenue supreme.

At first, as I watched him head east along endless Russian roads (all of which looked very good, especially the major highways he was using), I thought: “Fucken dickhead. He’s gonna crash and die.” He was riding at half the speed everything else on the road was doing. Trucks buzzed him scant centimetres from his handlebars. He was meat-jam, for sure, I thought.

 

But the countryside via his rider’s POV intrigued me. This was Russia unvarnished and honest.

 

Still, I felt I would get bored pretty quickly and find something else to watch. I mean, how many times can you watch Max getting passed by everything else on the road? I felt that would get old unless a truck hit him. Shit had to happen to him. It just had to. I kept watching.

Then he broke down. It was some kind of carby issue. He managed to fix it, but not properly. He continued. He broke down again and again. And then some more. Somehow, he always managed to limp onwards to Lake Baikal. His lights failed, his clutch started slipping, his speed was down to 40km/h. The ambient air-temperature dropped to minus-12 at night as he crossed the Ural Mountains.

 

He did not even realise he was in the mountains because it was the middle of the night. He just knew he was utterly cold – and he told his viewers just that as he held his camera at arm’s length and talked to it on the side of the road. But there was nowhere to stop for the night and rest. He carried on.

And he did big, long hours on the IZh. He had to. Otherwise it would have taken him months to get to Lake Baikal. He would ride 18, 19, 20 hours a day. There were days when he would ride for more than 24.

 

Sometimes he would sleep in tree-lines some 100-metres off the road, his beloved IZh camouflaged with birch-tree branches, clutching his knife to his chest, and hoping he would not be robbed and killed. One morning he woke up to see a man running towards him. He said it scared him and he prepared to die in battle. The man wanted to know if Max had a knife he could borrow. The man had crashed his truck on the road. The truck had sheep in it. He needed a knife to put some of them out of their misery. Max hesitantly gave him the knife he was openly clutching. The man returned it clean a few minutes later.

He would stop to get petrol and warm himself when he got the opportunity, which was not often. It rained for much of the way. Once, he bought cheap petrol off some bloke in the middle of the night. His IZh and that petrol did not get on. He managed to limp to the next petrol station at walking pace and dumped whatever potato-juice he’d bought on the cheap, replacing it with proper petrol. The IZh limped on, with only parking lights.

 

I was astonished. How was he carrying on? It was 2am. He was wet. He was beyond cold. He could not ride much over 60km/h. Trucks were missing him by centimetres. He would have to stop every 30 or 40km and fiddle with his clutch or his carby. He had no phone reception.

But he had resolve. He was going to Lake Baikal.

 

I feel the Road Gods took pity on him. They must have. Because Max, shaking with cold, met a bloke in a petrol station one evening around midnight. An older bike-rider, who looked at Max like people look at people who eat dirt and play with their penises in public.

He asked where Max was from. Max told him. “That’s 2000km away…” the man said. Then he asked Max where he was going. Max said he was off to Lake Baikal. “That’s 3000km in that direction,” the man said. Max agreed that it was.

 

“Look,” the bloke said. “There’s a Bike Post in the next town. Why don’t you follow me there and rest up? They can help you fix your bike, and they will feed you.”

Max, like me, had no idea such things as Bike Posts existed in Russia. And what a magnificent thing they are in a country as vast and harsh as that.

Bike Posts are places run by local bike clubs, and there are a lot of bike clubs in Russia. These are not outlaw clubs – though there are those in Russia too. These are just groups of local riders who form loose-knit clubs and if they can, open a Bike Post. It’s usually an old, abandoned building, which is tidied up, and offers hospitality to passing motorcyclists. For free. Free food, free drink, and free lodging. It’s not flash, but when it’s 2am, minus-12, and your lightless IZh is limping along at 20km/h past the village of Yurgamysh, it is pure salvation.

At one of these Bike Posts, Max lucked onto a bloke who was a mechanic who restored old Soviet bikes. This bloke fixed Max’s carby (temporarily), got him some new clutch plates and rebuilt his clutch, fitted a new LED headlight to it from a Lada, and fitted a screen and hand-guards to the IZh. This took two days and the bloke hosted Max in his house the whole time and refused money Max offered to pay him for the parts and work.

 

“One day,” the man said, “I may be broken down somewhere and I will need someone to help me. I believe in Karma. Have a great trip. Go with God.”

These Bike Posts, and the kindness of strangers and fellow bike riders is what ultimately carried Max through to Lake Baikal.

 

And he did get there – mad-eyed and fey. But then he struggled to leave.

Local legend has it you must throw a coin into Father Baikal. Otherwise, he will not permit you to leave. Max did not throw a coin into the icy waters, because Max was not aware of this tradition. So Max did not leave Lake Baikal.

He got himself stranded about 20km out of Irkutsk, the city that sits on the Angara River that flows into the lake. It was two am, it was insanely cold, and his IZh had ceased to proceed. This was the first time he actually looked concerned. I don’t blame him. It was a tough spot he was in. So he contacted his girlfriend. As you do when you’re that age. You seek some long-distance comfort. You want to share with her your whole road-warrior against-the-odds bullshit you’ve been telling yourself for 5000km.

She dumps him. On the phone. Via text.

 

Max loses his shit. He has a frozen, bike-dead, total-darkness meltdown. It’s searing in its naked honesty.

 

Somehow, the following day, Max limp-rides back to the shores of Lake Baikal and chucks a bunch of coins into the water. He understands the lake will now permit him to depart.

So he does. His adventures continue for another 5000km, but they are coloured and flavoured by his girlfriend dumping him. He rides on, long, rain and wind-blasted hours astride the biggest bastard motorcycle there is. Long-term IZh owners say the bikes are actually sentient creatures. They don’t speak, but they make their intentions clear when they decide you need to know shit.

 

He makes it home. Of course he does. His IZh manages.

I found Max’s vlog captivating. You may not. It’s hard…well, tedious at times to watch because it’s not glossy or well-produced and the auto-translate YouTube provides can be hit and miss. You will get the idea, but you will certainly miss out on the “Russian-ness” of Max’s emotional journey.

And that is a thing. Russians…well, Slavs in general are just like everyone else. Only more so. And that’s what makes them different, if you get my meaning. It’s hard to explain. My fellow Slavs will understand. The rest of you might well not. That’s fine. I’m just letting you know our inner frequencies are not yours.

I saw much of myself in Max. I think that’s what hooked me on his videos. I have changed much and much over the decades and millions of kilometres. We all do. As will Max. The Road Gods make damn sure of that.

 

May they watch over Max – and all of us on our travels.

 

ADDENDUM

 

Max made a few more videos after his Baikal trip. His most intriguing one was his trip from Bogorodsk to Crimea, via the Donbas. In 2024. During the war. Dressed in military camo and a tactical vest with a big knife in the chest-scabbard of the vest. His cos-playing had obviously reached new heights and I started to think he might be on some autism spectrum.

How did that trip go for him? Well, you’d have to ask him, and the Russian army. But yes, his evil IZh once again made it there and back. And I’m a fan.