Jan to Apr 2025 · one motorcycle
The Great India Ride
Home in Trivandrum down to Kanyakumari, up the west coast into Kutch, over the Himalaya to Ladakh, east across the plain into Nepal, Bhutan and the Northeast, and back down the east coast. Then I published the whole loop as route data, so you can ride it too.
- 18,181
- km
- 97
- legs
- 5
- sectors
- 3
- countries
- 93
- nights
A continent disguised as a country
Ride 300 kilometres in any direction here and everything changes: the language, the food, the weather, the unwritten rules of the road. In 2025 I took four months off and rode 18,181 km through 29 regions of India, plus Nepal and Bhutan, to find out how much of that one bike could hold.
It was not tourism. I lived on the road, ate whatever the region ate, and let strangers adopt me for an evening at a time. Some days the soundtrack was horns and diesel. Others, nothing but wind over a pass where the air thins and the mind goes very quiet.
Where it went
Every night of the ride, in the order it happened. This is drawn from the same route file the ride site publishes, not from a line traced by hand: 74 stops, each one a place actually slept in.
Five sectors
The loop comes back through Bengaluru and Delhi on its way round, and those returns are exactly where a rider can join it or leave it. So it splits into five sectors that each stand on their own. Take one, take two, or ride the whole thing backwards.
| Sector | From, to | km | Riding hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| S0Southern opener | Trivandrum to Bengaluru | 1,130.1 | 22.2 |
| S1West coast & Kutch | Bengaluru to Delhi | 3,643.0 | 74.0 |
| S2Himalayan out-and-back | Delhi to Delhi | 2,742.0 | 61.8 |
| S3The long east | Delhi to Bengaluru | 9,955.2 | 237.4 |
| S4Closing run | Bengaluru to Trivandrum | 711.0 | 16.5 |
| The whole loop | Trivandrum to Trivandrum | 18,181.3 | 411.9 |
Before the wheels turned
Trivandrum, the night before
Four months off work is not so much a decision as a surrender. The trip had been circling for years. What it came down to in the end was a bike in the yard, a set of lights to test, and a name stuck on the tank.
Sector S0 · Trivandrum to Bengaluru
South, to the first tip
The loop starts by going the wrong way: south, to Kanyakumari, where three seas share one shoreline and the mainland simply runs out. Then north, and it does not really stop for three months.
Sector S1 · Bengaluru to Delhi
The west coast, and the salt
Up the coast, then a long detour west into Kutch: Lakhpat, Narayan Sarovar, the white Rann. It adds 884 km that no sensible route would include, which is exactly why it is worth doing.
Sector S2 · Delhi, out and back
Into the Himalaya
Punjab flattens out and then stops flattening out very suddenly. This is the sector that costs the most and covers the least: 2,742 km and 62 riding hours, most of it spent gaining or losing height. Khardung La is the high point of the whole loop.
Sector S3a and S3b · the plain, and the hills
East, through Nepal and up again
Down onto the Gangetic plain, across into Nepal for a week, back into India, then up into the tea hills. Three countries in one sector, and the only leg with a bureaucratic layer: the Northeast needs an Inner Line Permit, and that is the one thing on this ride that cannot be improvised on the day.
Sector S3b · the far east
As far as the road goes
Assam, then Arunachal: Tawang up near the ridge, and Namsai out east, where the Golden Pagoda sits and the map more or less runs out. Almost every metre of tarmac up here was cut by the Border Roads Organisation, and their signs are the best writing on any road in India.
Sector S3c and S4 · the east coast home
Down the coast, and home
The long way back: Jharkhand, then the Odisha coast, where the road runs beside the Bay of Bengal for hours at a time. Bengaluru, then one last day south. The bike finished where it started, in the same yard.
What it cost
Every rupee below was actually spent, over 93 nights. It carries no bike, no shipping, no flights and no repairs, so read it as the running cost of being on the road rather than the cost of the trip.
₹3,41,402
spent in total
₹1,456
a night, for a bed
₹2,215
a night, everything else
93
nights on the road
Take the route
The loop is published as a route template rather than only as a story. Every hop carries its start and end coordinates, its distance and its riding time, in JSON you can fetch and re-plan against. There is a printable route book too, with sector maps, waypoint tables and blank pages to plan on.
One thing it deliberately will not tell you: the riding seasons are unwritten. Ten guidance notes are blank and print as a dashed box, because a route book is acted on, and an admitted hole beats invented advice.
Clips from the road
Everything posted while it was happening, in one place.
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