The Great India Ride

Taking four months off wasn't so much a decision as a surrender; the trip had been circling for years. It wasn't tourism either. 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 Himalayan pass where the air thins and the mind goes very quiet.

Varanasi's ghats at dawn, Goa's easy charm, villages where the bike drew a bigger crowd than a wedding, megacities that never once slept. Complex, contradictory, utterly captivating: that's India, and 18,000 kilometres barely scratched it.

Somewhere along the way the trip acquired a rule: if India had an edge, I wanted to stand on it. The corners even alliterate, four Ks: Kanyakumari at the southern tip, where three seas share one shoreline; Kashmir at the top of the map; Kutch and its white salt desert in the west; and Kongmu Kham, the Golden Pagoda at Namsai, in Arunachal's far east. At Wagah I watched the border ceremony close enough to the Pakistan side to hear their crowd answering ours.

The neighbours pulled me in too. A week in Nepal, a ride through Bhutan, and at Dawki a kayak on water so clear the boat seemed to hang in the air, paddling right up to the Bangladesh border. Four extremes, four borders. The passport got almost as much of a workout as the tyres.