TRAVEL FEATURE - INDIA
JULIAN CHALLIS
I stood at the side of the highest road on earth, having ridden here on a bike
that looked like it had been largely untouched since the 1950s. I’d made this
trip with a bunch of guys that two weeks ago I had never met and with whom
I now felt a bond of shared achievement that’s hard to explain.
We'd travelled nearly 1500 kilometres on some of the most beautiful,
dangerous, stunning, difficult and truly epic roads that I could have
imagined. We'd fought our way up mountain roads in sub-zero conditions,
rode through remote villages, crossed vast glacial planes and raced through
deep river valleys. We shared our breakfast with wild horses, took selfies
with yaks and rode camels across windswept sand dunes. This had been the
most incredible two weeks ever experienced and for a moment I was totally
overwhelmed. This was what adventures are made of ...
Let us rewind to how all these things came about ...
My life had been spent riding
road bikes, dirt bikes and
just about anything with two
wheels and an engine, from
California to Corsica. But aside from
a week-long trip to the Pyrenees with
my buddies in the local trail riding
club and a dirt biking trip to Morocco
back in 2008, epic motorcycle
journeys had not featured on my
bucket list.
That was all about to change. I’d
read about the trips to ride Royal
Enfields in the Himalayas and
thought that this would tick all
the boxes – I’d never been or even
considered travelling to India. I’d
never ridden a Royal Enfield and I’d
certainly never ridden every day for
two weeks on challenging and totally
unknown terrain. In terms of my
comfort zone, I was so outside it I
couldn’t even see it any more …
Four months later and I was
TRAVERSE 99