‘Just keep hitting the horn’: Lessons in how to stay alive on India’s roads with Extreme Bike Tours

FIVE-star hotels and frightening mountain hairpin turns on a motorbike. Despite a few broken bones, this is India at it best.

RUGGED ROADS: The scenery makes every pit stop on an Extreme Bike Tour a marvellous exper

LOOKING back over my notes for this trip, I can’t help but laugh at some of the entries.

“Day 2: Munnar to Kodaikanal – DJ stacked it and broke collar bone. Stayed in flash hotel on a lake. I got very sick and threw up in the dining room.”

“Day 3: Kodaikanal to Bandipur tiger reserve – long, crazy ride up mountain pass, got run off the road into a ditch by a bus. Lunch in a building site. Came down road with 36 hairpin bends. Ride in the dark was hairy for last hour or so. Lots of speed bumps, high-beam lights. Had 12-hour sleep.”

And so on. If you sign up for a motorcycling adventure with Extreme Bike Tours in India, you will scarcely believe what you have been through when you are sitting back home in Normalville.

Talk about operating outside your comfort zone. India is confronting enough for people travelling by car, train and bus. Try doing it on two wheels.

Extreme Bike Tours is an operation run by British expat Zander Combe, a man who in his 20s was living the high life as a stockbroker in New York but couldn’t forget the experience of riding a motorbike through India in his gap year after school. On one of his frequent return journeys he was sitting astride a 500cc Royal Enfield motorcycle – a classic if ever there was one – on a high mountain road gazing at the Himalayas when he made the decision to share the experience with others, and EBT was born.

If your bike breaks down in Rajasthan, there’s always a camel.

Since then Zander has pioneered motorbike expeditions through the Himalayas, into Tibet, Rajasthan and southern India. He’s thinking about Mongolia.

I joined him for one of the South India trips, leaving from Cochin for 10 days of touring through the spectacular tea estates of Kerala, up and over breathtaking mountain passes down onto the plains of Tamil Nadu and wending our way to the coastal playground of Goa.

One of the features of this trip is that you get to stay in a five-star hotel or similar depending on where you are. There is a cheaper three-star version, but after a long day in the saddle and frayed nerves, having some luxury is worth forking out a little extra for.

In fact it just adds to the assault on the senses. It is a little surreal seeing India at street level by day then slotting into pamper mode come sunset.

Like a lot of people I remember watching Star Wars actor Ewan McGregor and his mate Charley Boorman a few years back riding motorbikes to New York and Cape Town in the documentaries Long Way Round and Long Way Down respectively. They looked like such great adventures and made sitting in an office seem a poor alternative.

Extreme Bike Tours offers you that experience. You don’t have to be an expert bike rider but Zander’s expeditions are not for the faint-hearted either.

Confidence and decisiveness are the key. For instance our first morning started with a heads-up from Zander, who leads all the expeditions.

Extreme Bike Tours group makes its way through a valley flanked by imposing mountains in India’s north.

“Don’t use your indicators, because it just confuses everybody,” he told our nervous band of brothers and a couple of sisters. “Even if there is a truck or bus coming straight at you, just hold your line, don’t flinch. Just keep hitting the horn to let people know you are there.”

The thing about India is that there is no road rage.

Whatever crazy thing you are trying to attempt in a vehicle, it is expected that the mass of traffic will accommodate you. That’s how everything keeps moving.

This was illustrated perfectly when, upon leaving the safety of the hotel carpark on that first morning, we were almost immediately required to do a U-turn in front of what appeared to be about six lanes of screeching peak hour traffic and into the same going the other way. Amazingly the rivers of traffic just opened up and let us do it. In Australia someone would have rammed you for the impertinence of it.

We soon got into the rhythm of it, enthralled to be riding those same Royal Enfields that captured Zander’s imagination.

We travelled in convoy, followed by a team of mechanics in a van full of spares, medical kit, water ... Pretty much everything we needed to stay on the road.

Rocky roads, glacier-fed rivers and snow-capped mountains are all part of the scenery near the Himalayas.

Before the trip, I was curious to know who would sign up for these adventures, a little nervous that I would be out of my depth in the company of hard-bitten bikers because I haven’t ridden a motorbike for 25 years. But it was a surprisingly genteel bunch, with two married couples (the wives rode pillion), a father in his 70s sharing an experience of a lifetime with his son, a pair of middle-aged mates who are health workers in a Perth hospital and several members of the Harley Owners Group, known of course as hogs.

The riding conditions are unlike anything you would have experienced before, unless you happen to be a courier in Bangkok or Bangalore.

The towns are chaotic with traffic coming at you from all directions, while in the countryside you have all that plus roaming cattle, monkeys and pedestrians to contend with.

The roads are a surprise.

For the most part they are pothole free and would be the envy of many a regional area in Australia.

A tea plantation in southern India.

But there were accidents, as we were warned there would be, most of them minor at low speed with only injured pride to worry about, but there were a couple which resulted in broken bones including the most serious which happened to Zander himself. Believe it or not, this is rare.

Only once before has someone not finished a tour on their bike. But India has good private health facilities so even those mishaps were dealt with quickly and with expertise.

One of the highlights of the trip for me was stopping for tea and food in various roadside stalls that if I had been travelling without a guide I would never have entered.

Everyone has heard horror stories about people getting sick in India but Zander’s view was that eating at street level was safer than eating in the flash hotels because there they are continually recycling food from buffets in a country where power outages are frequent and refrigeration struggles.

Our experience was that he was right.

Would I do it again? You bet.

In an increasingly homogenised and risk-averse world , this was exhilarating.

When I finally get to see the Himalayas, I’m going to do it on one of Zander’s Royal Enfields.

The author travelled as a guest of Extreme Bike Tours and Air India.

Hairpin bends on dirt roads. If you’re riding in India you’d better get used to them.

GO2 - INDIA

Doing there

Extreme Bike Tours is offering 11 tours this year and next in India, Nepal, Tibet and Bhutan. The 1600km, 11-day 5-star South India tour next year from Cochin to Goa departs on February 7 and is available from $US5250 ($A5600) a rider or $US4350 a pillion passenger, including motorbike hire, fuel, luxury accommodation, meals on the tour and transfers.

The same tour but using 3-star accommodation departs January 24 next year and is available from $US4140 a rider and from $US3350 for pillion passengers.

Visit www.extremebiketours.com or call Extreme Bike Tours in India on + 91 96653 77344.

Flights from Australia to India are extra.

Air India offers direct flights to Delhi from Sydney and Melbourne, with connections available from other cities.

Visit airindia.com

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