Rolling through a kingdom

When motorcycle touring becomes a part of your life, there’s one question that keeps popping up when you’re having a chat with people. “What’s the best road you’ve gone riding on?”

For a motorist, a good road can be a lot of things. It can be the longest patch of buttery smooth asphalt over which they can ride at speed. It can be a road that’s got the curves that tempt them to scrape their knee-sliders and footpegs on. It can be a steep climb to cross a high-altitude mountain pass, which leaves both rider and machine gasping for air. It can also be a rather bumpy road, but one that passes by the most scenic landscapes. Or it can just be a ride through a region that’s laden with rich culture and beautiful people.

And as you can imagine, the only way of reducing the time taken to think about that answer, is to ride where you’ve never been before. So when we got the chance to ride with the Royal Enfield Tour of Bhutan this year, we got thinking, “Could this be it?”

The route plan, as chalked out by Royal Enfield, Siliguri-Darjeeling-Phuentsholing-Paro-Thimpu-Bumthang-Thrashigang-Guwahati, spun over 7 days of riding and one rest day at Thimpu. The total distance that was to be covered on this route came up to about 1,400 kilometers.

We all thought that this was a pretty standard ride, until the actual details popped up in the pre-ride briefing. We were told to be prepared for sudden changes in weather on the road. And we were told that we would start begging for straight roads once we got into Bhutan.

All of this was realised once we started riding out of Siliguri. The roads in West Bengal were quite straight up to Darjeeling. The first day of the ride was 212 kilometres long, and we encountered pretty much what one would find on Indian highways. Long, uneventful stretches of highway, narrowing down and widening up without warning. But once the ascent to Darjeeling started, we realised that we’re leaving behind us the straight roads.

The roads were good in patches, but the fact that we had to ride through huge tea estates on either side of the road all the way up to Phuentsholing made the first two days of riding quite beautiful. But this was going to get only better.

Because after the immigration formalities were completed, we set out from the border town of Phuentsholing to Paro, the roads widened up, became properly tarred, and the curves were tempting. Of the 176 kilometers from Phuentsholing to Paro, the last 60 odd kilometres of twisties were good enough to put the best motorcycle race tracks to shame. We didn’t hesitate to drop a gear, lean and start scraping the footpegs on the tarmac.

But there were patches of road that were being renovated. And that meant some serious off-road experience. For example, the Bumthang-Trashigang stretch was not just long (300km approximately), it was also bumpy and in places there were no signs that a road once existed there. Riders had to go through slush, water and dirt, and that was an exercise in endurance.

Also, the Thimphu-Bumthang and Bumthang-Trashigang rides had two high-altitude mountain passes each. The first pass after Thimphu, Dochu-La, numbed up our fingers with biting cold. And the passes that followed were no relief either. By the time we climbed up Thrumshing-La, the highest pass that we encountered (at an altitude of 12,400 feet above mean sea level), we could see patches of ice by the road.

But apart from the riding experience, there were a lot of other things that left us overwhelmed. The people, for instance, are probably the nicest and most hospitable ones that all of us had ever met. All along the road we stopped at small restaurants and had noodles, rice or momos, which were all served with a warm smile.

At Tiger’s Nest, in Paro, we trekked all the way up to the oldest monastery in Bhutan. The trek may have left us gasping for breath, but it also had us at a loss of words. The small monastery, perched on the side of a mountain, is just so hauntingly beautiful that you can’t find any adjectives to describe it.

But the one memory that would remain etched forever on our minds, would be the monks who would smile ever so serenely when you passed them, and the children who would come running to you, to just give you a high-five. It was hard for us not to slow down for them, because this part of the ride had us smiling as widely as the children who waved at us as we rode by.

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