← THE RIDE

ROUTE BOOK

The pan-India loop

A loop from Trivandrum down to Kanyakumari, up the west coast into Kutch, over the Himalaya to Ladakh, east across the Gangetic plain into Nepal, Bhutan and the Northeast, and home down the east coast. It returns to Bengaluru and Delhi on the way, and those returns are where a rider can join it or leave it.


This is the route as drawn, not a diary of the one running of it. Every distance and every hour on these pages comes out of the plan file that generated the loop; every rupee comes out of what that ride actually cost.

Where this book has nothing to tell you it says so, in a dashed box, and stops. None of it is guessed. Print it, carry it, and fill the blanks in yourself.

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AT A GLANCE

The shape of it

The five sectors

Each sector is a self-contained run between two points on the loop. Ride the whole thing, or take one sector and go home from where you started.

THE WHOLE LOOP

Master map

── the loop sector ends and crossings

Straight lines between waypoints, not the road itself. The road is longer and bendier than anything drawn at this scale can show. Distances and hours in the tables are road figures, not the lengths of these lines.

Planned, and ridden

This is the loop as drawn, and it has been ridden once. A drawn line and a ridden one are never quite the same thing, and where this one diverged is worth knowing before you plan around it.

MONEY

What it costs

There are no invented rates here. One rider's actual spend across this ride is divided by the nights it took, and those per-night rates are applied to the shape of the loop.

WHEN TO RIDE

Season calendar

A loop this long has no single riding season. It crosses several, and they do not agree with each other. Which months work for which sector is a question of research rather than of arithmetic, and nothing in the plan file answers it. The rows below are filled in only where that research has been done and written down.

A dashed box means this book has nothing to tell you about that sector. It does not mean the sector is open. Dates and permits are the part of a route book a rider acts on, so a gap is shown as a gap. Find that information elsewhere, from a source that is current, before you commit to dates.

PLANNING

Pages to write on

The loop has no dates of its own. These are for yours.

Sector planner

Riding days only, from the costs page. Add your own rest days.

The bike

Daily log

Checklist

Headings only. What goes under them depends on your bike, your season and where you are starting from, and this book is not the place to guess at any of that.

Notes

THIS IS A TEMPLATE

Take it and change it

Nothing on these pages is proprietary and nothing about the loop is fixed. It is a shape that works: two crossings, five sectors, three countries, and a set of waypoints that can be cut, re-ordered or replaced.

The data behind this book

Every figure printed here is read at load time out of four files served from this host, CORS enabled. Fetch them and build your own version.

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