# The Great India Ride

> An 18,181.3 km motorcycle loop of India, published as a reusable route
> template and not only as a travelogue: 97 hops, 94 waypoints, 5 sectors, 3 countries, with
> every coordinate, distance and riding hour in machine-readable JSON on a
> CORS-open host. It was ridden over 93 nights across 29 regions of India, Nepal and Bhutan.

Two things are published here and they are not the same thing. `route.json` is what
happened. `template.json` is the loop as it was drawn, and it is the one to fork:
the sector boundaries fall at the two cities the loop returns to (Bengaluru and
Delhi), which are exactly the places a rider can join the loop or leave it. Take a
sector, take two, or take the whole thing.

## The loop

- **S0, Southern opener** (Trivandrum to Bengaluru): 1,130.1 km, 22 riding hours.
- **S1, West coast & Kutch** (Bengaluru to Delhi): 3,643 km, 74 riding hours.
- **S2, Himalayan out-and-back** (Delhi to Delhi): 2,742 km, 62 riding hours.
- **S3, The long east** (Delhi to Bengaluru): 9,955.2 km, 237 riding hours.
- **S4, Closing run** (Bengaluru to Trivandrum): 711 km, 16 riding hours.

Totals: 18,181.3 km, 411.93 riding hours, 97 hops. The two figures a reader is most likely to question are disclosed on the
page rather than smoothed: the sheet's own total row says 18,039.2 km against the
18,181.3 km its rows sum to, and one hop (Agartala to Kolkata, 1,523 km) is the
sheet routing around the Bangladesh border and is not a rideable day.

## Pages

- [The ride](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/): the journey told in the order it happened, with the
  map, the media library, and the planned loop drawn under the ridden one.
- [The route book](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/booklet.html): the printable version. Sector maps,
  waypoint tables, the cost projection, the season and permit calendar, blank
  planning pages, and the field research appendix.

## Data

All files are served from https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com with CORS enabled. Fetch them directly.

- [data/template.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/template.json): The planned loop: five sectors, 97 hops, every waypoint with coordinates, distance and riding hours. This is the file to fork if you want to plan your own route.
- [data/template-notes.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/template-notes.json): The hand-written guidance: riding seasons, permits, points of interest. Entries reading TO WRITE are unwritten and render as a visible gap.
- [data/route.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/route.json): The ride as actually run: 93 nights, every place slept, and what was spent.
- [data/research.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/research.json): Field research into the xBhp "The Tourer" archive, India's oldest motorcycling forum, transcribed with its own caveats attached.
- [data/k2k.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/k2k.json): Kanyakumari to Kashmir as two lines, one cited and one measured, with the provenance of every coordinate.
- [data/basemap.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/basemap.json): Country outlines for the maps, from Natural Earth's India point-of-view file.
- [data/manifest.json](https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/manifest.json): The media library: 222 clips from the ride, with capture time, region and caption.

## What this material does not claim

- **The seasons and most of the permits are unwritten.** 10 guidance
  notes in `template-notes.json` are empty, and every one of them renders on the
  page as a dashed box reading "Not written yet", never as filler text.
  A route book is acted on, so an admitted hole is better than invented advice.
  The field research found that pan-India riders time their trips by leave rather
  than by weather, so nothing in that archive could be used to fill them in.
- **The cost projection is a floor, not a forecast.** It applies rates observed on
  the real ride to the template's shape, budgets no rest days, and carries no bike,
  no shipping, no flights and no repairs.
- **Permits change.** The Inner Line Permit note for the Northeast reflects sources
  read in 2025. Check the current rules before you ride.
- **The forum counts are keyword-derived.** 337 index pages and 3,317 threads were crawled, of
  which 14 pan-India ride reports were read end to
  end. The aggregate counts come from matching URL slugs and are a picture of
  proportion, not a census. The report's own caveats travel with the figures.

## Reuse

The route data, the build scripts and the pages are free to fork and adapt; the
source is at https://github.com/prasanthsasikumar/thegreatindiaride. The eight
photographs under `/media/research/` are other riders' work, reproduced with their
watermarks intact and a per-image credit, and are not covered by that. Ride media
under `/media/` is Prasanth Sasikumar's.