03/05/2026
Himalayas Solo-Bike Road Trip (19.03 - 13.04.2026)
Day #1 — Patna to Siliguri
19 March 2026
My journey began a day late, and for that I didn't feel regret.
I had meant to leave on the eighteenth. In my head the engines were already running, the mountains already calling from the far edge of the plains. I had returned only shortly before from a week of yoga in Jamshedpur, leaner in body, lighter in spirit, and determined to begin this great ride at once. There were still things to arrange, straps to tighten, small preparations to finish, but none of that seemed beyond repair. I was ready, or believed myself to be.
Then my father asked when I was leaving.
When he heard it would be the next day, he said with that soft authority fathers possess even in old age that I should stay one more day. He did not insist. He did not need to. A man in his late seventies asking for one more day from a son who no longer spends enough time at home speaks in a language deeper than command.
So I stayed.
The Himalaya, I decided, could wait twenty-four hours.
On the morning of the nineteenth, before I touched luggage or keys, I joined my father for yoga. My younger sister runs a WhatsApp yoga group, and each morning he joins faithfully, watching the instructor on screen and following along with the seriousness of a man who respects discipline. I stood beside him and did the session too. For twenty or thirty minutes we moved through stretches and postures in the pale Bihar morning light, father and son breathing in the same rhythm.
Then I withdrew midway, because the road was waiting.
Packing for a long ride is never elegant. It is a mixture of urgency, memory, and paranoia. Have I packed the charger? Where are the documents? Is the rain layer accessible? Did I secure the bungee cords? I moved quickly, but with the nervous concentration of a man who knows forgotten trifles become important hundreds of kilometres later.
By half past eight I was downstairs with my gear.
Before I left, something happened that has stayed with me more vividly than many mountain views. My father climbed onto the motorcycle himself. He sat there smiling, hands near the handlebars, while we took a few photographs of him pretending to ride it. It was playful, almost boyish. Yet to me it felt ceremonial—as though he had blessed the machine simply by sitting upon it.
I carried that feeling with me when I finally rode out from our home in Khemnichak, near the bypass in Patna, at around nine in the morning.
The first hours were through the long practical geography of the plains: traffic, markets, trucks, villages, stretches of widening roads that India has slowly improved over the years. Nothing about that terrain was grand, but beginnings rarely announce themselves with grandeur. They happen in the chest.
Somewhere outside Patna I stopped to fill my reserve fuel canisters—two plastic cans, two-and-a-half litres each. The main tank had already been filled earlier, but I wanted every contingency addressed. That small act made the expedition feel official. I was no longer out for a ride. I was provisioning for uncertainty.
Then I settled into the discipline of the day: ride, stop, drink, ride again.
I fed myself sensibly. Fruits whenever I saw them fresh. Water constantly. And above all, sattu—the great Bihari traveller’s food, roasted gram flour turned into sustenance. It fills the body without burdening it, gives strength without sleepiness, and asks little from the stomach. On a day of heat and distance, it felt almost medicinal. Papaya here, juice there, another pause beneath shade, then back to the road.
All day the motorcycle throbbed beneath me like a second pulse.
As the kilometres accumulated, my thoughts turned repeatedly to what I was attempting. In October 2020 I had completed a solo ride through India’s Northeast, touching the Seven Sisters in the uneasy season of the pandemic. That journey had demanded improvisation, border crossings, nerve. But even then I knew this new expedition would be of another scale altogether.
That earlier ride now seemed like a trailer.
This was the film.
Perhaps more than one film.
Because what lay ahead was not merely distance. It was altitude, weather, foreign borders, mechanical risk, fatigue, uncertainty, and the strange mental solitude that only long solo travel can produce. I knew it even then. Somewhere beneath my confidence was a quiet awe at my own audacity.
By evening I reached Siliguri, gateway to the hills. The light was thinning. I had hoped to reach a monastery in time and request a night’s stay, but I was late. The gates were closed. I could not even enter to visit.
So hunger took command.
Across the road stood a modest little eatery, the kind one might overlook a hundred times. A woman seemed to run it; there were army men about, or men connected to the army. I sat down and ordered a thali.
That meal became, in retrospect, the first sacrament of the road.
For a hundred rupees I was given rotis, rice, dal, vegetables, perhaps fritters, perhaps more than I now remember exactly. But what I remember unmistakably is its character: clean, hearty, hill-like, nourishing in a way city food often forgets how to be. It tasted of usefulness and honesty. After a day in the saddle, it seemed magnificent.
Then came the old traveller’s evening ritual: searching for shelter.
I tried for cheap lodging, then for a dharamshala, then for an ashram. Nothing worked. Someone mentioned a temple. I went there and found women occupied with Navratri observances. They were courteous but cautious. Elections were approaching in Bengal; strangers were suspect. They did not wish to let an unknown outsider sleep inside the premises.
I persisted gently.
At last a compromise was reached. I could store my belongings safely inside the temple compound, but I would sleep outside, using my tent.
So that was how the first night of my grand Himalayan odyssey was spent: not in some romantic mountain lodge, but on the ground outside a temple in Siliguri.
Rain came three or four times during the night. Street dogs made patrols through the darkness and objected to my existence. Sleep arrived only in fragments. Yet strangely, I did not feel broken by it. Perhaps adrenaline had replaced fatigue. Perhaps the spirit, once finally loosed into its long-desired freedom, refused to shut down.
Before dawn, around half past five or six, I called one of the women who had given me her number. A man came, opened the gate, and returned my things.
I packed in the grey morning light, strapped everything down again, kicked life into the machine, and rode out.
The mountains still lay ahead.
But already the journey had shown me its nature: tenderness before departure, labour on the road, food honestly earned, rain without complaint, and motion as the answer to doubt.
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