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My motorcycling trip to Bhutan
1600 kms in 10 days of cliff hugging rides cutting across the Royal Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan from west to east....
Prologue:
It was a sunny Monday afternoon and the chat table at CCD was getting heated up without any hot ingredient from the vendor. Bullz were zeroing in on their ticket bookings for an upcoming long ride to the mountains. The words like “Sikkim”, “Nathula Pass” were floating all over the place and right on the left corner sat a young man with a crazy mind inside his cranium. Anything known or predictable doesn’t attract him, rather he feeds on the uncertainties and challenges of the unknown and untraversed.
Bhutan, yes that was where I wanted to go, not that I wanted to flow against the tide or had developed any repulsion towards Sikkim, but the enchantment entangled with the name of Bhutan was too heavy to avoid – One of the lesser known neighbors of India, a royal kingdom far and away from the corrupted and materialistic world, a land of beautiful people designated as the richest country on earth in terms of Gross National Happiness and tucked away at the foothills of the mighty Himalayas, promising every sight as a frame for the lenses.
I started with my homework and analysis on the feasibility of making a run through the royal kingdom, after a couple of blogs and travelogues, I was sure this can be done and that too accommodating the time crunch everyone has due to professional commitments. When I laid out the plan in front of my gang of bikers, aka Bullz, “let’s scrap it”, “let’s go goa” was the vibe. My task was getting daunting now, I didn’t want to bury my dream and neither could I agree with them for a Goa or a Sikkim. What to Do??? Picasa came to my rescue, some awesome photos from the already present albums and the pendulum started swinging!!!
Tickets were already booked till New Jalpaiguri (Siliguri’s main railway station) for the Sikkim plan and no issues in using them for Bhutan either, since it’s the same gateway! After the bubble of initial enthusiasm burst, the onus of successfully completing the first international tour of this freaky biking gang from Bhubaneswar was laid on 3 of us, Dipu on Yamaha R15, Som on Bajaj Pulsar 200 and Me, affectionately called Arnie the Bull (ATB) on Bajaj Avenger 200.
The bikes were shipped to Siliguri with a promise that it will reach atleast a day before the 7th of October, supposedly the eve of our exciting trailblaze. The checklists got all the points checked out before we stepped in to the 1st railway platform at the capital of Orissa. The final plan looked like this at onset:
