Himalayan Odyssey '09 - Why Royal Enfields rock the route to Ladakh Priyadarshan Bawikar    2 July 2009

How did the Thunderbird I was riding do after being put through more than 2500km of every sort of road surface imaginable? What makes Royal Enfields the quintessential Ladakh bikes? I attempt to find out

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Now I'll be the first to admit that I'm not really a 'Bulleteer'. While I think Royal Enfield makes some really great bikes, I've never considered owning one, even though most non-bikers tend to think I look like someone who rides an Enfield. I was secretly hoping that the guys at RE would let me have one of their newer Machismo 500 LBs for the journey. But they sought fit to hand the media the twinspark Thunderbirds. Having been sport riding in the twisties around Pune for the last few years, the thought of having to ride a 'cruiser' motorcycle over mostly broken roads and gravel track naturally made me feel a little uncomfortable. But I wasn't going to let that stand between me and what I knew from the beginning would be one of the most exciting journeys of my life.

So as we flagged off from Delhi on the 13th of June towards Chandigarh, I figured that the straight highways would be the ideal place to get accustomed to the T-Bird - a bike which I hadn't ridden more than a couple of kilometers on before. And right off the bat, it became very clear that the bike wasn't really a cruiser, but more of a laid-back street bike. The foot pegs were almost as far back as most of RE's street bikes, and though the seating position was lower, the T-Bird displayed a nimbleness very similar to the Machismos and other Bullets. But the real test of the 'Bird came the next day, as we tackled the couple of hundred kilometers of twisty roads on the way to Manali - the kind of riding I was very familiar with and very critical about.

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While obviously the T-Bird didn't have the excitement of a sports bike on the winding Manali roads, it did tackle corners with a certain kind of grace that made me smile a lot. Apart from the footpegs that kept scraping (mostly due to my excessive weight) the 'Bird had no trouble keeping up with (and even passing) the faster bikes. In fact, I was having so much fun on the bike that I even decided to christen her 'Fatgo'... for reasons that shall remain personal as of now.