From Delhi to Yangon

From Delhi to Yangon

By Andy Benfield Emilie Röell   |   Sunday, 05 January 2014

"WE should just ride it over!" It was said jokingly whilst on the train to Mandalay. But as we were getting delirious from the intense rocking of the train and lack of sleep, we fantasised about how nice it would be to have a bike in Myanmar and reminisced about the old Royal Enfield Andy still had stored in Delhi from when he used to live there a few years ago.

Negotiating for the motorbike.

Somehow the idea stuck and, back in Yangon a couple of weeks later, we started to look seriously at just how crazy an idea it would be to try to ride a motorcycle from Delhi to Yangon.

Pretty crazy, as it turned out – first and foremost because the border between India and Myanmar is closed to foreigners. Second, the route would have to pass through some of India's dodgiest states in the country's restive northeast. Plus there were the unpredictable road conditions in the Himalayas, which looked to be some of the most challenging in the world. Then there was the innumerable red tape involved in transporting a motorcycle across six international borders. And the small matter that it's actually illegal to ride a motorcycle in Yangon.

It was quite understandable therefore that we couldn't find evidence of anyone who'd driven this route previously. A couple of organised groups – including the Calcutta to Kunming Car Rally – had actually crossed overland from India to Myanmar, but they had the sort of high-level contacts we could only dream of. Plus they were escorted all the way through, which certainly wasn't what we had in mind. No one seemed to have been permitted to cross independently for at least several decades.

So why try? The lure of adventure was strong. Just the names of the places that the route would take us through – Kathmandu, Sikkim, Bhutan, Nagaland – was enough to convince us that we should give it a shot. Moreover, we felt it would offer a great perspective on Myanmar's past, present and future regional connections. We live on Shwe Bon Thar Street in downtown Yangon, an area brimming with Indian roots and fading colonial buildings. Probably half of the traders on our street can claim Indian ancestry, their forefathers having made the journey from the old country. We thought it would be fascinating to retrace that trip and see how the region beyond Myanmar's western borders is changing. It would mean travelling along old trade routes that will soon become the new high roads of Asia as India and China develop and as Myanmar, a crucial link between the two, opens up.

Interested, or perhaps apprehensive, onlookers check out the spectacle of motorbike travel. Photo: Supplied

So it was that a few weeks later we found ourselves on a flight to India, not quite believing what we were about to try to do. In the meantime, we'd been busy. We had a rough route planned that looked kind of feasible on paper, though whether certain thin lines on the map corresponded to navigable roads on the ground – especially just after the monsoon – was a different matter. We'd secured visas for India and special permission to travel through Bhutan with our bike, but not Nepal. And we still had no green light to cross into Myanmar overland, despite a series of missives to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Nay Pyi Taw.

We'd done our own amateur security briefing and, while safety in western and southern Nepal seemed hazy, in Northeast India and particularly in Manipur it was crystal clear – several bombings and highway robberies in the past few weeks assured us that this would be the most dangerous part of the journey.

We'd studiously ignored the fact that neither of us have a clue how to maintain a motorcycle, deciding that we'd rely on roadside mechanics and crossed fingers instead. And we'd have to gamble on Google Maps for the navigation. We now had what we thought were the essentials for a motorcycle trip stuffed into two backpacks in the airplane's overhead lockers, including the vital Swiss Army knife and hip flask of single malt which we felt should be sufficient to see us through the more sticky situations. We also had a shiny new blog online, though we wondered what hope we really had of living up to its ambitiously optimistic address, Ridingtorangoon.com.

Only now, as we looked out the airplane window and down at the vast expanses of the northern plains of India, did other vital questions start to pop into our heads: Would the motorcycle still perform at high altitude? Just how cold was it going to get? What was the number of days one should reasonably allocate for sickness and breakdowns? And where exactly would you pass the night should you get lost in the middle of the Nagaland jungle? All of these would be answered in the coming weeks, proving several of our airborne guesses to be wildly wrong. Our musings, however, were interrupted by the cabin crew preparing for landing, and a few minutes later we were bumping down onto the tarmac of Delhi's Indira Gandhi Airport.

We allowed ourselves a day in Delhi for final preparations and some last minute shopping. Most importantly, though, we wanted to get the bike 'blessed'. We viewed the protection of Ganesh as absolutely essential given the amount of holes that still existed in our plan. So we headed up to Lalli Singh's bike garage in North Delhi where we were warmly greeted with namastes and chai.

Lalli had introduced Andy to the legendary Royal Enfield motorcycle some years back and taught him how to ride (at least, in a certain fashion…). The Royal Enfield is a bike that is ubiquitous in India, a classic 1940s-style machine that can be seen chugging along the highways and byways across the country, piloted by mustachioed khaki-clad cops, turbaned young Sikhs and anyone else who wants a little piece of Bollywood machismo in their life.

About to depart for the epic ride to Rangoon. Photo: Supplied

Despite hosting numerous over-landers, Lalli confessed that he'd never heard of anyone succeeding in riding from India to Myanmar. Thus he gave us a very special puja, during which he had a moment of inspiration after considering that our surnames are Röell and Benfield. "Achah, so Röell Benfield on the Royal Enfield!" he exclaimed, declaring that this was certainly a sign from Ganesh that our trip would be fortuitous.

With the bike appropriately garlanded, the next morning we corded our backpacks onto the back, strapped on our helmets and kicked the engine into life. Ahead of us lay 6500km (about 4050 miles) of the unknown. The idea that we'd actually ride all the way to Yangon on this thing was hard to believe. And what we'd experience in the attempt, we really had no idea. But it was time to stop worrying and start riding.

Not toward Myanmar just yet. First, we had to make a very planned excursion to the Taj Mahal, a place neither of us had ever visited despite the length of time we'd both spent in the country. Expecting potholes, dust and blaring trucks, instead we were greeted by the spanking new Yamuna Expressway, which runs from Delhi down to Agra, 200km of smooth six-lane asphalt with hardly another vehicle in sight. The expressway provided the ideal stretch to ease us in and for Emilie's first go at riding, which we agreed went rather swimmingly. Team spirit suitably cemented, we steeled ourselves for what we knew would be the far more challenging roads ahead.

http://www.information.myanmaronlinecentre.com/from-delhi-to-yangon/