Tiger Trails

This past week was spent in the company of Triumph and its motorcycles. First, we wrestled Tiger 800s on slick and slippery trails in Aamby Valley, Maharashtra, under the watchful eye and cutting tongue of Vijay Parmar, rider extraordinaire and chief trainer, Tiger Training Academy.  Later, we got a little seat time on the much-anticipated Triumph Street Scrambler as seen in the previous post.

Tiger Trails is a structured training program that is designed to instill the basic techniques of off road riding and confidence hand in hand. Large adventure motorcycles can be difficult to manage in the dirt because of their weight and bulk. You can get away with a lack of dirt riding skills on small bikes, but an adventure bike can hurt you if you don’t know what you are doing.

By the end of the session, we were humbler, safer and far more confident riders in the dirt…

--HARSH MAN RAI

Vijay Parmar can't believe how bad journos are off-road...

Tigers in the land of the Snow Leopard

So as I got back from thrashing around the dunes in Dubai on the Christinis I made my way to Delhi. Harsh and I wanted to beat the crowds and make an early ride to Ladakh via Srinagar as it had been a while since the two of us had been into the mountains just for our selfs and even longer since we had taken the route through Srinagar. Triumph was brilliant in providing a Triumph Explorer 1200 to me and an Tiger 800 XCX to Harsh for our trip.

It was horrid and hot in Delhi and our plans were to do as many miles as we could the first day but we overslept and by the time we left Delhi it was Chandigarh that we ended up in for the night (just making it more obvious we can't bypass Chandigarh ever). That turned out pretty well because as we got into Chandigarh I got a call that our first Himalayan was ready for delivery. Always a fun evening going to get a new motorcycle.

You forget how spectacular the state of J&K is until you go through the Jawahar tunnel and you come out into the Kashmir valley. The roads were in a horrid state in many places but all because there is lots of construction and upgrading of the existing roads. So hopefully 2017 the same ride will be far easier. Not like it made us much of a difference because the Tigers are totally at home on the highways as they are on the rough stuff that we refer to as roads.

I have been sitting on this post for a few days now so maybe I shall just let the images tell the story...