Leader of the Pack: Goan's Motorbike Tours by Greg Cook
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Eighteen years ago Suzie Lumsden had never been to India and had no idea how to ride a motorbike. Today she runs thriving business leading bike tours across the magical sub-continent that has now become her adopted home.
The bone white peaks of the Himalayas jutting vertiginously overhead, sunrise over the serenely flowing Ganges, the glowing red hill forts of Rajathstan, palm-fringed Goan beaches bustling with fishermen and empty ruined cities sacked by the Moguls and abandoned to the monkeys. These are just some of the amazing sights witnessed by Suzie Lumsden since she first arrived in the magical sub-continent of India back in 1989, and all of them framed between the chrome handlebars of her beloved Enfield 350 Bullet, the classic motorbike as synonymous with British India as a spot of tiffin.
In 1999 Suzie formed her own tour company, Blazing Trails, offering bike riders of a more adventurous nature a once-in-a-life time opportunity to share the magic from the saddle, with tours taking in Goa, Kerela, Rajathstan and the Himalayas. “Whether you want to challenge yourself as a motorcyclist or learn about yourself as a human-being, riding a bike in India provides the perfect opportunity,” explains Susie. “Personally I’d recommend both.”
A Passage to India
It’s an endorsement to be taken seriously from a lady who in early twenties quit her family home in rural Cambridgeshire, where she worked behind a desk at a travel insurance company, for a passage to India.
“I guess that gradually, as I was dealing with all these mundane daily issues but set against the backdrop of all theses exotic destinations, it dawned on me that I hadn’t actually been to any of them,” she recalls. “As soon as I’d made that realisation I felt stagnant. I knew I had to do something about it, I was young, I had no ties in the UK except my family, and more strangely as soon as I made the decision to travel I had this unerring conviction that I had to begin in India. I didn’t do much planning, I just packed a rucksack, scraped together all the money I had at the time and got on a plane. Ten hours later I found myself in the middle of Delhi surrounded by a teaming, chaotic mass of twelve million human beings all getting on with an utterly different way of life – I don’t think I could have set myself up for a bigger culture shock.”
This is obviously untrue as several weeks later Suzie found herself on a motorbike she had no idea how to ride while embroiled in some of the most chaotic traffic systems in the world. The big question is why?
“Out of anger and total indignation.” She explains simply. “Probably two of the worst reasons you could find to go out and make an impulse purchase, especially one that’s just cost you virtually every penny you’ve got in the world.”
Bitten By the Bike Bug
“It happened while I was having a few beers one evening with a collection of western backpackers I’d recently met. I’d been in India for a few weeks by then, just meandering south, but I’d already noticed that most of the population seemed to get about on two wheels, motorised or not. I’d also seen a lot of Enfield bikes on the roads. I thought they looked great and it struck me what a brilliant way they’d make to get around the country as a traveller.
When I mention this out loud this one American guy in the group just turned round and said, ‘chicks can’t ride motorbikes’. He was so sneeringly dismissive I was incensed, so the next morning a packed up at dawn and headed straight back to Delhi, navigated my way to the Enfield dealership and bought myself a 350cc Enfield Bullet – the bike I still have today.”
It was a noble and defiant gesture with just one minor problematic element – Suzie had never ridden a motorbike before in her life.
“And when I calmed down, I experienced the interesting sensation of realising I’d just spent all my money on something I had no idea how to use.” She explains. “However, that proved to be the true beauty of India – I got the basics from the guy at the shop, nursed my way out of Delhi onto the deserted dirt back-roads of rural India and began the process of teaching myself exactly how to ride a bike. You could only get away with it in a country like this, basically because that’s the way everyone learns out here”
“I’m glad to say I learned pretty quickly – and entirely out of necessity! But once I felt confident in the saddle I experienced a sensation of complete and total freedom. I’d enjoyed a comfortable middle-class upbringing in a democratic western country, but I’d never felt so totally in charge of my own destiny. I was on a bike with this awesome country full of colour and vibrancy and ritual and poverty, full of alien sights and smells pouring past me everyday – I was completely intoxicated. I slept rough by the roadside, was robbed several times, camped out alone in ancient ruined temples, and spent several months with an amazing old man who was a tantric guru. Without speaking a word of English he taught me to speak, read and write fluent Hindi. He lived in a hut on the edge of a rural village and the villagers were terrified of him, but if they had an ailment they would come to his door and he would blow the bad winds out of them.”
Biker Nomad to Businesswoman
There’s little doubt that Suzie was living the freewheeling life that so many people only dream about, but after nearly ten years on the road she knew that if she wanted to stay here permanently, she would have to set down some proper roots, and that would involve finding a home and earning a living. So with that in mind, Suzie decided to make the transition from biker-nomad to businesswoman.
“By that time,” she explains, “I’d notched up 35,000km and pretty-much travelled the length and breath of India. Then in 1999 I got involved in The Enfield Challenge, which was a 1000km sponsored ride for a cancer hospital in Kerala. There were 120 of us in all, with a lot of riders from the UK, and I’d forgotten how much fun it was to ride in a pack and share the experience. Then it occurred to me that if I wanted to earn a living, stay in India, do what I love and share it with other people, then setting up guided bike tours was the perfect solution – I’d also made some great contact through The Challenge, so that’s how Blazing Trails was born.”
“The experience of starting a new business in India is probably much as you’d imagine,” she continues. “The Indians inherited their bureaucratic system from the British and then put their own embellishments on it. Basically to achieve anything here you need bags of patience and dogged determination, but the most useful technique, which I and a lot of other people I know have employed, deliberately or otherwise, is to go to offices at the very highest level and burst into tears. They only take you seriously here if you look at your wits end - then documents and permits that have been circling the system for months or even years get stamped and sorted within minutes.
The one thing I did, which to me was imperative, was affiliate with a British-based tour operator. We offer our packages through Jewel In The Crown who are excellent, and by this means we are ATOL bonded and members of ABTA. I also decided to make our base in Goa as its easy to get to with package flights and being a former Portuguese colony is the most westernised part of India, which makes it easier for our first-time visitors to acclimatise. We have an old colonial mansion which is our headquarters and also where I live and where we keep the bikes and do our maintenance”
Experiencing the Real India
It’s from here, in India’s smallest state, hidden between jungle and rice field’s down a pot-holed road just a few kilometres inland from the thoroughly westernised strip of neon bars and nightclubs that stretch the coast from Baga to Sinquerim, that Suzie now runs her thriving business, opening the gateway for more adventurous bikers away from the tourist beaches and into 1,229,737 square-miles of the ‘real’ India, while adapting naturally to her new matriarchal position at the head of an extended family of staff members.
“I hope what these tours do is offer people nothing less than the experience of a lifetime.” Says Suzie emphatically. “We’ve been doing this now longer than any other company out here and we now have a fleet of thirty 350cc Royal Enfield Bullets, although we use the 500cc models for the tour over the Himalayas. We currently offer tours of Goa, Kerala, the Himalayas and recently Rajathstan, which all include a guide, usually me, a support vehicle and a support crew that includes a mechanic and a trained medic.”
“I actively encourage women on our tours and we’re getting more and more, which is great. The Enfield is the perfect ‘cruising bike’, comfortable but tough. It’s no Japanese pocket rocket but it’s a great leveller amongst riders of all sexes, and as even my most cocky tour party members soon discover, you don’t want to pull 120mph down a busy Indian road – ever.”
“However, although it’s the bikes and the people, the sights and the sounds that make the trip, it’s what people take back home inside them that makes the difference. You can learn more about yourself in one week out here than in a lifetime at home.
I rode around this country with my eyes on stalks, drinking it in without a moments introspection, and by the end of it, without really noticing, I’d changed into the person that I’d always meant to be.”