Across India in King Rama's footsteps

A journey across India by motorbike can be a nostalgic delight or, as Martin Buckley discovered, a hot, slow and dangerous undertaking... but he would still favour it over any other mode of transport.

I fell off just the once but I feel I looked eternity in the eye several times

I must have spent a second longer than was wise contemplating some rural temple or verdant country scene on my left.

I turned to see the highway filled by three vehicles - a lorry, the bus overtaking it and the car overtaking it.

I twisted my handlebars, crashed across ruts and went over, the heavy motorbike falling on my legs.

The car flashed past, on its driver's face an expression of insanity. A solicitous crowd gathered round and a cup of chai appeared.

But that's the trunk roads for you. Drive them and you take your life in your hands.

I already knew that and still I had decided to cross India by motorbike.

The Ramayana - the Hindu epic that is India's best loved story - has at its core the tale of a kidnapped queen, and King Rama's journey across India to find her.

'Living history'

I wanted to retrace his route but by what means? To my mind, there was only one way to explore India's back roads: by Bullet.

After university, a quarter-century ago, I crossed Sri Lanka on the back of a friend's ancient Honda. We wound through paddy fields and followed tracks alongside the hazy turquoise of the Indian Ocean.

Motorcycles are a popular mode of transport in India

Then, in India, I discovered the archaic Royal Enfield Bullet, an ancient English marque, still being manufactured in India, unchanged, a chunk of living history.

Few people owned cars in the early '80s but nor could many afford a Bullet, the privileged mount of policemen and soldiers.

I spent a year in a small South Indian town, where an elderly neighbour owned and immaculately maintained an old Bullet.

As he wiped and polished, he enthused about his love of the far-off Isle of Man TT Races.

I was really more interested in the folk tales and ghost stories of which he was also an endless source. But I fell under the spell of the Bullet, with its steady pace, its four-stroke thump, its absurdly utilitarian, black paint job.

Twenty-five years on, when I needed a mode of transport to cross India, there was no competition. Besides, a Bullet gets you down bumpy lanes that would otherwise require a jeep.

It puts you in contact with the landscape and its inhabitants. A Bullet is so much more than a mere mode of transport.

In the event, I crossed India by motorbike, boat and even microlight aircraft.

Nostalgia

A hero of the Ramayana is the monkey god Hanuman. When I discovered that a microlight called the "Hanuman" is now manufactured in Bangalore, naturally I had to cadge a lift.

I find myself nostalgically recalling the many other traditional modes of transport I have used during 25 years visiting India: the great black beasts of the steam engines that were still common in the '80s; the marvellous miniature steam train, designed a century ago, that still claws its way into the Nilgiri mountains.

Mark Tully is affectionately known as "Tully Saab" in India

I have taken many boats, too. I remember dawn on a Monday morning, after a weekend on Elephanta Island, when I had to return across the bay to Bombay.

The only transport was an impoverished fishing smack with no motor and a sail made of old sacking. There was no wind, the sea was glass.

When, that afternoon, I finally reached the Indian newspaper office where I was then working, my boss was not amused.

I remember, too, being rowed across the broad Brahmaputra River in Assam to an island temple, with the former BBC Delhi correspondent, Mark Tully.

Mark was trailing his feet in the deliciously cool water. Reminiscing about his days in an English boarding school, he lay back across the boat and gave full voice to the hymn Breathe On Me, Breath Of God. It is not the sort of image you easily forget.

Danger

My favourite form of Indian transport remains the motorbike.

Of course, Indian roads are not exactly safe. Recently in central India I came to the site of a three-way collision, where 13 corpses lay beneath blankets, under the shocked eye of a very young policeman.

The Ramayana epic is essentially about good overcoming evil

I fell off just the once but I feel I looked eternity in the eye several times.

I crossed bandit country where other motorcyclists carried rifles.

Then, there was the time two traffic cops stopped and threatened me, hustling for a bribe.

My crude old Bullet broke down several times. Oh and motorcycling in the Indian heat can be unpleasantly slow, hot and dusty.

India is changing. It produces very good modern technology nowadays like that high-tech microlight. Yet the Bullet is still in production.

Perhaps it will soon be seen as an embarrassment, an absurd throwback to colonial times but I think its slowness and solidity, its charisma and romance, will guarantee it a long life yet...

As the ideal way to explore India's two million miles of often green and temple-strewn roads.

From Our Own Correspondent was broadcast on Saturday, 26 July, 2008 at 1130 BST on BBC Radio 4. Please check the programme schedules for World Service transmission times.