Creating a New Adventure – The Recce Ride Experience

Whether crossing the 18,000ft Khardung-la Pass in Ladakh, traversing the Thar Desert in Rajasthan or winding through the endless twisties of the Western Ghats mountain range in southern India, I never tire of shouting the same phrase through my helmet intercom to my partner Josh at the lead of our ride group: ‘You know what, Josh?? We have the best jobs in the world!” And he never gets sick of reassuring me that, ‘yes, Roro, we sure do!” So what could possibly top sharing what we love most with a group of like-minded people? Creating a new experience from a blank sheet of paper. This is called running a ‘recce’ or reconnaissance ride.

‘What’s that all about?’, you might ask? Well a lot, actually. It all starts with places we love to ride and believe adventurers would love as well. Let’s take Nepal, for example.

While Two Wheeled Expeditions is based in Delhi and our coverage of this vast country is quite substantial, Nepal is a very difference place. I had ridden through a lot of it during an around the world ride in 2008 and both Josh and I have covered parts of it for our own for personal adventure in the years that followed. That gave us the foundation to know we love the place and market research tells us we are not alone, so we were in agreement: Let’s build a Nepal expedition.

As you’d expect, the clean sheet of paper doesn’t stay clean very long. We knew we had certain constraints (difficulty, duration, distance) and standards (our ‘best accommodation and restaurant available’ policy, making cultural connections, staying off the beaten trail, etc.) So like any adventurer, we started with research. We contacted everyone we know in Nepal to get insider guidance, we researched dozens of hotels, we mapped out various route permutations and we defined our ‘must have’ experiences. Then came the fun part: 3 best friends meet in a hotel in Kathmandu and begin to make it real. In this case, it was me, Josh and one of our favourite people in the world, Igor from Toronto.

Roro, Josh & Igor in the jungle.

Now obviously we can’t spend cash on our recce rides like we do on our client rides. We stay at cheaper hotels but visit all of the best ones around and build relationships with managers and owners. We don’t use a support vehicle so we have to carry everything we need on the bikes and we have no mechanic so we carry our own spares and tools. Of course, getting a tour of a magnificent hotel like the Baber Mahal Vilas in Kathmandu – one of my favourites on the planet – may give us a good sense of what the experience is like, but to test a restaurant you must eat. Accordingly, our food budget is always lavish (I tell our accountant to post the invoices under ‘Research & Development’) and so it should be: we are foodies and cuisine is the heart of any culture and cultural connection is at the heart of our rides. After each experience, hotel, meal, chai stop, stretch of road, we take a break and discuss our impressions. Was it boring? Dangerous? Did it inspire wonder? The notebooks capture all this info, the exact locations of each feature, the distances and timings of each ride sector, GPS coordinates, landmarks, the menus, the costs, the locations of hospitals and workshops, site entry fees, the contact details of people we meet..everything. This info later forms the basis of a very detailed Expedition Guidebook.

Finally setting off on the recce is a sense of pure adventure: we go where we want to go in pursuit of the best experience possible. Do we get lost? Yes, often. But getting lost is part of the adventure because nine times out of ten, we are led to something completely unexpected, something that MUST be on our tour. Of course, we won’t divulge all of our ‘secret stashes’ here because there is always a competitor looking to copy our rides – yes, industrial espionage exists in the adventure touring business…we have even seen our own tour descriptions copied and pasted in other web sites – but believe me when I tell you that accidental discovery is the essence of the recce: Look at a map, detect an interesting geographical feature or a village hidden in the forest and off we go! The long, mountainous road from Lumbini to Chitwan National Park sparked one of these beautiful finds. Long stretches winding on a narrow highway through the forest revealed a dirt road turnoff into the dense jungle and Josh raised his arm to have us all stop and huddle. A unanimous ‘yes’ and we set off into the unknown.

Winding through the jungle.

The sinuous path through the dense flora was idyllic. We crossed over streams, made our way across fields of tall grasses and broke though beams of sunlight that penetrated the tall trees. A forager encountered in the middle of the forest pointed the way to his local village and there we had tea and biscuits, watched the evenings chicken dinner be slaughtered and befriended the local kids. The 26 km detour through this magical place, a secret path less travelled, has been a fixture on our Nepal ride ever since.

Roro hanging with kid in the village.

I will never stop telling Josh that we have the best jobs in the world because, as I define it, the best job in the world is not a job at all. It is a passion that you would pursue even if it was totally devoid of any monetary incentive. But there is something special about the recce ride. It is about building an experience kilometre by kilometre, relationship by relationship and momo after yummy momo with your best friends. And we cannot wait to begin our next one because a Sri Lanka expedition is right around the corner.

Robb La Velle

Roro La Velle is the founder and Maharaja of Client Experience with Two Wheeled Expeditions. He has ridden around the world twice and laid tracks through over 40 countries on 4 continents. He is also the author of ‘The Places In Between‘, an account of a husband & wife team circumnavigating the world on two wheels