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Female biker’s solo India odyssey to show it’s safe for single women to travel and explore the country
- Men were among Indrani Dahal’s biggest fears when she set out; an encounter with an AK-47-wielding soldier in a forest in central India left her trembling
- Otherwise Dahal, who learned to ride a motorcycle at 16, has ‘been received everywhere with kindness’ on her 18,000km trip and had some beautiful experiences
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Late one evening, Indrani Dahal found herself in dangerous territory.
She was in Jharkhand, a province in Central India that is a stronghold of the Naxalite militant organisation. Her GPS was not working and she had no mobile phone reception.
As she rode deeper into a forest on her sturdy Royal Enfield 500CC motorcycle, an AK-47-wielding sentry appeared and suggested she would be better off retracing her path to the nearest highway.
“I was trembling as I rode away and prayed silently that I wouldn’t have a flat tyre. Only when I reached the highway and a roadside dhaba [restaurant] did I get my breath back,” she says with a smile.
Men – with or without guns – were one of Dahal’s main concerns when she began exploring India on her Enfield, soon after most coronavirus restrictions in the country were lifted in November 2020.
Kalpana Sunder is an independent journalist based in Chennai, India. She writes on travel, environment, gender, architecture, culture, lifestyle, food and fashion. Her work has appeared in The Guardian, the Christian Science Monitor, Al Jazeera and the National Geographic Traveler.
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