A year after the first big loop, I did the obvious thing and started planning another one. Same idea as before — leave Cochin, point the bike north, and come back when the trip meter shows a number worth coming back for. But where the previous ride had been mine and mine alone, this one quietly turned into something else. It belonged to other people. Old friends, scattered all along the route, each of them waiting at a different stop.
Nine days later I rolled back home with 2,172 kilometres on the meter and a brand-new respect for the humble motorcycle seat. This is the story of that loop — Cochin to Bengaluru, then up through Chikkamagaluru and Gokarna to Goa, and the long way home through Coorg — and of the two things that ended up shaping all of it: the friends, and the slow, stubborn rebellion of two badly cushioned saddles.
Two days in Bengaluru
I set out from Cochin early and rode straight for Bengaluru, the highway unspooling in that familiar, hypnotic way it does when you have a long day ahead and no real reason to hurry. By evening the city had me — traffic, noise, the particular electric buzz Bengaluru carries after dark — and I checked in for what would be a two-day stop.
First city, first friend. Santosh was born and brought up in Bengaluru and now lives in the UK; he happened to be home at the same time I'd be passing through, and that was reason enough to build a stop around him. We spent the evening bar-hopping, and there's no better guide to a city's bars than someone who grew up drinking in them. We worked our way through a few of Bengaluru's breweries — the kind with big polished steel tanks standing behind glass — and caught up on a couple of years in a single night.
The next morning he took me to The Rameshwaram Cafe. If you've spent any time on the internet you've probably seen the queues outside it — and I can confirm the queues are entirely real. We went early, joined the line with everyone else, and it was worth the wait. Their dosa lives up to every bit of the hype: crisp, generous with ghee, the sort of thing you think about for days afterwards. A filter coffee to finish, and we were done.
My second evening in Bengaluru ended with another reunion — this time Sony Mathew, a friend who'd been my junior back in college. Two pubs, a long stretch of catching up, and that easy feeling of a friendship that simply picks up where it left off, as if no time had passed at all. Bengaluru, this trip, was turning out to be a city of reunions.
The rest of the team
The next day I rode on from Bengaluru towards Chikkamagaluru. While I was doing that, Krishnaraj was riding all the way up from Cochin to meet me there. Krishnaraj is an old riding friend — the same sort of friend as Varun Jose, who joined a leg of last year's trip — the kind you don't need to brief, because he already knows how the day is going to unfold and is fine with it either way.
We stayed at a homestay near Mullayanagiri, and it was the kind of place that justifies the detour all by itself — hills folding away in every direction, clean and genuinely comfortable rooms, and the deep quiet you only get when the nearest town is some distance back down the hill. The drone footage below is from right there.
From Chikkamagaluru onward, it stopped being a solo trip. Two bikes, two riders, and a route to argue out together over breakfast. The team, as it were, was now complete.
A revolt in the saddle
We woke the next morning with a plan to ride all the way to Goa in a single push. The plan did not survive contact with the roads. They weren't terrible, exactly — but they were bad enough, and somewhere in the middle of all that jolting and patching, both of us began to register a very specific complaint from a very specific part of our anatomy.
I'll be honest about it: it got bad. Bad enough that the cheerful "let's just push through to Goa" quietly became "let's stop, and let's stop now." We pulled the plug on the Goa plan for the day and rolled into Gokarna instead.
Gokarna turned out to be exactly the right kind of accident. We ended the evening at Om Beach with cold beers and the sea going slowly dark in front of us — the same easy magic the place had worked on me the year before. Some stops you plan months in advance. Some stops you simply limp into, sore and grumbling, and end up grateful for. This was firmly the second kind.
Goa, and a third friend
The next day we made the real run to Goa. It wasn't entirely smooth — we picked up a puncture along the way and lost a fair bit of time getting it sorted by the roadside — but by the afternoon we'd reached our hotel, a place called Swimup, and settled in for a few days of doing very little.
Goa came with its own reunion. Varun Jose — who had ridden a whole leg of last year's loop with me — couldn't join the ride itself this time; Motoverse hadn't started yet and he needed to keep himself free for it. But he came to the Swimup anyway, and the three of us made a proper evening of it: drinks, food, and the kind of long, unhurried conversation that is, when you get down to it, the entire point of a trip like this.
One evening we went down to the shacks at Vagator beach and simply stayed. We were still sitting there at around ten at night when the tide came in far enough to wash right up to our feet — and not one of us was in any hurry to move.
There really isn't much that beats this — catching up with old friends who, despite the distance and the years and the lives that pulled everyone in different directions, are somehow still this close.
The cushion problem, diagnosed
After a few good days in Goa, we set off for Coorg — Madikeri. And by now the saddle situation had been promoted from a passing complaint to a genuine, ride-defining problem. Both of us were sore, and a long day on the bike had stopped being purely fun.
The cause, once we finally sat down and worked it out, was almost embarrassingly simple: cushioning. Krishnaraj rides the first-generation Royal Enfield Himalayan, and the foam in its seat had compressed over the years to roughly the thickness of a sheet of paper. My bike came with a low seat, which by design carries less padding than a taller one. Two completely different motorcycles, the exact same flaw — there was simply nothing left under us.
Madikeri more than made up for the discomfort getting there. We rested properly, and then did the one thing you are genuinely obliged to do in Coorg — we ate pork. The region is famous for it, and we worked our way happily through several different preparations, each one better than the reputation that preceded it.
A roadside fix
The final day was the run home to Cochin via Wayanad. The scenery did everything you'd want Wayanad scenery to do, and the seats — predictably, faithfully — were still a problem.
And then, somewhere on the road after Wayanad, we found our fix. We passed an upholstery shop — and, almost without discussing it, pulled over. We asked the man inside if he could cut us two small pieces of sponge, just big enough to lay on top of our seats. He could, and he did, no doubt wondering what exactly these two riders were planning to do with them.
It looked ridiculous. Two loose slabs of foam sitting on top of two touring motorcycles, held down with whatever straps we had to hand. But here is the thing worth reporting honestly: it worked. Both of us were genuinely, measurably more comfortable for the last stretch home. Dignity, it turns out, is negotiable. A sore backside, past a certain point, is not.
From there it was a straight, and noticeably more cheerful, run home to Cochin.
The numbers
The dashboard at the end of it told the whole story in figures: 2,172.4 kilometres on the trip meter, just under thirty-two hours of actual riding time, an average of 61 km/h, across nine days and three states.
Last year's ride was about the road — about riding solo, and the particular clean quiet that comes with it. This one was about the people. Santosh in Bengaluru, the college junior over two pubs, Krishnaraj for the whole back half of the loop, Varun turning up at the Swimup — the route itself was really just the thread running from one friend to the next.
And if there's a practical lesson buried under all of it, it's this: a square of foam, cut to size at a roadside upholstery shop, should not be the single most important upgrade in your touring setup. But if that's genuinely what it takes to get you home smiling — take it, and don't overthink it. I'll be sorting the seat properly before the next loop. Because there will, without question, be a next loop.
Ridden in November 2024 on a BMW F900XR. Route: Cochin → Bengaluru → Chikkamagaluru → Gokarna → Goa → Coorg (Madikeri) → Wayanad → Cochin. If you've ridden this loop or are planning your own, I'd genuinely love to hear about it — reach me through the contact page.
