First switchbacks, taken slowly

Nobody enjoys the run out through Meerut, Bijnor and Najibabad — trucks, slow towns, heat all the way to the hills. We put it away in a steady four hours with two chai stops and did the real briefing at the last one: pace set by the slowest rider, a fixed order, markers at every turn, nobody overtakes the lead, and if you're not sure, you slow down, you don't speed up.

At Kotdwar we filled every tank — there is no pump in Lansdowne — and I watched the four first-timers get quiet as the road tilted up. Priya asked me, only half joking, whether it was too late to leave the bike here and come up in the car.

Forty kilometres of shaded switchbacks to 1,700 metres, and we rode it at a genuine learner's pace: wide into the corner, look through it, no staring at the drop. There was one stall on a hairpin — Farhan, clutch bites, restarts, rolls on, no drama, and at the next lay-by everyone clapped and he went red.

Somewhere around the halfway hut it clicked for Priya. You could see it in her shoulders. She stopped fighting the bike and started steering it, and for the last ten kilometres she was the smoothest rider in the group. That is the moment you take people to the hills for.

Lansdowne is an army town and behaves like one — clean, quiet, shut by nine. We walked up to Tip-n-Top for the ridge, did the loop around Bhulla Tal, ate early and turned in.

The next morning, through a contact in the Pauri belt, we stopped at a small government school that is down to a dozen students as families move to the plains. We left two boxes — notebooks, pens, a few storybooks — and spent half an hour there while the kids showed Meghna their classroom. It is not much. It is the reason we point the bikes at these particular villages instead of the busy ones. Then the descent: cool, empty, the valley opening up at every bend, and four riders who came up scared going down grinning.