An 18,181 km motorcycle loop of India, Nepal and Bhutan, published as a route template you can fork rather than only as a travelogue.
The ride · The route book · The data · llms.txt
A route template. data/template.json is the loop as it was drawn: 97 hops, 94
unique waypoints, 18,181.3 km, 411.93 riding hours, five sectors, three countries, each
hop with its coordinates, distance and riding time. This is the file to fork.
A printable route book. booklet.html
turns it into something you can carry: sector maps, waypoint tables, a cost projection,
a season and permit calendar, blank planning pages, and a field-research appendix from
the xBhp forum archive. 37 sheets of A4.
The ride that was actually run. index.html:
93 nights, 29 regions, every place slept, what was spent, 222 clips.
The template and the record are deliberately not the same file. Sections of the Northeast closed and the weather windows do not overlap, so the loop as planned and the loop as ridden differ, and both are published.
Anyone putting together an all-India ride, or a piece of one, from a blank map. What is here that a blog post is not: real coordinates and distances hop by hop in fetchable JSON; sector boundaries you can actually cut at; a cost model derived from a real ride; the gaps left visible; and the build scripts, so you can point them at your own sheet.
| Sector | From → to | km | Riding hours | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S0 | Southern opener | Trivandrum → Bengaluru | 1,130.1 | 22.2 |
| S1 | West coast & Kutch | Bengaluru → Delhi | 3,643.0 | 74.0 |
| S2 | Himalayan out-and-back | Delhi → Delhi | 2,742.0 | 61.8 |
| S3 | The long east | Delhi → Bengaluru | 9,955.2 | 237.4 |
| S4 | Closing run | Bengaluru → Trivandrum | 711.0 | 16.5 |
| The whole loop | Trivandrum → Trivandrum | 18,181.3 | 411.9 |
The loop returns to Bengaluru and Delhi, and those returns are where a rider joins it or leaves it. Take one sector, take two, ride it backwards.
Everything under /data/ is served with CORS enabled. No key, no rate limit.
curl -s https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/template.json | jq '.totals'const base = 'https://thegreatindiaride.prasanthsasikumar.com/data/';
const tpl = await (await fetch(base + 'template.json')).json();
// Sector 2, as legs you could hand to any mapping library.
const s = tpl.sectors[2];
const legs = tpl.hops.slice(s.hopFrom, s.hopTo + 1).map(h => ({
from: h.from, to: h.to, km: h.km, hours: h.hours,
line: [[h.fromLat, h.fromLon], [h.toLat, h.toLon]],
}));| File | What is in it |
|---|---|
template.json |
The planned loop. Sectors, stages, every hop with coordinates, distance and hours. Fork this one. |
template-notes.json |
Hand-written guidance: seasons, permits, points of interest. TO WRITE means a declared gap. |
route.json |
The ride as run: stops, nights, hotels, spend. The cost projection derives from this. |
research.json |
The xBhp archive field research, transcribed with its caveats attached. |
k2k.json |
Kanyakumari to Kashmir as two lines, one cited and one measured. |
basemap.json |
Country outlines, ~32KB, from Natural Earth's India point-of-view file. |
manifest.json |
The media library: 222 clips with capture time, region and caption. |
Machines get llms.txt, a
sitemap that lists the data files as well as the pages, and a schema.org graph in each
page. All generated: see Machine-readable front door.
The most useful thing here may be what it refuses to guess.
- Riding seasons are unwritten. Ten guidance notes are empty, and each renders as a dashed "Not written yet" box rather than as filler. A route book is acted on, so an admitted hole beats invented advice. The forum archive could not fill them either: its finding is that riders time trips by when they can get leave, not by weather.
- The cost projection is a floor, not a forecast. No bike, no shipping, no flights, no repairs, and no rest days.
- Permits change. The Inner Line Permit note reflects sources read in 2025.
- Two totals disagree, on purpose. The sheet's total row says 18,039.2 km; its rows sum to 18,181.3 km. The sum is published and the 142.1 km gap is disclosed.
Everything is generated from two Google Sheets exports, neither of which is in this repo. Swap in your own and the site rebuilds around them.
node scripts/build-template.cjs "/path/to/Your Trip - Itinerary.csv" # the planned loop
node scripts/build-route.cjs "/path/to/Your Trip - Expenses.csv" # the ride as run
node scripts/build-k2k.cjs # derived: the K2K lines
node scripts/build-seo.cjs # robots, sitemap, llms.txt, JSON-LD
node --test # 108 tests, no dependencies
python3 -m http.server 8899 # then open http://127.0.0.1:8899/build-template.cjs refuses to run without data/template-notes.json, because a
route book with silent holes where its guidance belongs is worse than no route book.
Write the file even if every entry starts as TO WRITE.
Two knobs you will want: CROSSINGS in build-template.cjs names the cities your loop
returns to, and SKIP_NIGHTS / ORIGIN in build-route.cjs handle rows that are not
on the motorcycle route.
index.html booklet.html the two pages
assets/ atlas.js, costs.js, images
data/ everything the pages fetch, CORS open
scripts/ the generators
docs/ the long version of this README
media/ the ride footage, and the credited research plates
test/ 108 tests, Node's own runner
robots.txt sitemap.xml llms.txt generated by scripts/build-seo.cjs
- docs/route-data.md: how the template, K2K, the route book and the research appendix are built, and what each of them refuses to guess.
- docs/the-site.md: the front page, the map, and the media library behind it.
- docs/working-on-this.md: tests, house style, local dev.
The route data, the build scripts and the pages are free to fork and adapt. Two things
are not, and both are marked where they live: the eight photographs under
media/research/ are other riders' work, reproduced from the xBhp forum with their
watermarks intact and a per-image credit; the ride media under media/ is the
author's own.
If you build something on this, a link back is appreciated and not required.