Cycling Royal Rajasthan Ride On The Hippie Trail

Benjamin Levin is the Content Creator on the 2025 Hippie Trail Cycling Adventure. He looks back at the tour’s experience in the Indian state of Rajasthan.

During the first rider meeting in Agra, India, the excitement levels were high. There was a nervous energy radiating from our riders, an assortment of experienced alumni and first-timers. It was understandable. India is a far-off place, culturally different from many of the countries in the ‘global north.’ It is loud, crowded, and smelly (in both good and bad ways); sometimes, it feels like you’ll never escape the perpetual honking of horns. People were nervous about the traffic. How could one ride in that onslaught of cars, cows, camels, bikes, motorcycles, tuk-tuks, buses…? The list goes on.

As the riders arrived at the first lunch, the concerns were alleviated. People pulled in with huge grins on their faces, energetically talking about how great the morning was. The mood had completely shifted. “There are no rules. Cars are coming the wrong way sometimes, and there are no lanes, but it is really amazing. We were in kind of heavy traffic in the morning leaving Agra, which is a fair-sized city, and it just felt like people would look out for you.” exclaimed Agra to Goa rider Michael Talbert when asked about riding in the legendary Indian traffic. “It was very different than I anticipated,” he went on to say. “I thought I would be looking around like crazy and stopping on a dime, but no. The safest thing was to just get in the flow of traffic and go through, and everyone’s looking out for you.” Leaving Agra was busy, but that’s part of the India experience.

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As we left the hectic roads for smaller less congested ones, we entered beautiful Indian farmland. Mustard and wheat wreathed the landscape in yellow and green. Many of us were taken aback by how green India is. When you hear people talk about India, you never hear of the peaceful farmland that gives way to desert scrub as Uttar Pradesh becomes Rajasthan.

During this first section of the Hippie Trail, Royal Rajasthan Ride, which runs from Agra to Udaipur, the group discovered how incredibly warm and friendly Indian culture is. With TDA, you get off the beaten track, so of course people stare and are interested in you. This celebrity status can make some people uncomfortable, but here in India, it is often followed by a smile and a little head waggle that makes it hard to feel put off by it. So many people approach, asking where you are from, what your name is.

They want to take selfies and invite you into their homes. It is an incredibly warm country. After every day on the road, a rider will come in telling everyone about a lovely experience they had with the Indian people. “People invited us to a wedding and gave us food, not expecting anything in return. When we stopped to repair a flat tire, they had given us cups of tea,” said John McQualter, another Hippie Trail full-tour rider. This has been the universal experience for the TDA riders so far. “The Indian people are exceptionally friendly… people are actually interested to see you come through their local villages,” mentioned Richard Whitlock.

Another major highlight of this section of the trip is the hotels we have stayed in, or in some cases, palaces. Every single night of that section, we stayed in a unique and wonderful place. Some hotels lean towards the modern side of things, like our hotel in Pushkar, which combined modern architectural design with the arid Rajasthan landscape to create a desert oasis feel. On the other side of the spectrum, and no less impressive, was our heritage hotel atop a hill in the middle of Roopagarh, where, 400 years ago, battles were fought upon under its walls as the Maharaja defended his seat of power. Every night we stayed somewhere notable, with riders exclaiming how this hotel had to be their favourite, no matter how many amazing ones they had seen in the weeks past.

The mood leaving Agra at the beginning of the section versus the mood entering Udaipur at the end of it could hardly have been more different. What was once a group of excited, but nervous, TDA riders, is now a confident group that has experienced what Rajasthan has to offer in a way that few people ever get to experience. If you have ever wondered if India is worth cycling through, that you will be too overwhelmed to have a good time, do not worry. We were concerned about the same things and have come to see that it is nothing more than opening day jitters. We have learned how to navigate Indian motorways, experienced the warmth of the Indian people, and slept in palaces fit for a Maharaja (literally!).

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