The Spice Route on Royal Enfield (South India)

Thirteen nights from Mahabalipuram to Kochi, guided, along the historic spice route of South India on a Royal Enfield.

The spice trade is the thread and it is a real one: this coast supplied pepper and cardamom to Rome, then to the Arabs, the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British in turn, and the buildings along the route record every one of them.

Mahabalipuram opens it with its shore temples, then Auroville and Pondicherry, an experimental township built round a golden meditation dome and a French colonial quarter that has kept its grid and its street names. Swamimalai follows by way of the Airavatesvara temple at Darasuram, a world heritage Chola building on the Cauvery. Chettinad comes next, where nineteenth-century merchant families built mansions of marble and Burmese teak and then largely abandoned them, with a stay in one and a bullock cart in the evening. Madurai follows, then the Western Ghats up to Kerala’s highest ground and Munnar’s tea estates, and the backwaters at Alleppey with a private evening cruise on Vembanad, the longest lake in India, before Kochi and the church where Vasco da Gama was first buried.

The bike hire is included; the full inclusions were not itemised on the operator’s page and are worth confirming at booking. October to March is the season, since the monsoon reaches Kerala in June and the state gets a great deal of it. Fourteen days at a gentle pace covers two states, four landscapes and a good deal of history, and the riding is easy by Indian standards: sealed roads, short days and traffic rather than terrain as the thing to get used to.