A Thrilling Ride

This time we headed to the India Bike Week in Goa astride two extremely capable motorcycles: the Triumph Tiger 900 and Tiger Sport 660

Tiger 900

The India Bike Week festival has been known to bring the motorcycling community together. It has been somewhat of a ritual for most bikers to ride down to the venue. After a long break it was exciting to prepare for this ride.

While I have always enjoyed long-distance riding, I had not yet had an opportunity to do Pune-Goa astride a large ADV, so this seemed like a perfect time to tick it off my list. While I selected the Tiger 900 Rally Pro, my colleague, Kurt, chose to accompany me astride the Tiger Sport 660.

We got off to an early start from Pune and quickly found ourselves in the Katraj Ghat section that we had to tackle in darkness. This was made effortless due to the powerful headlights of the bikes illuminating the way and that is just one of the reasons why a large ADV bike is a perfect companion in just about any situation. We then got on to the main highway at around 6.00 am and started to cover distance. With the visibility still poor, we rode carefully until the popular breakfast spot just before the Khambatki Ghat. From there, we got a glimpse of the sunrise and met some fellow bikers who were also on their way to the festival.

While leading, it was surely helpful to have that large display feeding me information while the windscreen kept me cruising comfortably against the wind blast. Even though this Tiger is off-road focused with a 21-inch front wheel, it was amazing how stable, planted, and flickable it proved to be on those twisty roads. This made it easy to cut through all the truck traffic and the potent 888-cc motor allowed me to power through and overtake slow-moving vehicles.