FEATURED ARTICLE
THE LONG WAY DOWN THE KONKAN COAST by Mithun Mukherjee
NOV
Photos by Joel Witwer & Mithun Mukherjee
Joel Witwer said it best in one of his recent posts for the ‘gram: “be careful about the friends you find and the jokes you make because you might just find yourself on a grand adventure.” Joel and I met in 2015 when he was working to resurrect Rochester’s monthly “Vintage Bike Night” which eventually evolved into the RocMotosocial as everyone knows it now. We became fast friends. A couple years into our friendship, we started scheming about moto adventures together. Joel’s already well known to be somewhat of a world traveler (40+ countries, 7 continents) and I’m “that guy in town with the Royal Enfield.”
I
was born and raised in India and had been following the burgeoning adventure motorcycling scene in that part of the world for some time. Growing up in India, riding on two wheels had always been more or less out of necessity, not leisure. So, over the last couple of decades as the motorcycling scene in India started to evolve from basic commuting to exotic adventuring, I naturally wanted a piece of it. Joel had India in his next-travel-conquest crosshairs and the Royal Enfield fanboy in me had always wanted to go to Rider Mania in Goa, India. It seemed natural to plan a motoadventure together around these individual interests.
events (dirt track, flat track, custom bike builds, etc.), music concerts, and moto-art in the sunny state of Goa on the western coast of India by the Arabian Sea. Fun fact: the venue at Hilltop, Vagator, is also the worldwide epicenter of Goa/Anjuna trance music if you’re into that sorta stuff!
For the uninitiated, Royal Enfield Rider Mania is a motorcycling festival of sorts, or as Joel describes it, “Coachella for bikers.” I’ll even take it a step further and call it “Coachella meets Sturgis” (I haven’t been to either, but I imagine that’s what the mashup would be like!) Rider Mania has been sponsored and run by corporate Royal Enfield for the last decade, but has its origins in a grassroots event that started in 2003. It includes three days of uninhibited motorcycling Joel Witwer (front) and Mithun Mukherjee (that guy in town with the Royal Enfield)
20 | MOTOCLECTIC
