Lost Horizons

From a Rajasthani chai stall to the surreal salt flats of Kutch, a TVS-led ride on the iconic RR310 brings a rider face to face with the mythical 'Road to Heaven'

- By Sharan Sanil

My first brush with North Indian touring came on the cusp of twenty three.

Back then, I indulged in some barely legal cavorting with Delhi bikers on streets much wider than what Bombay now affords me, and a couple of those encounters eventually led to a ride out of town onto the Jaipur Expressway. I had never ridden on a highway that straight before. Bombay-Pune regulars like me in the late 2010s were usually left itching for the odd twisty or hell, even a downshift.

But for all the expressway's grand, undeviating charm, it was at a chai tapri in the amusingly named town of Chomu, Rajasthan, where I first heard someone mention a stretch of road that made even that arrow-straight expressway sound mundane. They called it the Road to Heaven.

The name sounds like something dreamed up by a tourism board, but the stretch itself is very real. Cutting across the vast white expanse of the Great Rann of Kutch, the road is little more than a thin ribbon of asphalt drawn across a salt desert, so flat it begins to play tricks on the eye. Originally built as a strategic access route towards India's western frontier, the strip of tarmac eventually developed a reputation among riders who discovered that crossing the Rann felt less like travelling across land and more like riding through light itself.

The nickname—popularised over social media—likely came from that illusion. When the sky reflects off the salt flats, the horizon begins to dissolve. Ground and atmosphere blend into one continuous sheet of colour until the road appears to disappear into brightness.