Roads I haven't
ridden yet.

Meghalaya, Nagaland, Manipur, Mizoram and Tripura still to go. Remote, thinly trafficked, and several of them need an Inner Line Permit arranged before you arrive.

Meghalaya's living root bridges are grown rather than built, over decades. The Hornbill Festival brings Nagaland's tribes together each December.

Cherrapunji and Mawsynram are among the wettest inhabited places on earth. Waterfalls, cloud sitting in the valleys, and light that changes by the minute.

Long, fast desert highways with the Thar on either side and very little between towns. Distance riding rather than technical riding.

Fort cities within a day of each other — Jaisalmer in sandstone, Jodhpur's blue old town, Udaipur on its lakes.

The most colour of anywhere on this list: blue walls, yellow stone, and textiles that were dyed to be seen from a distance.

A cold desert above 4,000 m, crossed by Kunzum La. Long unpaved stretches and glacier-fed water crossings that run deeper through the afternoon as the ice melts — the reason people start early here.

Tabo monastery has stood for over a thousand years, and Key clings to a ridge above the river. Kibber, Langza and Komic are among the highest villages anywhere with a road to them.

No haze at that altitude, so the rock reads sharp all the way to the horizon. Nothing green to soften it, and skies dark enough at night to see the Milky Way without trying.

Route 1 circles the island on tarmac, but the F-roads through the interior are gravel with unbridged river crossings and need a proper adventure bike. Wind is the real hazard here, not corners — it arrives sideways and doesn't let up.

Glaciers, active volcanoes, hot springs and black sand beaches inside a single day's riding. A country small enough to circle in a week and strange enough to fill it.

The reason to go. Midnight sun through the summer means golden hour lasts most of the night; from autumn the aurora takes over. Waterfalls and basalt in between.

Overland through Myanmar, Thailand and Malaysia — around 6,000 km and five countries on one set of tyres. Needs a carnet de passage, and Myanmar transit has been restricted for years, so the route has to be checked close to the date rather than assumed.

The whole point is the gradient: Indian plains to Thai jungle to Malaysian coast, watched from the saddle rather than an aircraft window.

Five countries' worth of border towns, roadside food and changing architecture — the kind of series that only works because it was ridden in one continuous line.

The ninth-largest country on earth and mostly steppe. Straight, empty roads where the distance between fuel stops is the thing you plan around, not the corners.

Almaty sits under the Tian Shan mountains, and Charyn Canyon is a day's ride out — a smaller, emptier Grand Canyon with almost nobody in it.

Nothing but grass and sky for hours, which makes scale impossible to convey and interesting to try. Long light in the summer evenings.

The Carretera Austral runs a thousand-odd kilometres through Chilean Patagonia on mostly gravel, with ferry hops where the road gives up. Andean passes to the north and the Atacama beyond that — the driest desert on earth.

Patagonia at one end and Rio at the other, with Uruguay's coast as the quiet stretch in between. A continent that takes a season, not a fortnight.

Granite towers, glaciers calving into lakes, and an Atacama night sky clear enough that the world's observatories were built there.

The Ha Giang loop in northern Vietnam and the Mae Hong Son loop in Thailand are two of the most-ridden roads in Asia for good reason, and Laos in between is mountain road with almost no traffic. Bikes can be rented or bought locally, so there's no shipping and no carnet.

Angkor in Cambodia, night markets, river life on the Mekong, and food worth planning the route around.

Limestone karst rising out of flat ground, terraced rice in the north, and street life dense enough that the pictures find you.