Can't tyre her out

Shady hotels, AirTags, dirty loos, surprised locals. Life on the road looks different for Vishakha Fulsunge. But she's set records and shown us what women can do. What a ride!

- Urvee Modwel

In 2019, when Vishakha Fulsunge was in college, she was riding her motorcycle near the Belgaum toll booth in Karnataka, when she heard a puppy crying near the service road. "I saw a group of men playing catch with the pup. I kept my helmet on - there's a camera in it and I can make calls if needed." She went up, asked for the puppy. They refused.

Fulsunge managed to grab the animal and clean its wounds. The men snatched the puppy back, she reached for it again. "I noticed the men gather around me. There were 11, they'd been drinking. It started raining. I knew I needed to get out of there."

One of the men pulled out a knife.

Fulsunge ran to her motorcycle and sped off with the puppy inside her raincoat. The men chased her in an SUV in the dark downpour. She finally stopped at a tea stall, ran inside and told the people there what was happening. The car stopped too, but ultimately left.

To most women travelling solo across India, an incident like this is enough to reconsider travelling alone altogether. For Fulsunge, 30, it's just another bump in the road. She's been motorcycling long distances by herself since 2016 and covers terrains that few dare to explore. She rode 1,800 kms from Mumbai to Vishakhapatnam in one go in 2019. She then crossed the sea on ship and rode to Andaman. The India Book of Records credits her as the first woman to "ride across the Andaman Islands on her own bike". It also records her as the "first female rider to cross the Bay of Bengal" in 2019, (no woman had taken a motorcycle over sea and ridden to the mainland before) and the first woman rider to complete the Narmada Parikrama, a 4,600 km circle around the river, on a motorcycle in 2020.