The third phase of the expedition begins at Digha beach on the Indian coast — sea level, humid, the ocean behind you — and ends in Kathmandu, Nepal. 900 kilometres on foot. Three to four weeks of carrying everything you need on your back, mixing wild camping with nights in villages and small hotels along the route.
What makes the trek unusual is the context it arrives in. By this point, the body has spent months on a bike. The cycling muscles are conditioned, efficient, almost automatic. Then you switch to walking, and everything changes. Different muscles, different rhythm, different relationship with the ground beneath you. The first days are uncomfortable in a way that feels almost unfair after everything that's come before.
"Walking slows everything down. And in that slowness, you start to notice what you've been moving too fast to see."
But that discomfort is instructive. It's a reminder that adaptation is always specific — that what you've built in one domain doesn't automatically transfer to another. The body is more particular than we like to think. And so is the mind.
Walking at this scale has a quality that cycling doesn't. It's slower, obviously — but the slowness does something. You're closer to the ground, closer to the people you pass, closer to the landscape. Conversations happen that wouldn't happen from a bike. You notice things. The pace forces a kind of presence that faster movement makes easy to avoid.
I think about this when people talk about wanting to change — wanting to shift something fundamental about how they live or who they are. The instinct is usually to go faster, to do more, to find the most efficient route. Sometimes the answer is to slow down enough to actually feel where you are. The trek taught me that.
