How Adventures Overland's Road to London drives began

How the Road to London drives actually began

Adventures Overland did not start as a travel company with a plan to drive cars to London. It started with one man quitting his job.

In 2010, Tushar Agarwal left an IT consulting career in London and drove home to Delhi alone, becoming the first Indian to complete that route. The drive took 51 days and crossed 17 countries. There was no company behind it, no paying clients, just a man and a car working out a route through Central Asia into India.

Two years later, in 2012, Agarwal and Sanjay Madan turned that experience into a business, offering curated self drive expeditions inside India, to Ladakh, Spiti and Rajasthan. The founders' own mileage kept growing alongside the company's.

Around the world in a Fortuner, then around India in a convoy

Between September 2013 and December 2014, Agarwal and Madan drove a Toyota Fortuner around the world, covering 90,000 km across 50 countries over 15 months. Inside that trip, in Australia, they set a Guinness World Record for the longest journey in a single country, 17,107 km covered in 28 days. The expedition became a 10 episode television series called The Great Indian World Trip, shown on TLC and Discovery Science and Turbo, and a book of the same name.

That round the world drive is why Adventures Overland's India trips carry weight with Indian 4x4 and overland clubs. The founders had already driven the roads their clients would later follow. In 2015 the company ran its first expedition outside India, to Iceland, before building toward the trip its name is now most associated with.

Thirteen cars, twenty seven people, one road to London

Adventures Overland's commercial link to the United Kingdom started with a chance meeting in 2016, when Dilpreet Singh Bindra joined a company trip to Bangkok and struck up a partnership with Madan and Agarwal. The next year, in 2017, that partnership produced the first Road to London expedition with paying members: 27 people in 13 cars, 20,000 km over 55 days, through 18 countries.

The convoy crossed Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, dealt with snow on mountain passes and the Gobi Desert, drove through Russia and Europe, and loaded the cars onto the Calais to Dover ferry for the final leg into London. None of the 13 cars were expedition trucks built for the job. They were the kind of cars an Indian club member already owns.

Why this matters for Indian off-roaders

Among the global names on the overland beat, Overland Expo in the United States and Abenteuer and Allrad in Germany are venues where people gather to look at gear and vehicles. Adventures Overland is different. It is the Indian outfit that actually drives the route, with ordinary club members in ordinary cars, and that history is why its waitlists fill up every time a new Road to London or similar trip opens. For an Indian 4x4 or SUV owner wondering if a car bought for weekend trails can realistically cross 18 countries, the answer already has a 2010, a 2013 and a 2017 behind it.

Sources

• About Adventures Overland
• On the road to London: How a chance meeting led to decade-long adventures
• 6 Lessons From the Great Indian World Trip