Sachin Chavan has run Royal Enfield's rides programme for a decade

Every Indian rider who has signed up for the Himalayan Odyssey, Rider Mania or one of Royal Enfield's off road training weekends has, without necessarily knowing it, signed up for something built by one man. Royal Enfield's own trainer profile page for its off road training school names Sachin Chavan as the person who has headed the company's Rides Department for over a decade, and credits him as the person behind the Himalayan Odyssey, Unroad and Rider Mania, the brand's full calendar of official rides in India.

A racer before he was a route planner

The same Royal Enfield page states that Chavan was the first person to win the Raid de Himalaya, India's high altitude car and motorcycle rally raid, on a Royal Enfield. This claim comes from Royal Enfield's own website and this desk has not found an independent result sheet that confirms it, so it should be read as the company's own account of his record, not a verified sporting result. It still matters on this beat because it sets Chavan apart from a marketing executive put in front of a camera. His credential, by Royal Enfield's own telling, is a result on the same Himachal and Ladakh roads that the Himalayan Odyssey later used as its own test.

By the time the company was developing its first Himalayan motorcycle, Chavan was already its head of rides and community. Speaking to Australian Motorcycle News in January 2016, ahead of the launch of the original Himalayan 411, he explained an engineering call made for the sake of route builders like him, not just for a spec sheet. "We've tried to get the right compromise between seat height and ground clearance," he said. "We took a call to go with the 21 inch front wheel instead of the 19, which a lot of soft roaders and on off roaders are doing, and that was primarily to make it go over the rougher sections more comfortably."

The rides and the school

Royal Enfield's trainer page lists Himalayan Odyssey, Unroad and Rider Mania as events under Chavan's department. Rider Mania has since been rebranded Motoverse, as Royal Enfield's own event page for Motoverse 2026 confirms. The off road training school is a newer addition to the calendar, and the Hyderabad edition's trainer page names three people working alongside Chavan: Hema Choudhary and Jitin Kanwar, both from the Rides Innovation Team, and Aditya Malaker, who the page says handles operations for the brand's rides and events. A separate registration page for that Hyderabad school listed a fee of ₹1,500 a rider for a full day of training on curated off road circuits, though riders should check current dates and pricing directly with Royal Enfield before signing up, since programme details change between editions.

Chavan's own account of why riders keep returning to these events, given to Forbes India about a Himalayan Odyssey edition, was less about the motorcycle and more about the group. He called the route to Khardung La "a terrible understatement" of the word treacherous, describing a steep elevation profile and long stretches where a rider travels alone on bad, empty terrain. What gets riders through, in his account, is trust built into the format itself. "The riders know that there is someone behind them just in case something happens. It is this implicit trust that keeps them going," he said.

Why this matters for a rider signing up

For a rider weighing a Himalayan Odyssey slot or an off road training weekend, the person who designed the programme is not incidental. Chavan's own description of the Khardung La climb reads as a fair warning rather than a sales pitch, and the training school he now runs puts named instructors, not just a brand logo, in front of beginners. Riders should still verify current fees, dates and route details on Royal Enfield's own event pages before they commit, since the figures above come from pages that may not reflect the latest edition.

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