Why I’m Riding With Scenic
There’s a moment on every Himalayan ride where the phone goes quiet.
You feel it before you see it. The little signal bars don’t ping. The blue dot on Google Maps stops twitching. You’re somewhere above 4,000 metres, the road has just turned to rubble, and the algorithm that’s been bossing you around since Delhi has finally given up.
Most riders panic at this point.
I’ve started looking forward to it.
Because that’s the moment the ride begins. No more “fastest route.” No more “turn left in 200 metres” into a dry riverbed. Just you, a map you should have downloaded, and a vague sense that the pass is up there somewhere.
The first time it happened to me in Kashmir, I sat on a rock for half an hour and laughed.
The second time, I bought a proper navigation app.
Why Google Maps Doesn’t Cut It
Look, Google is brilliant at getting you to the office.
It is terrible at getting you anywhere worth going.
The whole product is built around speed and certainty. Less time. Fewer turns. Wider roads. The exact opposite of what an adventure rider wants. On an ADV bike, the fast road is usually the worst road. The empty squiggle on the map is the one you came for.
That’s the gap.
For years I’ve patched around it with GPX files, screenshots, paper maps and the kindness of dhaba owners. It works. It’s also a faff.
So when Scenic Motorcycle Navigation reached out about a partnership for my ADV rides across India and the Himalaya, I tested it properly before saying yes. I’m not in the business of slapping affiliate codes on things I don’t ride with.
This one I do.
What Scenic Gets Right
A few things, and they all point in the same direction. The app is built by people who ride.
You plan routes around waypoints, not start-and-end pins. You can ask it for curvy over direct and it will dig out the squiggles. Tap a button and it builds a round trip from where you’re standing, which is a small miracle in places like Ladakh where half the joy is “let’s see what’s down there.”
There’s a library of thousands of rider-built routes inside the app. Local riders, real rides, properly rated. In a country where the best road is rarely the obvious one, that’s worth its weight.
It works offline. You download the map, you ride, you don’t think about signal. Spiti, Zanskar, the inner lines of Uttarakhand. No bars, no problem.
It logs the ride properly. Speed, elevation, distance, the whole shape of the day. So you’ve got something to look at later, beyond a vague memory and a few blurry photos taken with frozen fingers.
And the interface works with gloves on, which sounds trivial until you’ve tried to pinch-zoom a touchscreen at minus five with summer gauntlets and a bad attitude.
What It Doesn’t Get Right
I’m meant to be selling this thing, so let me be useful.
Scenic has a learning curve. Waypoint planning is more powerful than dropping pins on Google, but it takes a couple of routes before it clicks. Some riders bounce off it in the first ten minutes and go back to what they know.
If you give it an afternoon, you’ll get it.
If you don’t, you won’t.
That’s not the app’s problem.
The Spiti Ride, September 2026
The partnership kicks in properly with my Spiti Valley ADV ride this September.
High passes. Long dirt sections. Real expedition stuff, the kind where the bike eats fuel and you eat dust and at the end of the day you sit on a rooftop in Kaza and watch the light go off the Dhauladhar.
Every route on that trip is being built and tested inside Scenic.
Which means anyone joining gets clean, shareable routes loaded onto their own phone. No “where the hell are we going” radio chatter. No one staring at a paper map at 4,500 metres with the wind chewing their fingers off.
Well. Fewer of those moments.
A Deal, If You Want One
If you want to try it yourself, I’ve sorted 20% off the annual premium plan
Premium opens up unlimited routes, unlimited waypoints, and the offline maps you’ll actually need. Worth it if you’re planning anything bigger than a weekend.
Go to https://scenic.app/ and use code ALT20 for 20% off your first year
One Last Thought
Most people treat navigation as a utility.
Riders know better.
The route shapes the ride. The ride shapes the day. The day shapes the trip. And somewhere along the way, you stop counting kilometres and start collecting moments. The moments are the whole point.
Scenic gets you closer to the moments.
That’s the only reason I said yes.