Roads, risks and rural realities: embodied high-altitude motorcycle mobility in Ladakh

Motorcycle tourism in Ladakh, India represents an intensified form of embodied rural mobility in which movement is shaped by environmental extremity, infrastructural fragility, and negotiated risk. This study analyses 143 narrative-based user-generated reviews using interpretive thematic analysis to examine how riders construct meaning through high-altitude travel. The research addresses three questions concerning motivational drivers (RQ1), emotional and sensory engagement with landscape and risk (RQ2), and the role of community interaction in experiential interpretation (RQ3). The findings indicate that riders frame the journey as a deliberate test of endurance and identity rather than as recreational sightseeing. The high-altitude landscape is described as affectively powerful and sensorially immersive, often associated with heightened awareness, vulnerability, and reflection. Environmental and infrastructural uncertainty are not treated as barriers but as integral to experiential value, requiring continuous adaptation and resilience. Interactions with local actors including mechanics, monks, homestay hosts, and army personnel function as forms of informal social infrastructure that stabilise mobility and shape cultural meaning. By conceptualising motorcycle tourism as an embodied and infrastructurally mediated mobility practice, the study contributes to adventure tourism and mobilities scholarship by offering a context-sensitive analysis beyond destination-centred approaches. It suggests how experiential value in extreme rural environments emerges through sustained negotiation between bodily exposure, infrastructural conditions, and relational encounter, positioning the journey itself as the primary locus of meaning-making.