WINNER: CITY OF BRISBANE / SINGAPORE AIRLINES ASIA PACIFIC TRAVEL WRITERS AWARD. $AUS 12,000 1st prize. When Peter Riordan and Stephanie Dowse set off from Nepal for India on a vintage Enfield Bullet nothing could have prepared the two novice motorcyclists for what lay ahead. Harried by murderous lorry drivers, breakdowns, pot-holes and bullock-carts, the pair journeyed to the southern-most tip of the subcontinent and back to the Himalayas, coming face to face with an India that few outsiders experience. Their 17,000-kilometre odyssey takes the reader along teeming, fume-choked highways, through backwaters of exquisite beauty, and into the world of everyday India – at once welcoming, exasperating, enchanting, and unknowable.