Stephen O'Connell

Day 1 - Shillong to Nongstoin

Day 1

Finally an update! We've been in some pretty rural places for the last couple of days - after a fantastic launch (beautiful weather and no crashes or breakdowns....!) we took the mountain route out of Shillong to the west. We decided we'd seen Guwahati on the taxi driver and that some nice scenery was more our sort of thing.

Quite a few teams were out with us - we had a good little convoy of rickshaws passing each other. Unfortunately the roads were terrible as we went along - no tarmac, massive pot holes, difficult bridges and loads of dust. Then to top that off - night fall took us surprise - the sun sets very quickly, it's dark by 6pm.

We continued on to the next major town where we'd heard there was a hotel, however when we got there (lots of rickshaw runners in a rural mountain town). Just as it was looking like an uncomfortable first night the locals came to our rescue - they opened up community buildings for us, we slept in a primary school! They couldn't help us enough - thank you people of Nongstoin!