Update From Gangtok

Well, about 6 days into our Indian adventure and so far no one is sick; although three square meals of curry a day does get a bit much! Day 1 Pete and I arrived in Kolkata at about 9am and caught a taxi into the middle of the city to find our hotel. To say the roads are insane is just doesn't do it justice! The number one piece of equipment you need to have on your car is a horn... breaks are second. I don't know how it works, but it does, and once you have gotten used to the horns and lack of any sort of official road rules you start to get a handle on how things really work. Crossing the road is really just about walking out at a constant speed and not getting phased by the horns being blown at you; they're just letting you know that a car is coming....I think anyway... Anyway, once at the hotel we had a snooze in air conditioned comfort and headed out into the craziness again. You're lucky to see one street sign in a 4 block area in Kolkata so we just walked around blindly until we found something interesting. Needless to say we attracted a lot of attention from the locals and once they found out we we're Australian they were quick to rattle off names like Ricky Ponting, Shane Warne etc.. That night we had a wander around some local markets and made ourselves a friend by the name of Khan, a local merchant selling everything from the finest (or so we were told) silk in India, to carved statues and swords. We went back to his shop for a glass of tea and a demonstration of how you can tell if silk is good quality...something to do with burning the ends of it!? After that we promised to come back for lunch in a couple of days with the rest of the boys once they arrived. The next few days in Kolkata were crazy and full on, so we were pretty happy to get out of there and catch our over night train to New Jalpaiguri. The train was surprisingly comfortable; we had a bed each and air conditioning and ended up sleeping most of the way. Once in NJP we had to catch a jeep four hours up the mountains to Gangtok but the morning we arrived there was a mass transport strike so we were stuck there overnight. No matter though, beds were cheap and there were places to eat and drink. The next day we got our jeep to Gangtok and after fours hours of crazy mountain driving we arrived in a stunningly beautiful city built on the side of mountains. This place is more Tibet than India and people are infinitely more chilled than in Kolkata; at most we get a few passing glances and not the 10 minute long stares we attracted down south! We are staying in a really nice hotel along with a whole lot of other rickshaw runners so the mood is pretty excited as you would imagine. We get to see our rickshaws for the first time today, and finish pimping them! We can updated our website along the via text message, so once they really interesting stuff starts we will let you all know what we have gotten ourselves into! Few points: - Any local we have told about what we're doing either just laughs and shakes their head, doesn't believe us, or offers to drive us in a jeep because they just don't believe it's possible to do it in a rickshaw! - Standing out the front of a busy train station in Kolkata was where we felt the most uncomfortable... the stares from people seemed less friendly curious and more.... 'Look at those westerners bags sitting there!'  (apart from that we have always felt fine) - It's really hard to say no to children beggars, but we made the mistake of buying a pack of gum off one and 2 seconds later there were 10 more of them around! - If you want to endear yourselves with locals, start up a cricket game! We did this in NJP and had 100 people playing 4 balls into the first over! Although I have to say, their bowling actions were extremely suspect! - Oh, and Pete and Matty are pretty sure they were kidnapped for a few hours one morning when they drunkenly let a taxi driver take them on a tour of Kolkata! I won't say exactly where they ended up but their request to be taken back to the hotel fell on deaf ears until about 9am...they had been gone since 4am! That's all for now! Keep checking back for updates once the race starts! Dave, Matty, and Alex