What does "dry hump" mean to a camel?

The word travel traces its origins to the French travail meaning “work of a painful or laborious nature.” Which makes sense if you ever slept in a hostel after age 30, tried to rent a car in Mumbai or flew coach on Spirit Airlines.

So if we accept that travel will be harder that a beaver’s front teeth, we can sit back and bitch about it on social media. And of course, social media is abuzz at the new Wanderlust name change! No longer are we on the Rickshaw Run Hollywood to Bollywood adventure, so a title change was in order. Something exciting…something enticing…something that the dweebs at Facebook wouldn’t reject. So after 11 tries this is what they’d accept: Wanderlust-Gentleman Explorer.

It was a moment of pure travel.

So it begins…

As e.e. rowling, the great lower case poet wrote, and I’ve had this poem committed to memory since I was a child:

“Two roads diverged in the woods… something, something, something… I went on the one less traveled on, and ended up sleeping in my car.”

Wow, I really thought I had that one down, but the point is; e.e. penned this moments before he was attacked in the undergrowth by Capuchin monkeys, for they too, take the road less traveled on and he would have known this if he would have READ THE DAMN GUIDE BOOK.

But where we are going has no road, per se. It has no route, nor is there a guidebook. We have a starting place, Cochin, India (also spelled Kochi) and an ending place, Jaisaimer, India that is in the middle of the Thar Desert. I love the name Thar Desert…it sounds like something from the Hobbit, or Game of Thrones, or as if it was spoken by someone with missing front teeth.

The importance of dental hygiene aside, the truth is that the Rickshaw Run offers us no support what so ever once we leave their Kochi (Cochin) parade grounds. So it’s fourteen or so days of us being on our own, living by our wits, relying on the kindness of strangers, repairing our own rickshaw, finding our own lodgings and food, and, most entertainingly, weeping on the side of the road because we are lost, hungry, tired and alone. Well, never alone. Remember, we have 1.27 billion strangers to rely on for kindness. Our kindness odds are GREAT.

This whole post is to set up the photo of the map. Here is a map of our possible route…which will change by the minute once we are on the Run.

What is 911 in India?