Past few days recap

So, just a quick recap as I sit here in Guwahati, preping for the 100km sprint to the finish line tomorrow.  It's been incredibly eventful, so I'll just jot a few things down - more detailed stories will follow.

Had an awesomew day off in Bubaneswar at a sweet hotel with a pool and nice beers.  The Tuckers and Norway joined in on the fun.  While we were enjoying the sun, some Bajaj dealership mechanics (the co. that makes the rickshaws we're driving) were tuning up our racers for the second half of the journey.  The next day, our rickshaw broke down 3 times.

Drove up the foothills of the Himilayas, to Darjeeling.  It was a daunting drive, and we sat in 1st or 2nd gear pretty much the whole way up - also stalled a few times which prompted some pushing and running to catch up.  Our clutch is really in bad shape.  But it was definitely worth it for the views and the friendly people - everyone we saw was happy and smiling!

Drove down the mountains the next day, which included driving across the "road" where a landslide had occurred recently.  The road was basically dirt and rocks in an uneven path, with hundreds of meters in a sheer drop to the left of you, just to keep you on your toes.  It's especally fun on the parts where the road tilts towards the drop.  We got amazing video, though there is a lot of cursing, as both Ryan and I thought there was a good chance we might actually roll off the mountain and die.

Drove through the night on the edge of our seats through the eastern part of West Bengal and Assam.  We had no place to stop to sleep for the night,a nd locals were warning us that the roads were dangerous and that we were in bandit country.  Ryan looked to the side at one point and saw some guys standing in the trees with no lights, just smoking cigarettes, so we just gunned it for around 3 hours.  Finally got stopped at a police blockade, where there was a lot of subterfuge, and finally we were detained at the roadside station.  It seemed to be a sketchy situation, but it turned out they just didn't want us to get hijacked.  We left in the morning at dawn with police escorts all the way to the provincial border.

Spent today driving some of the worst roads ever, and ended by wheeling into Guwahati (the capitol of the eastern states) and being flagged to the side by a local traffic cop.  After all we'd been through, we just wanted to get to the hotel, so as he directed us to the side, we blasted through the intersection and sped off down the road.  The Norway team behind us saw him flip out and grab a motorbike from a civilian and start chasing us.  We were chased through the city, though with a few quick moves we got away and made it to our hotel.  I have no idea what the guy wanted with us, but I had been getting bad vibes all day from cops and didn't want to deal with it at all.

Now we're so close to the finish line we can taste it.  See you all on the other side!

West Bengal, India

potholes are killing us slowly - carburetor, spark plug, and battery all being held in place with electric tape. Also, welding is coming apart on the luggage rack/roof. But Shillong is close now and morale is high!

West Bengal, India

It's slow going on the minor highways - we're hating it. Just praying that these massive potholes don't make our engine drop out of the rickshaw.

Days 1-4 Recap

Hey everyone!

It has been one hell of a journey so far.  We've had no real time to update, but rest assured we are alive and well (somehow).  I'm currently in a nice hotel in a city called Rajamundry, on the eastern coast.  Ryan and I decided to treat ourselves to a little pampering, considering the journey we've been on so far.

The start line was chaos.  Everyone was lined up in a semi-circle on the parade grounds in Cochin, and at the start, everyone made a mad dash, but for what, I'm not sure.  People scattered in every direction, and no one seemed to really know where they were going.  Ryan started the drive, with me navigating.  It worked out really well for us actually - we hugged the water until we found the bridge to cross out of town, and from there it was smooth sailing - for a while.  We had a good travelling group, with Big Fat Tuckers and Ninja Escimo (the Norweigians) following close behind us.  The rest of the day, we were forced to learn many lessons.  For one, don't let the gas station attendants fill your tank directly.  The rickshaws run on a mixture of oil and gas, but you can't put the oil in first, or it'll flood the engine and require you to clean out your carborator.  We learned the hard way to mix it yourself.  That little setback cost us at least an hour, but we did learn how to clean out the carborator, and had lots of funny Indian guys help us out.  We eventually made it to a small town called Pollachi, where we bedded down for the night.

Day 2 was plagued with engine trouble for our friends, the Big Fat Tuckers.  They sent us and the Norweigians on, in hopes of catching up.  As we made our way across to the coast, we bumped into a trio of American girls (team: Rickety Cricket), who accompanied us all the way to a place called Krishnagiri.  As we neared the goal, it was our rickshaw that started to ahve some engine trouble. 

This continued until the next day, when we simply couldn't get things going.  We sent the other teams on ahead, and called for a mechanic.  Luckily, this guy was awesome.  He may or may not have been a wizard - he had a long scraggledy beard, and worked magic on our rickshaw.  Whatever brown magic he used was amazing, because once he finished, we had n problems, and did the most kilometers we'd yet done, and all after 1pm.

However, day 3 also held what was probably the most stressful, sphinchter-clenching, dangerous expereince of my life.  It was basically several hours of pure adrenaline punctuated by one of the happiest eating experiences I've ever had.

We had always planned on avoiding major cities, as driving a tiny rickshaw in such chaos is kind of like trying to cheat death.  Ryan and I had planned to avoid Chennai - but as we had difficulties with our route (being that the road we planned on taking around Chennai turned out to be a half of a road through tiny villages with naked kids and goats crapping right in front of the rickshaw as it crawled along at a mere 5kph), we were forced to head for the city.  We looked on the map, and saw that our highway 4 would intersect with highway 5, which we needed to go north, so we thought, "this'll be fine, how hard could it be".  I was driving, and it was harder than any driving I've ever done.  I'm still trying to process what happened, but basically, the highways here don't stay separate from city streets when you come into a town.  add to this the rush hour traffic, the general lack of driving rules here in India, nighttime driving (which consists of everyone in opposing lanes with their brights on), people on foot constantly crossing the 6-lane highway in dark clothes, complete lack of street signs and markings, and the fact that most busses and trucks are 10 times bigger than our rickshaw, and you may start to get an inkling of the terror this experience can induce.  Not to mention that the entire time you're driving, you're also thinking about how if you stop you'll eather be crushed or somehow not be able to get back out of the city and be trapped for some time.  We have some good video that hopefully I'll get to post some time soon. 

The one highlight was that during this drive through the outer circle of hell, as I was crossing an intersection in the middle of the city, Ryan suddenly yells out "McDonalds!"  I immediately swerved over to the side, parked by some other rickshaws, and he ran in to get us a feast of American food.  Chicken nuggets, fries, KFC, cokes.  We gorged ourselves, taking a respite of calm and security after the ordeal.  I was ashamed at how much I loved the whole meal.  It was as if I had had a near death experience, and so the meal tasted that much better - judge me if you like, I've never had a better chicken nugget, and I'd wager you would have agreed. 

All in all, we got into the situation through stupidity, but we came out of it feeling like real men.  I don't think I'll ever be afraid to drive anywhere after that.

After Chennai, we made great time up the coast, trying to catch up to where our friends were staying.  We actually ended up passing them, and stopped at a small roadside town for a sleep around 1 am.  The place was a total hole in the ground, and had one "lodge", which was probably the worst place I've ever stayed.  There were roving packs of wild dogs, a drunken Indian man asking if I had any American wine, whatever that is, (blood)stained sheets, and to beat it all, the hotel night staff made us push the rickshaw up a wide flight of stairs to lock it up because, as they said, people would steal everything they could off of it.  We ended up "sleeping" for 3 hours before waking up and getting the hell our of there at 5:30 am.

Day 4 was great, though.  We made great time up the coast, had a delicious lunch in Vijayawada, talked to lots of nice people along the highway, including 2 hilarious young Indian truck drivers who waved me over to the side of the road because they wanted to take pictures with us and the rickshaw.  They spoke no english, but they happened to be driving a truck full of coconuts (I guess) and gave us each one to drink from.  I was sad I had no gift from the US to give them, but we got tons of pics with them on their camera phone, so at least they'll have a funny story to tell their friends.

So that, pretty much summs things up for us ehre.  We had a great night in an awesome hotel last night, and we're meeting back up with BFTs and the Norweigians at the beach in a few hours.  We're also taking the rickshaw to a mechanic today to get her a good thorough check-up.  Morale is high, and barring some major problems, we should make the end of the race, maybe even with time to spare!

Best to you all, and we'll be posting more updates from the road - I finally got us registered to send in text updates!

Pre-Race Prep

We've made it to Cochin!  Right off the bat we've had a change of plans, as I am an idiot and didn't notice that a few months ago the endpoint of the race was changed from Gangtok to Shillong, which adds about 220 miles to the race length.  Should make getting home a little more exciting.

Race registration was this morning, and since we've gotten the chance to meet some of the good people who'll be joining us on the mad dash across India.  Also, we've had a couple of test-drives of our TukTuk - hilarious.  The first moments of attempting to get her going ended in failure when it turned out they had forgotten to put gas in before we set off.  The second attempt went (relatively) smoothly, with both Ryan and I taking her around a small park with minimal incident (and maximal laughter from the locals watching us).  Later this afternoon, we forayed a bit further from the race grounds, seeing some of the sights in Fort Cochin, the central area here where there are tons of olf colonial churches built by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English.

Currently, we are designing the paint job for our TukTuk, which will be heavily animal-themed and will include a couple of ridiculous terms written in Hindi, which I will not explain here, but wll leave for when we next see each other...

I know I continue to say this, but hopefully photos are coming soon - we've got some great ones so far (Also, the Goan sand has killed my camera's lens-extending mechanism, so I am in the process of finding a new camera).  Best to you all!

Burning...

We've arrived here in the southern part of Goa, at a beach called Patnem.  It's just what you might imagine of a secluded beach hideaway.  We've got a small hut on the beach, and there are several places along the way serving awesome seafood, indian dishes, and general traveler haven fare.  I already don't want to leave, and if it weren't for the Rickshaw Run itself, I'd probably be here for a good, long while.

Photos to come...

Touchdown!

So, we're here - and it's been a real change of pace right off the bat.  Our cab ride was reminiscent of the opening scene of Darjeeling Limited - racing through the streets, inches away from crushing (not so) innocent pedestrians.  But we made it, and pretty soon after checking in, sat down to an awesome meal of grilled chicken and beer.  Nothing that can't fix, right?

The beach by our hotel is kind of a mix of great and terrible.  Great because it's very active and a great place to run in the mornings.  Terrible because you can't really just chill out and get sun on it - b/c stray dogs are crapping everywhere on it, among other things...

We leave on a train bound for the infamous and idyllic beaches of Goa tomorrow night.  Right now, it's lots of logistics/sitting by the pool.  We're kind of easing into the culture, rather than jumping head-first.  I did get some good practice in hindi on the plane, however - hopefully it'll come in handy to know how to say "that is beautiful"...

It's really happening...

INDIA!  I can't even believe we got a spot on the Rickshaw Run.  After several failed attempts to snag a spot on the Mongol Rally, Ryan and I had resigned ourselves to lives without the adventure of trans-continental ridiculousness.  And then we went for it, one more time, with the more time-friendly and India-focused Rickshaw Run, thinking that maybe it'd be nice to get to do this right before we both graduate from medical school.  And amazingly, that's exactly what will be happening a year from now!

We've been going nuts over this since we got our spot, and now we're settling in to the planning phase.  Step one is in process - we've started to spread the word amongst our friends and family, hoping to plant the seeds of massive $$$ donations and/or visits along the way.  We've also collected some good literature on India, trying to decide where we'd like to visit and what we can't miss while on the subcontinent.  Soon we'll be buying plane tickets and Visas - holy shit, it's still a year away?  I am not sure I'll be able to concentrate on anything else, especially as the start draws near.  Hopefully I'll be able to get it together enough to learn how to be a doctor to a degree that will allow me to graduate, no?