Thank you!

Only 300+ km away from Kochi, we decided to take our rickshaw for a challenging spin up into the hilly tea estate to enjoy some stunning views and the coolness of the air (which turned out to be freezing!). To test out the shaw’s climbing capability, we pushed her to go up two peaks, Kodaidanal and Munnar in a single day, and she was performing exceptionally well until…

Code red(ish), our loose exhaust situation was getting worse by the minute. Every time we got it tightened up, it would get loose after couple of kms, making a clonking sound to warn the team for attention. Once again, she needed some professional care.

We brought her to a local motorbike repair shop, based on the mechanic’s body language - they don’t repair rickshaws. Since the locals don’t speak either Hindi or English, we were struggling to understand the direction the mechanic was trying to show us for the rickshaw repair shop. (Ok, now we understand how difficult it must be for other teams without a Hindi speaker on board). He soon jumped on his bike, waving us to follow him to the rickshaw repair shop. How nice!

Spanner on hand, nuts, bolts, washers coming off, that was our exhaust disassembled. And yes, we had a slight issue, the gasket between the exhaust and the engine outlet was half chewed up. We were glad the problem was quickly diagnosed, but it came with another issue, they didn’t have a correct sized gasket for replacement. They tried a handful of different gaskets from the toolbox, none of them fit. We turned around and looked at each other – sensing this is not going to be a quick stop.

Both mechanics had some discussions, and soon, they were back on the bike in search of the gasket for us in town. We were left behind in the workshop with chai in hand, starting to think about our plan B. 5 minutes, 10 minutes, 15 minutes past, they were back, with huge smiles on their faces! Spanner on hand, nuts, bolts, washers screwed tight, that was our exhaust reassembled, tested with a healthy sound of engine startup! Success!

When we asked for the price, with bits of Hindi, English and body language, we left shocked that they didn’t want any money, only a photo with us and the shaw. We gave them the biggest smile for the photo, and insisted 500Rs for helping us to extend the life expectancy of our rickshaw.

Thank you!

Broken yet?

They say don’t worry too much about the breakdowns, that’s part of the experience. We clearly are not enjoying as much breakdown experience as other teams are, where some had piston blown out, some had dysfunctional brake, some had a complete changeover of the engine. The only malfunction we’ve had so far (touch wood) was a broken speedometer, half functional carburettor (which we got fixed), and a loose exhaust (which we keep tightening at each stop). Our shaw has been a mini beast.

While the rickshaw is fighting hard on the road for us, we are deteriorating slowly, constantly under close medical monitoring and attention.

In Darjeeling, I was running behind a steam train to get some great footage of this historical train, bits of the coal fell into my right eye. At the time, I didn’t think too much of it, hoping my body’s self defence system would get this sorted in no time. Next day, it turned into an eye infection. I was constantly in tears, even slight eye movement was causing unbearable irritation, I had to look straight at all time, and only tilt my head to change my view angle.

Meanwhile, Joban was struggling to get a good night sleep. He’s got a very sensitive body temperature, either too cold, or too hot, was going to wake him up in the middle of the night. Plus, his minor stomach issue was not helping in achieving a sweet-dream night.

As a team, we all had a fair share of the “Indian cold”, Joban started off first with a cold from freezing aircon, and had to wear a jumper to keep his body warm at 30 degree C temperature. Then closely followed by me, coughing, running nose, sneezing, you name it, I had the full package. The exhaustion of the long drive weakened our immune system, turning the recovery into a forever battle. Finally, now it’s Steven’s turn, since Bangalore, he’s been put on paracetamol, hopefully the western pharmaceutical wonder is going to beat the eastern medical troubles.

Our shaw just climbed up the highest peak she’s ever travelled with us so far to Kodaikanal, not sure how long the team driver is going to keep up with her!

Home comforts

Now we are driving through the IT hub of India, Hyderabad, and Bangalore. Coming out of Hyderabad, we got stopped by a TATA pickup truck on a flyover, thinking what did we do wrong this time. Turned out the driver was an editor for the Times of India newspaper, and was so intrigued by our rickshaw design and the markings of the daily journey, he had to stop us to find out who were behind this unusual looking rickshaw. There we were, parked by the side of a flyover, explaining our rickshaw challenge from Shillong to Kochi in supporting local and UK charities. He was surprised the tiny rickshaw could travel across the entire India through some of the roads he wouldn’t even consider his monster TATA pickup truck is capable of driving. He passed over his business card, and asked us to contact him anytime if we need any help. Watch out, we might be written about in the national newspaper!

Entering Bangalore feels like coming home, fashion shops alongside the road with many internationally recognised brands; trendy bars with some of the best brew the locals can offer; most people speak fluent English, and many of them have either studied or worked abroad. We decided to treat ourselves with a luxury hotel for some long missed customer service, and a Thai massage for much needed muscle relaxation, followed by a fashion shopping session to recover from our constant struggle for clean clothes. We then woke up to a rooftop breakfast with the home comforts we’ve been dreaming about, beans on toast and Twinings English breakfast tea! Nothing can beat a traditional English breakfast! Not only this, we even experienced the first McDonald’s drive-thru at a petrol station in India! Is this even real?!

Properly fuelled and fed, back on the road, we are now counting the days to Kochi!

Life in the shaw

On average, we spend about 15 hours a day in the rickshaw, it is our lodging-on-the-go. So to make sure we are mentally and physically at our best performance, we have made some in-shaw improvements.

Windshield – India is a hot country, very hot comparing to Aberdeen, so light packing to us means shorts and T-shirts only. But when the shaw is cruising at 50km/h during the night with open doors, it can be a bit chilly. So every night just after sunset, our chief engineer, Steven will construct a windshield using the curtain we hand made to stay dry during the monsoon season. The windshield 1.0 is professionally wired and taped up to feature great structural integrity in high winds to ensure the optimum comfort is achieved for the passengers on board.

5S (sort, set in order, sweep, shine, standardise) – the more experienced we are at mastering the life-in-the-shaw, the more critical items we keep closely with us at all time - go pro, camera, books, oil, fuel filling equipment, DEET, sun cream, water bottles etc. And soon, we struggle to find anything in the bundle of mess (mostly Joban’s crap) 5S is urgently required! Throw away the rubbish, categorise multiple sections based on the items’ function and usage, use cut-open water bottles to act as barrier between different sections, and permanently mark each section followed by training for all team members, voila, every item in the shaw now has a home!

Stretching – Everyday, we wake up in the morning, grab something to eat, walk to the rickshaw and stay there until we get to the destination of the day. Apart from occasional toilet, food and petrol break, we rarely step outside the rickshaw to exercise the muscle and the joints. Pretty quickly, we all started to feel the uncomfortable stiffness of the body. To combat the joints and muscle deterioration, we developed a full body in-shaw stretching exercise, including the legs, abs, hips, back and arm. #HealthAhead Caution: some of the exercises will require the person hanging half the body outside the rickshaw when the shaw is still in motion, so DO NOT practice before being competently trained by the team.

That’s 3 continuous improvement projects submitted by team #bridge.

Entering the new era

To many people, travel is about taking the routes least travelled, exploring the un-touched, and enjoying the unique experience. We had definitely done that by travelling the East. We could feel the hardship of remote lives, poor infrastructure, limited goods and services. However, entering Nagpur was like entering the India of the new era - full of sophisticated shops and restaurants, robust infrastructure to boost the economy. This is a very different India, many people may argue this is not a real India, but in fact, it is.

Provided with local expertise, we knew the road from Nagpur to Hyderabad is going to be superb! Challenge is on, let's do 500km a day!

Wow, what a refreshing journey, proper tarmac highway with two lanes each side; plantation in the middle of the road to block the full beam from the opposite direction; clear signage along the way, even some electronic boards ready to be installed by the roadside - Welcome to 21st century!

Super road, but not too super rickshaw, the shaw refuses to go beyond 30km/h before it starts jerking constantly. We knew there's something wrong with the carburettor, but apart from fine-tuning the ratio between air and fuel, there's very little we could do. So the decision was made, the shaw needs to meet a proper mechanic. And there we were, standing by the highway, meeting one of the best mechanics. He's calm and professional, took our carburettor out, carefully examined each part, and cleaned away all the debris, which was the main reason blocking up the carburettor and affecting its performance. Within half an hour, he overhauled the carburettor, tuned it for our special driving, and advised us with better oil and fuel mix. We took the shaw for a test run, she's running beautifully again! - easily cruising at 50km/h!!!

Here we were, hitting the record distance for a single day travel with 515km in total, Kochi feels only inches away now!

Code yellow, exhaust is becoming loose...

Interesting bits and pieces

Now we've been on the road for 10 days, and there's been some interesting observations and experience we want to share with you.

Indian direction - the Indians love to point you to a direction, but not necessarily the right one. Asking 10 different Indians, even though they all know the location, they will give you completely different directions, making our routes finding more like a city touring.

Dust is the new oxygen, we breathing in and out all day long, given the shaw has no doors, the air is flowing freely from one side to the other. And we get a sudden surge of it when a lorry decides to overtake us, usually mixed with smoke. Hmm... Refreshing! At the end of the day, getting to a hotel, the first wipe of the face in a white hand towel always leaves a clear and distinctive black mark.

Driving like an Indian is becoming norm for us. Remember at the beginning of the trip, we were shocked, confused and scared by Indian driving? Now we think it's just an orderly chaos. Honk your horn long and hard everytime you feel like it. Driving on the opposite direction is OK, even with incoming traffic, until they start flashing on you. Undertaking is perfectly fine, as long as you make your presence loud and clear by honking your horn.

Last, but not the least, Indian road toilets. They are designed to be natural and lively. There's no surprise to find cockroach, lizard, or beetles in a toilet, at the end of the day, it's their natural habitat. And "hole in the ground" is the luxury version of a toilet, often you enter a tiny square room, with a slightly tilted floor, and a bottle cap sized hole at the corner of the room. There's no differentiation between where you stand and where you do your business, many times, I would enter the "toilet" and feel like I'm missing a user manual, and impressed by its simplification!

Wonder how we will be turned out by the end of the trip.

A different kind of Highway

When I think about motorway in Scotland - it's smooth, it's well signed, you cruise at 70 mph, sometimes, you get a little rain, snow and wind, but no big deal, you're in a well insulated moving box with your choice of the tune at a comfortable temperature.

On the way from Varanasi to Rewa, we experienced one highway, put it this way, it's special and unique.

After Varanasi, our next big destination is Mumbai, 1500km away, will probably take us about 5 days to get there, so we'd better get moving quickly! But the reality was, this "quick" journey was not as quick as we hoped. We hit a super potholed highway!

Rickshaws are vulnerable to potholes. One reason is purely due to shaw's size. Any holes deeper than one foot will literally make the shaw lean to one side and the passengers feel like it's going to tip over. So when big lorries smashing through potholes, we have to slow the right down to carefully maneuver through them. And not all potholes are very visible at distance, when going over a pothole unexpectedly at normal speed (30km/h), the passengers at the back get propelled from the seat, and potentially suffer from minor head injuries. At the beginning, we thought it might be just a small section of the highway, but miles after miles, we were constantly battling with this uneven road surface, switching between gear 1&2, averaging at 10km/h. The tarmac appears from time to time, but that only gives us a false sense of hope, which usually only lasts less than 100 meters.

Then we hit a hill, a hill with potholes! Climbing is already a tricky task for the shaw's 2 stroke engine. With potholes, our only mission was not to slow down the shaw too bad, it starts to roll back down!

Talking to someone at the petrol station, this potholed highway was only constructed 3 month ago! Clearly some corruption has contributed to our special bumpy experience.

With strong perseverance, we managed 135km in 9 hours, then hit a normal highway covering 242km in total in 12 hours.

Next time when you are cruising at 70mph, do not take it for granted.

Varanasi, a holy place

Varanasi is one of Steven's must-see city, hence it's undoubtedly on our agenda, also many other teams'.

The Ganges cuts through the city, making Varanasi a major centre for pilgrimage, especially because Hindus believe that death in the city will bring salvation.

Due to its popularity and religious importance, it was the busiest city we've ever travelled so far! Once we entered the city, we hit the traffic straight away. If all your Britz thinking M25 is busy, this is definitely 10 times worse. Cars, rickshaws, bikes, motorbikes coming from all directios with cows sitting comfortably in the middle of street forcing the traffic to divert from them (cows are too holy to be disturbed in India). A 8km journey took us an hour to cut through, costing us to lose a chilled Joban to a road rager.

Someone from the group shared a contact for a local guide, who we got in touch with - have to admit, that was one of the best decisions we made, otherwise we would just be pass-by tourists, having little knowledge about this holy place.

Varanasi is famous for its ghats, embankments along the riverbank where pilgrims perform their rituals, and daily ceremony for the mother Ganges. Through narrow ally ways up and down, the tour guide took us to many famous ghats, where we saw people dip in to take a bath in the Ganges for its holiness.

Soon, we were led to a high ground with open fire, where people around Varanasi (within 100-200km) carries the dead body of their family member to Varanasi for cremation. Within 3-5 hours of passing of the family member, the family needs to gather around, and arrange the transportation of the body to the Ganges. The body is wrapped around in 5 meters white fabric, carried by people to the Ganges to get cremated. It takes 3h to burn the body, then the oldest son needs to pick up the remaining ashes and throw back into the Ganges without turning back, meaning cutting away the ties from the dead.

Our guide also helped arrange us a 'balcony view' of the evening ceremony happens daily by the Ganges, paid by individual families who wish to worship the mother Ganges.

It's definitely a very different way to send-off the dead to what we are used to, however, it carries its weight and significance among the locals to have the closest family members going away with the most holiest river in the country.

Total Preventative Maintenance

Having two black belts on board for this journey, it's hard not to bring our 'expert knowledge' to the race. And one thing we know well and appreciate its importance is Total Preventative Maintenance (TPM).

Checklist, even with an experienced pilot, a checklist is still required for each flight before taking off. We haven't got this in paper form, but have a mental checklist each morning - working lights, check; spark plug condition, check; fuel filter, check; air filter, check; wheel bolt tightness, check; visual inspection on any abnormality, check; finally, bugs check due to recent sting by a giant bee! Good to go!

Preventative service. After the 19-hours long drive, we can feel the shaw is getting tired and weary, before it gets to a breakdown situation, we sent it to a local workshop in Bodhgaya for a MOT. The "master chief" told us, every year he gets people from the rickshaw run in his workshop for repair/maintenance. After couple of hours' magic work, our shaw was sounding a lot more healthier, and was able to reverse for the first time! You know the feeling where you go to the hospital after falling ill, the second you step out of the hospital, you feel better already, that was what we felt after picking up our shaw - almost brand new with an upgrade on gripped handle to assist with better ergonomics of the handle bar.

Who knows lean six sigma would be handy for a rickshaw run?! But it definitely does!

Technical inflicted injuries

Driving a rickshaw not only requires a nutty heart, but needs a wee bit technical mind as well, if not cautious, injury might be your daily greetings.

To kick start the engine, you will require a powerful left arm, a quick impulse (like start your lawn mower), and a clear directional force. All three are absolutely essential. Joban clearly didn't realise the criticality of the last element, smashed his left elbow to the shaw frame. Luckily, there's no damage to the shaw, phew...

If you think using keyboard and mouse daily are the main cause for RSI, try change rickshaw gear 100 times a day, half of your left hands' functionality will be paralysed! Half way through the day I had to use my right hand to help my left hand everytime I need to turn to 4th gear.

Blisters used to be weekly occurrence to our fellow rowers, but who knows rickshaw can cause as much if not more blisters! Holding onto a vibrating, frictional, and hot handle for 4 hours a day has given Steven 5 blisters (one blister on each finger on left hand).