Day 13 and 14 or This is the End
In short, we made it. Over 3200km in a rickshaw, brought to an end in the fantastic surroundings of Rajasthan's "Golden City" Jaisalmer. We arrived at midday on Saturday, after an easy drive up from Barmer on some beautiful roads; no more floods, just even more extreme heat. To extend our time in the city, we didn't actually cross the finish until Sunday, a bit of a privilege as some teams had to rely on others to drive out into the desert to tow in their expired machines.
But with our hotel across the road from the finish venue of the Jawahar Niwas Palace, it was easy to pick up on the atmosphere of over 200 people finishing a pretty remarkable two weeks. An arrivals board featured select moments particularly enjoyed by each team - changing a tyre in a tiger reserve was quite familiar, "EXPLOSIONS" a little more confusing.
We traded many such stories over beers and made the most of Jaisalmer's food before the final victory parade on Sunday afternoon. With close to 87 rickshaws driven around the city fort by idiots, the police were unsurprisingly out in force for this event, and predictably most groups got lost, broke down or caused a scene in some way. Returning triumphantly, with a couple of final donuts around the palace grounds, our last task was to return our faithful machine.
It's difficult to describe how this feels. Ours looked after us very well (especially given what we put it through), breaking down very rarely, and having now taken a five hour taxi in a proper car, I can say that a tuk tuk is actually probably less terrifying on Indian roads. But ultimately these things are just slow, sweaty, damp and useless... which is probably why they're so much fun. Though it's hard to class almost wrecking the thing near Bangalore as either a highlight or lowlight, our little spill did at least earn us the award for "Best Manoeuvre" from the organisers. Worth it.
India itself is mad. It's a completely alien shock to the senses in almost every sense of the word; the country's name itself came to be our answer at any time we were confused by something happening. For example, a man reversing his pickup at full tilt three hundred metres down a busy highway because he'd missed the slip road - "India".
The nice thing about this is it's never boring. I don't think I can begin to list everything that we saw or experienced across food, landscapes, buildings, people or our stupid method of transport, so I'll end with three examples we witnessed directly outside our hotel on our last day in Jaisalmer:
A team's arrival at the entrance coincided with the appearance of a four foot cobra. Neither was harmed.
Another team, just about to set off to hand back their rickshaw, was hit head on by a local rickshaw. Brake failure. Most damage that team sustained all trip.
We watched a beautiful sunset from the roof, then had to bail indoors to shelter from a vicious thunderstorm. It lasted less than 45 minutes and the skies then completely cleared.
For the final time, Muppets signing off.
Day 12 or Lovely Day for a Dip
We set off feeling confident about an easy day of driving. We only had to reach Barmer, a mere 250 km away. To make it more interesting, we decided to take a detour off the national highway to see the Dantiwada dam, which we had spotted on the map. Unfortunately, the road on the map was closed so we winged it and went down a mystery road that seemed to be going vaguely in the right direction. We succeeded in some ways since we did get closer to the dam, but the road came to a rather abrupt and crumbly end. I'm just glad that Tom was concentrating and didn't drive us off the edge.
We then continued along our hot, dusty and pot-holed road.
Until we reached massively flooded sections of road. We toyed with the idea of turning back as we watched cars struggle to get across. And then in a spontaneous moment of bravery, Tom saw his window and followed a tractor through the very middle of the 'puddle'. We could just about make out the road as the tractor sliced through the water. Tom was revving the engine hard to try to keep water out the exhaust. And then we saw the tractor lurch to one side as it clearly fell into a pot-hole. Knowing it was too late to turn back, we braced for impact. We jerked to the left and I was convinced it was game over, but Tom's expert driving got us out the other side.
We all breathed a sigh of relief as the worst was clearly behind us. That is, until some dumb truck decided to speed through the puddle in the opposite direction. Silver lining: I was cool for a while.
Day 11 or Sweatfest 2k17
Thursday was all about distance, traversing the vast majority of Gujurat past Vadadora and through Ahmedabad, our third and India's sixth largest city. Surprisingly this far north, we were able to find dosas in a truckstop for breakfast by the real highlight was their version of "pakora", essentially a deep fried curry sandwich; Tom has promised to perfect the recipe when he's back in the UK.
I was really keen to do some city driving, so we allotted three hours to get through Ahmedabad and headed in around lunchtime. We had some great conversations with other rickshaw drivers as we picked our way through the interior, yet the real highlight was an elephant. Not in a reserve as you might expect, just tramping through the streets. Our wildlife counter is finally off the mark!
It wasn't as busy as we expected, but what it was was hot. Really hot. When we left we were "viscous" in Tom's words. I only discovered quite what he meant when we reached the hotel and my back was revealed...
The final section of highway up towards Palanpur was equally warm, punctuated by a pure veg lunch and a roadside photo with a bus of schoolkids. We fell slightly short of our final target for the day when we happened upon several kilometres of unexplained standing traffic. Deciding this wasn't for us, we pulled a U-turn through traffic and retired to the inappropriately named Hotel Fourway for a cool down and more pure veg. On the home stretch.
Day 10 or Goat Lovin'
Woke up at our usual 5 am, but couldn't get out the building. It's padlocked, said Fred. So we woke up the poor night watchman only to be told the door was indeed open. Which it was. Oh Fred.
We cracked our first 100 km before breakfast, tackling the delightful Dhule ring road, which was engulfed in fog. We were the only vehicle that deemed it appropriate to use lights, much to our sorrow. They're surprisingly useful when you can't see 10 metres in front of you.
We recovered with a delightfully odd breakfast of biscuits and chilli pakoras. Nom nom.
We pushed hard during the day and made it all the way to Rajpipla. There, Tom eventually managed to acquire a clean pair of shorts, despite the shop assistant thinking what looked like a size S would do.
We then had another surreal experience at dinner: there were no drinks except curd, we ordered several dishes and were given two (neither of which we ordered) and a tractor loaded with a huge sound system and dancing teenage boys drove by. Ganesh festival I believe.
We ended the evening snuggly playing cards together.
And how could I forget the hotel worker sleeping in the same room as his goat. That filled me with questions.
Day 9 - The day that never was...
We started bright and early again after another night next to the deafening highway in ant infested rooms. We drove up via Aurangabad and after a bite to eat, decided to drive round to the World Heritage Site Ellora Caves, which were shut on the one day of the week we had arrived.
Disappointed we promptly tried to move on but had a tyre blow out 2 kms on from the town. This would have been fine had the spare tyre the Adventurists given us not had a nail sticking through it (Thanks!).
After some nimble negotiating (miming hysterically) with one of the hoard of curious Indians who had gathered by now, Fred managed to secure us a new tyre from the nearby town.
Phoebe and I entertained ourselves with temporary tattoos and speaking to our remaining faithful groupies. Tyres fixed we quickly moved up the highway. 20km on we found the national highway had been closed due to rockfalls, or so the policeman mimed anyway. So we headed off on the 80km additional detour through the forest.
Little did we know it was India's "Bachelor high road" with more single Indian men with huge horns than a dairy farm. The road was so busy we had to crawl through this Bachelor park, which led us to not quite reaching our final target and settling on Chalisgaon. Still, after a quietly pleasant dinner, we sloped off to bed happy with our day's progress.
Day 8 or Where we're going, we don't need roads
Leaving our prison cell at the crack of dawn, we ventured out of Udgir early and made 5km of fantastic progress before the accelerator became suddenly and irreversibly stuck on full. Brief analysis led us to determine this was definitely a problem with our accelerator cable, so not the fault of our wizard mechanic and his service the day before, the obvious choice to help solve our new predicament.
Tom finding himself incapacitated in the woods, and Phoebe not wanting to go on her own, we flagged a rickshaw heading back to Udgir for me. I found the mechanic in the gym next to his shop - he was happy to help and we were soon heading back to the stranded three wheeler. It became apparent after the carburettor was stripped twice, that the problem was not the cable, per our expert diagnosis, but a stuck inlet; easily fixed we were back on our way having only lost a few hours.
The day turned out to be another wet and cold one, so it was thick clothing and "waterproofs" when we weren't driving. Despite this, local Maharashtra pakoras and some very nice Gobi Manchurian for lunch ended a morning of serious progress after our breakdown, and we set off buoyed to reach Paithan, a town we believed to have a "luxury" hotel and a nice lake.
Unfortunately, India's roads had other ideas. Presented with two choices of road, we opted for the shorter more direct "state highway", which sounded pretty decent. To say it was the opposite would be an understatement. Starting off poor, to the point we considered turning back, the road got steadily worse in the middle, and became frankly abysmal towards the end. It was so bad, it had evidently claimed the life of at least one car, evidently long abandoned as plants were growing out of the almost closed windows.
After 31km, three hours, a terrifying bridge and spines vibrated to dust, we emerged through our third festival procession back onto the superior national highway just before dusk and bailed into the next lodge we saw. Phoebe's and my room was infested with ants, but the attached restaurant did serve beer and was kind enough to provide torches when the power cut. Joy.
Day 7 or Tom's quest to dry his pants
We barely made it out of Hyderabad as the roads were already being closed shortly after 6 for a marathon. Thankfully, Tom's ability to make friends meant we got the heads up in the nick of time and zoomed our way round the ring road.
We then had an uneventful day of wet and pot-holey driving, broken up by delicious dosas for breakfast and amazing kaju curries for lunch.
We reached Udgir early enough to get our Rickshaw its much needed service, and between being chased by kids and shooed away by mechanics who weren't interested, it did take us a while to find our dear mechanic. Repairs underway, we were whisked away only to have tea with this expert who showed us how 'shaws should be driven.
Another customer having his rickshaw serviced was delighted to help fix ours rather than his and ran off somewhere with our air filter. The crowd that had gathered fell about laughing as he pulled a Tom and stalled as he was waving and trying to drive away.
We found a hotel room, outside of which the manager loitered for seemingly most of the night since he clearly thought two boys and one girl would be up to no good. Even though I'd said we were cousins. Princesses Fred and Tom thought the room was not quite up to standard and wawa-ed all evening. I thought the rock hard bed did wonders for my bruised body.
Day 6 or Counting Tigers
Up early, we stormed into the nearby Nalla Malla reserve by mid morning, a place that redefined rainforest for us. We were deluged as we drove up precarious mountain roads, through "death zones" and into a cloud. This proved all too much for our wiper, which eventually gave up twitching at the side of the windscreen and had to be hastily fixed.
The wildlife reserve itself promised a huge variety of animals, announced on billboards throughout the sixty of kilometres through the forest, including; tigers, leopards, porcupines, mongeese, skunks, pangolin, bears, kingfishers, meerkats, deer, otters, various types of gazelle and tarantulas. We saw precisely none of these, but this didn't stop us expecting a mauling at every corner - running out of fuel took on a whole new sense of paranoid urgency.
After our escape, we recuperated with vast quantities of dhal and bindi, served on Visa branded foil paper plates. The main highlight was a huge dam in a massive gorge, situated not far from the popular Indian tourist destination of Srisailam, a very holy site for Hindus. This also marked our departure from Andra Pradesh, crossing into Telangana in the early afternoon.
The drive to the state capital, Hyderabad, was uneventful, the roads quiet and well maintained (something we've learned to very grateful for since). However, on arrival, we determined that three wheelers were banned from the equally pleasant and flat Nehru Outer Ring Road forcing us to head for the Inner Ring Road through the worst traffic that our second biggest city had to offer. Regulation didn't stop us accidentally speeding around 10km of "raised expressway", but a policeman at the next exit did. As has happened a lot, announcing our departure point and eventual destination earned us raised eyebrows and a hasty shooing back down to ground level.
I'd communicated our intention to stop in Hyderabad to some old colleagues, whom we met for dinner at a branch of the famed Paradise biryani. They delighted us with their hospitality, insisting on dish after dish of the spiced rice and a huge variety of sweet desserts. It was a real pleasure to catch up with these guys nearly two years after leaving the company. Sai, Ramesh, Prakash and Anvesh, if you're reading this, thank you so much for your generosity, we really appreciate it - we'll be back for another visit soon!
Day 5 or the Day of the Dosa
Uneventful day, which we were all glad of. Powered over 300 km through the Indian countryside. We reached a small village just outside Cumbum at nightfall and found an elctrishan to fix our lights. We were initially very happy with his handy work, although we now have a suspicion his work is shorting everything.
Highlight of the day was the dinner. First time we've had to queue in India cause it was so popular with the locals. Simple onion dosa for a grand total of 20 p each - best meal so far in my opinion.
Day 4 Part 2 or Tubthumping
Still in somewhat of a daze, we weren't quite sure what to do after being patched up at the hospital, waiting for our rickshaw to be reborn. We were ushered into a flat above the hospital where we were immediately invited to drink tea and take rest. A wonderful woman called Manjula (who like most of the locals, spoke very little English) and her daughter Amrutha then spent the rest of the day spoiling us rotten. They walked us round a silk factory, showed us heaps of photo albums and did the most beautiful henna patterns on me. Being an Indian household they obviously also fed us until we burst.
There was a constant flow of visitors throughout the day - family, friends, inquisitive neighbours. And then things began getting surreal. Journalist upon journalist seemed to be turning up and asking us to repeat our story. What tickled me most was that they kept filming the bandage on Tom's knee - he had bandaged it the day before as it was quite sunburnt.
In my geeky linguist opinion, the moment Manjula's family and I properly bonded was when we started to teach each other how to write our names in each other's language. The evening ended with a hindu blessing (to avoid getting into another crash I think?) and heartfelt goodbyes. Tom and Fred were clearly instructed to keep me, Manjula's 4th daughter, safe.
