Team Spirit of Adventure

A summary of what broke during our adventure:

broken shifter cable on the first day, leaking tire inner tube, broken roof rack welds, plugged fuel shutoff valve, numerous broken body welds, muffler bolt went missing, broken muffler tailpipe weld causing it to go missing, broken roof rack welds (again), maybe a bad spark plug and/or spark plug wire (changed them at the same time for good measure), fried/seized clutch, broken clutch key, and cracked clutch keyway, broken engine crossmember at weld

What went right? The whole experience.  Even more so, whenever things seemed to take a turn for the worse, some comical moment would occur and we were right back in high spirits.  Additionally, almost every time we had a breakdown, it occured at the most convenient location.

Notes to future self:

Don't expect to find anything in India in a hurry. If at all possible, bring what you want with you as you are entering the country. Even simple things like gum, bug spray, sun glasses, and that sort of thing are aggrevatingly hard to locate.

Don't expect anyone to understand you; even though English is one of India's official languages.

If you are at all mechanically inclined, bring an 8mm through 14mm combination wrench set and an 8mm through 14mm socket set. Besides the usual spark plug, plug wire, and fuel filter, buy a spare shifter cable, clutch cable, and throttle cable; at least one of those three are almost sure to break. Consider buying a clutch kit as well. Consider the cost, safety, and practicality of buying and hauling around a small oxy-acetylene welding kit if you have the knowledge and plan to spend a lot of time off of the beaten path. Broken control cables, worn out clutches, and broken welds seemed to be the most common causes of breakdown among all of the teams (besides the obvious and extremely common fuel, ignition, or tire related fault).

A lot of the small town roadside "mechanics" will try to sell you a carburetor or carburetor cleaning no matter how unrelated the symptoms. Clutch is stuck engaged? "Carburetor." Ignore them unless you are sure of the diagnosis.

Take the vehicle keys out and put them into your pocket whenever you leave the seat. Even if you are standing right next to the vehicle and are talking to someone, someone else is liable to jump in and try to take it for a spin. This is especially true when in close proximity to a "mechanic". It is in the mechanic's best interest -- under the guise of troubleshooting -- to break whatever turns out to be the weakest/most-damaged component.

Consider writing your country of origin (not just your flag or colors [we had a huge American flag flying and hardly a soul seemed to have any idea of our country of origin]), the city in India from which you started, your destination city in India, your name(s), "petrol", "two stroke", "not a taxi", "this vehicle on loan from www.theadventurists.com", and "this vehicle provided by www.theadventurists.com as part of a service package and I could not possibly guess the amount that I have paid solely to use this vehicle" onto a prominent location, on a handout, or even incorporated into your paint job, in Hindi, to alleviate answering the same questions over and over again.

And most importantly, whenever trash exits your auto rickshaw by its own volition, make sure you yell out "I'm saving the world!". This also works for fuel spills and whenever you get the nagging feeling that joyriding in a two stroke across India is wasteful.

It's well and truly over.  The highlight of my day was when the engine crossmember broke and we drove the last 2 hours with the engine held by rope.  The lowlight? When somebody mistakenly -- or purposely -- took my teammate's bag from our auto rickshaw at the finish line parking area and now he is up late trying to figure out how to be an upstanding citizen while missing his important documents.

Got a tow (push!?) to the mechanic to get our clutch replaced since we had shit tools, no parts and questionable compentcy to do it ourselves 

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bm5cxT4F0ue/?utm_source=ig_share_sheet&igshid=17i0pr6a4s3lz 

Is our clutch supposed to look like this? 

Argh! I am so annoyed. 4 hours and counting just to get the parts to replace the clutch. Every shop stop turns into a round-table discussion about what we have and what we need. 2 stroke? Yes, 2 stroke. 2 stroke? 2 stroke! 4 stroke? No, 2 stroke! We have the old parts in hand, but still they want to push the thing to a mechanic and have us pay them to do the job we are easily capable of doing ourselves.  Maybe we will get out of Davanagere sometime today.

Ok, we can all agree that India is terrible and we hate it.  It's crowded and dirty and there are too many people in this eat-or-be-eaten society of individuals just trying to prove that they exist on their quest to carve their path through the chaos.  Just get this piece of junk down to Bengaluru, push it over the finish line -- if we have to -- so that we can leave and go back to ... work ... No, I take it back!

We chased the rain and the fog most of the morning.  Then we stopped to get the warped clutch disks replaced, but it turned into a snafu with the local town drunk and incompetent mechanics instead attempting their hardest to blow up our engine and transmission as part of some strange troubleshooting process.  No thanks!  We would rather push-start it in first, if we have to, thank you very much!

She's got a nasty case of the speed wobbles.

It was a glorious morning. Nothing but open road.  And then we hit a big traffic jam. We discovered that the roof rack was broken (again) and the tail pipe was missing. While those were being welded, the traffic cleared and the going was easy.