Team The Polkadot Punkahwallahs

After an enjoyable evening with some other teams in Hampi (a dry city, because it is a holy site) and a good night's sleep, we got up at 8am in time to watch the 45 uear old elephant, that lives in one of the temples, have his (her?) morning bath in the lake. All very odd, but undoubtedly the cleanest elephant in India and, surely, the whole world, given the two guys scrubbing the pachyderm with soap and scrubbing brushes and what looked like pumice stone, for over an hour, every day.

We caught up with an American team over breakfast. This team put diesel in their Rickshaw early on in the run, but otherwise seem to have been pretty trouble free. Talking to the teams last night makes us feel as though we've got off pretty lightly so far; there were numerous tales of problems with gears, carburetors, spark plugs and structure.

Leaving Hampi we had expectations of a quick and trouble free day on the good roads to Bangaluru (formerly called Bangalore). However, Google's idea of the quickest route is apparently based on distance, so we soon found ourselves on tiny back roads, through small villages where we were given some very strange looks as we came through scattering chickens, pigs, sheep and dogs before us.

Not long after wasting several kilometers doing a few laps of a Google Map infinity loop, we got back on track only to find that we were driving on two wheels and a rim. Perhaps a delayed reaction from driving into a concrete block at the toll station the day before?  Luckily the Rickshaws are fairly light and even with just the two of us it was fairly straightforward to lift it up and attach the spare.  We debated about leaving ourselves without a spare, but decided that the lesser of two evils was to spend the time to fix the flat spare rather than endure a crap time in the unlikely event that we did get another puncture. Of course that meant finding another inner tube before we could get one of the many roadside tyre repairers to fix the tyre. It may be obvious to the locals why a tyre repairer doesn't have any inner tubes, but it remains a mystery to us. Fortunately at the first town we came to we picked up some random off the street and he directed us to a little back street shack where we got our tube. There is mo possible way anyone could find such a place on their own.  Our helper wouldn't accept a tip for his assistance, which has been a faiy common occurrence throughout India (although there are still plenty of people who do have their hands out).

Back on the road, and for the first time we rocked up in a small town at the end of the day with no booking.  We ended up finding a very modestly priced room, clean and with a bathroom, even if there was no toilet paper and no latch (let alone lock) on the door. We had forgotten the joys of sleeping next door to a mosque, the last tme being in South America some twenty plus years ago. The wailing really does sound painful and the hours at which it is inflicted on the local community are frequent and appear designed to ensure only minimal sleep. Oh well, only one more day to go.  The finish line in Bangaluru has just been confirmed and we now have only 120km of our run to go.