The Last Hurrah

After arriving in Pokhara on Wednesday evening we had to wait until Friday for the official end to the Rickshaw Run. We spent Thursday shopping, swimming, eating beef and generally feeling like we were on holiday for the first time. Today saw the official festivities, all the Rickshaws lined up and paraded through Pokhara to a lakeside park for pictures and local music.

What then ensued was a mass deposit losing excesise in real world bumber cars as we drove the rickshaws to the final lock up.

A second football match was held and another win for the Rickshaw Runners was enjoyed (4-3 this time)

Now it is time to head off to the main party and hope we can be up at 6 tomorrow to head into the jungle on our way back to Kathmandu and the UK.

The Break for the Border

After the day off in Lucknow we decided to make a break for the border. This presented us two options the slightly longer route through Gorakhpur or the slightly shorter route through Basti. After last time this choice presented itself we decided the more direct route was the way forward.

This was not the correct choice.

After bumping up various single track roads and dirt tracks, at each turning being told with some certainty the way we should be heading we checked out GPS coordinates. As it turned out we were in Nepal already. For a few seconds this seemed like a good thing, we could just carry on north and meet the highway. We quickly rationalised this and decided that illegal immigration of us and our trusty steed was not the way forward and we snuck back into India the way we had come.

By the time we reached the delightful border town of Sunauli we were in no mood to try and tackle the border so we holed up in the only hotel in town with the (I can only assume) ironically named Paradise Restaurant as our only dinner option.

Lucknow

After leaving Agra to goal was Lucknow and the promise of a day off. We covered the 370km fairly quickly though the rickshaw developed a new and more serious sounding rattle and also kept managing to disassemble the spark plug. This actually turned out to be a good thing as every time it happened we could fix it our selves and look like big men in front of the thronging masses which swarm around every breakdown.

The major event of the day was getting lost in Kanpur, having heard that the day before some other runners had been told at gunpoint that foreigners were not welcome we were keen to avoid the place. Sadly, it was most confusing and we ended up driving through 3 times. This all lost us an hour and a bit and so by the time we crossed the Ganges we cared little.

We arrived in Lucknow and were pulled over three times by police but stuck to our policy of "if you're going to extort money from me you're going to have to do it in English and they all soon got bored and waved us off (one did muster "show me driving licence" but we played dumb)

We found ourselves a nice hotel WITH A BAR NO LESS! sadly this was a bar exclusively lit by UV light and playing thumping techno at 7pm but it was a bar nevertheless.

We spent our day off buying replacement t-shirts and getting kicked out of Muslim holy places for possibly being American but it was still worth it.

Day 7...Agra and the Taj

Day 7 only included 106km of driving!!! Again sadly the carburetor was having a bad day, when it finally got going we had to stop for Joe's bowels which it didn't like but we still made it to Agra for midday. The highlight of the drive came when I tried to use a petrol station toilet only to find it occupied by a female cow, she had obviously not realised it was the gents but she wasn't moving.

Agra was also the easiest of all the towns we have visited to navigate which made a welcome change.

We spent the afternoon present shopping and Taj Mahal seeing and to say it has been hot today in noway dopes it justice, we saw 3 people passed out in the mausoleum. The foreigners mark-up on entry to the taj is also crazy (5Rs for locals 750Rs for foreigners!!) but ho-hum we have seen it now.

It has been an odd experience having the day to kill, it turns out we are a little out of practice, we are considering taking a full day in Lucknow on Monday so we better get practicing...

There all caught up, have fun.

Day 6...The big push

Day six meant 470km to Gwalior in an attempt to make Agra a 1 day affair. There is little to say about it really 12 hours of constant driving, some biscuits and old apples to keep us going and the carburettor having a little paddy every time we filled up with fuel.

We also did our first nighttime highway driving which was fairly stressful as everyone in India uses high beam sat all times and rarely sticks to their own side of the road, that coupled with the cows, sheep, pigs, pedestrians, cyclists, etc, etc. meant that it was quite the experience.

The late arrival sadly meant no time to see what Gwalior has to offer which is by all accounts a fair bit but that is the nature of this trip.

Day 5...

Day 5 saw the start of the covering the 860km to get to Agra and satisfy Joe's determination that he wasn't going home without seeing the Taj Mahal whatever anyone said.

This meant 390km to Indore, India's industrial heartland. The drive was fairly uneventful except for having our first breakdown after an over enthusiastic petrol pump attendant refused to mix our fuel the way we wanted leading to the engine getting clogged with oil. Luckily within about 5 seconds about 20 people had stopped and had us going in no time. However the carburettor remains troublesome days later.

The highway was absolutely awful as we crossed into Madhya Pradesh and coupled with it being the hottest day of the trip so far it was pretty tough going. 

Indore allowed us to do some shopping for those back home but little esle as a 'tour guide' had harrassed us the whole way around the city as we searched for our chosen hotel (which did afford us our first hot showers of the trip.

Bloody Day 4...

Firstly apologies for the delay in the blog, rumours of our demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Day 4 involved a morning of continued tourism as we visited the Ellora Caves. These are 34 Buddhist, Hindu and Jain temples carved in to the rock of one mountain near Aurangabad. They were truly amazing even in spite of the sweltering heat and the first walking we had done in almost a week having been sat down in the rickshaw or lying in a bed, in fact even the overpowering stench of bat poo didn't dampen the experience.

Sadly the day took a turn for a worse at that point. Having returned to Aurangabad to collect our bags we checked the map and found there were two routes to our next destination, Dhule, 125km away. We decided to take the slightly longer route which involved being on the highway the whole way.

To our distress this was no highway it was 100km of bone shaking dirt track pock marked with potholes which took 5 and a half hours to negotiate. Having reached the actual highway we found it to be in a state of construction and it was extremely slow going. To top it of Dhule is rubbish.

Day 3...

We arose early this morning in Pune (the most expensive and least friendly town we have visited so far) and set off in the direction of Aurangabad. The aim was to arrive in the afternoon to allow a bit of tourism. We covered the 230km nice and quick and were in Aurangabad for half three. Having finally managed to expand our animal sightings past cows and dogs to seeing some camels and a particularly hairy incident involving a flock of sheep being driven across the highway leaving only a gap just smaller than a rickshaw by the time we arrived.

Making Aurangabad this afternoon  meant a trip to the Bibi Ka Maqbara (aka mini Taj Mahal) which was interesting but involved much ticketing and guide payment confusion. Having left the rickshaw at the hotel we then managed to get across to a pro-rickshaw walla that we wanted to buy some 'rims' for the jigshaw. What followed was a death defying drive through the twisting back streets of Aurangabad's old town, however he duly obliged and if the rain ever lets up we will be fitting our new 'crome' and yellow plastic 'rims' tomorrow, along with some fetching Triple X handle bar grips.

A very nice Punjabi vegetarian meal followed at a mighty reasonable price where we bumped into two other teams amazingly enough. Then a monsoon ridden dash about 500m to the hotel to much laughing from the locals

Tomorrow morning we continue a bit of tourism at the Ellora caves before starting the long drag north to Agra.

Day 2

The name of the game on day 2 was miles, miles, miles. In an attempt to buy tourist time on Wednesday at the Ellora Caves we pushed on 330km to Pune. All highway driving so far less eventful than yesterday but much waving was had by all. A few high speed chats with passing locals and other runners helped pass the time. As yet no problems at all with the t\rickshaw and even the odometer has started working now.

On arrival at Pune it became apparent that this was a far bigger city than we had imagined so the attempt to cross it from south west to north east without a map proved a pretty decent challenge  by the tiny map in the guide book and the advice of many a rickshaw driver we finally got to where we wanted to be and discovered that the rumours about Pune having too few hotels and the ones here being overpriced turned out to be true. But no materit's dinner time, anyone fancy an Indian?