Dates Covered: September 5th- 27th, 2009
Countries: India, Nepal
ABOVE: Be sure to enable HD, watch full screen, and turn scaling off.
I went to India so I could drive to Nepal. The 3000 kilometer (conversion = lots of miles) trip would be made in an auto rickshaw (picture below), take two weeks and have a top speed slightly higher than I can pedal a bike. Organized as a fundraiser by theadventurists.org, sixty-odd teams would start in Goa (southern India) and if all went to plan end up in Pokhara, Nepal. There were no pre-assigned routes or seatbelts. I was pretty sure someone would die.
ABOVE: My team’s rickshaw, Goan Nowhere Fast, displays its climbing prowess at the base of the Annapurna Mountain Range in southern Nepal.
Before I could begin this ill-advised journey, though, I had to spend some time in Mumbai. With over 80 million residents, it was in every way more crowded, congested and confusing than Cairo. There were also a lot more cows eating garbage in the middle of the street.
I was sick when I arrived and over the first few days I barely traveled more than a hundred meters out of Hotel Singhs. As opposed to the hostels I had been staying in, Hotel Singhs was an HONESTTOGODHOTEL. Bellboys wore uniforms, security guards opened doors and receptionists called me, “Mr Metier.” Considering this was the poorest country I had traveled to so far I was initially surprised. Not pleasantly, either. Around the time I discovered I couldn’t finish a glass of water before a waiter made a show of wrapping a linen cloth around a bottle to pour a refill, the remnants of colonialism became too much for me.
Walking down the street in Mumbai a middle-aged woman asked me where I was going. When I said I didn’t know, she suggested I get a fifteen rupee bus pass so I could hop on and off whenever I pleased. My reply that I just wanted to walk for the sake of walking, she found either disingenuous or stupid. “Its too hot for walking,” she said.
As we continued down the street I learned she had grown up in Mumbai but now lives with her husband in Germany. Noting that she was back in her hometown I said it seems everyone is pulled back to where they came from. She thought this was even stupider than my insistence on walking. “Well I don’t want to die here.”
Her hatred for the city stemmed mostly from its inhabitants. Namely, there were too many of them and they were all dishonest. This was a dangerous city to walk around in and I shouldn’t believe anything a beggar had to say. Nobody was actually poor; they had plenty of money and just didn’t want to work. When I said I found it unlikely that all 80 million people lived above the poverty line, she grabbed my wrist. “I’ve been to the slums and they keep the front looking bad, but in the back they all have working refrigerators.” I wasn’t sure if access to a power outlet really canceled out living in a garbage pile, but realized further discussion was pointless.
India might be the most helpful country I’ve ever been to, but my conversation on the street set the precedent that no matter how well-intentioned, it wasn’t always beneficial.
While recuperating in Mumbai, I got a hold of my old friend, Joy Bloser. She was the one who informed me of Rickshaw Run’s existence and for the last many months, had been my theoretical teammate. While I traipsed from continent to continent she did the real work back in the U.S. The race existed primarily as a charity fundraiser for people in the hosting countries and each team was required to donate at least a minimum amount. This meant Joy spent hours contacting donors, conducting interviews, and throwing parties. Meanwhile, my contributions consisted of being really excited and asking Egyptian cab drivers how to survive on a lawless road.
I should not have been surprised, then, to learn that my spot on the team had never existed and was filled by people who actually helped with the fund-raising. Negating any suspense that this plot twist might create, I almost immediately joined rival team, Goan Nowhere Fast.
ABOVE: Former teammate/current rival Joy Bloser poses with the rest of Karma Payment Plan, Nick Campbell and Matt Acosta, minutes before the race begins.
In order to get to the southern end of India, I took a train. The experience was exactly like The Darjeeling Limited (minus the pre-clip ad) and I feel no need to describe it further.
When I imagined the 150 people who would join me on this journey to the north, they were all serious. They would be teams of spies in Brooks Brothers suits easily fading into the background unnoticed. Each of them knew they had a job to do and they intended to do it with quiet dignity. The reason I envisioned this was because I had not thought about it logically. If the Gumball Rally episode of Jackass had taught me anything, it is that people who do things like this are extroverts. They spell adventure with all caps and want everyone to know about their exploits. Of course, not every participant fits this description, but as a result they fail to make an impression and are unlikely to garner much space in a blog. The ones who stick out wear pith helmets and safari suits, rig horns that play Dixie to their roofs, and jump from vehicle to vehicle as they barrel down the road.
The giant lorries in India are painted with elaborate designs and often honor a Hindu god. The full-scale customization began years ago as a way to entice travelers to ride along. People stuffed in the cab or sitting on the roof pay a few rupees and help the driver make a living.
As with any other specialized vehicle, the pride of driving a unique vehicle holds its own appeal. This is where the tradition ties back to the Rickshaw Run. Before even getting to India, teams designed their own paint jobs and emailed them to headquarters. As a way to impact further the local economy, artists were hired to convert the plans to reality. Some of these plans were as simple as a racing stripe on the side (see my rickshaw at top) while others required many colors, shading, and calligraphy. As supported by their award for best rickshaw, Matt Costa’s design featuring Ganesh was my personal favorite.
Customization continued right up to race time, with many teams adding laurels of flowers and other personal touches.
In order to obtain the permits, finances and good will necessary to stage such an event, theadventurists worked closely with the local tourism board. At both ends of the race, media events were staged. We played good will soccer games against local teams and had a parade. Rickshaws have been outlawed for years in Nepal, but the promise of money and good press literally opened the border. The incredible number of people who came to watch the start of the race was a good indicator of the spectacle we would become.
With all the preparation and ceremony out of the way, it was finally time to start driving. The day before the race began, teams were given a couple of hours to learn how to operate the rickshaws. Motorcycle handlebars gave a clutch in one hand, accelerator in the other and a brake at your feet. The three wheel design allowed for tight turns, which were not recommended until you knew how to control your speed. This proved a problem for most.
For the first few days, I felt like all one billion of India’s residents were crowding the road with me. Merging onto highways, maneuvering through roundabouts and especially passing trucks took a team effort. The cooperation necessary to get around wasn’t limited to those in our car. Many of the lorries had the phrase, “Horn Please” written on their back. When wanting to pass, a staccato tap of the horn let them know your intention. Since it was hard to see around, the driver you were passing became your lookout. If they put on their right blinker (the passing side since you drive on the left) then it was safe to go. A left blinker meant death was approaching in the oncoming lane. This absolute reliance on total strangers took days to accept.
Eventually, the surrounding chaos and seeming danger became commonplace. When the petrol tank ran dry as I was passing a truck with another headed straight for me, I was able to tell my teammates to flip the switch for the emergency tank and try to straddle the lanes until power came back. This was a great improvement in both morale and survival over the first day, when a similar event on a steep uphill was resolved by getting out and pushing.
With this new relaxed state of mind, I was able to focus on the changing scenery. We passed through crowded cities, open rice fields, dusty villages and forests of banyan trees. The limited speed of the rickshaws was ideal to take it all in. At a little over thirty miles an hour, at least as a passenger, I had plenty of time to appreciate the details of my surroundings. I came to realize that in this country of the holy cow, billboards selling beer feature wranglers herding horses, never bovines. Children ride bikes that are twice their size and three times their age. Traveling at eighty miles an hour, I wonder what else I would not have noticed. I certainly wouldn’t have gotten to return the hundreds of smiles and waves we received every day.
At the same time, the lack of doors or shocks contributed to a sense of immediacy. It felt like riding a sled towed behind a pickup. If I looked at my foot dangle an inch above the concrete or focused on a woman sitting backwards on a motorcycle while holding a baby, it was amazing how fast we seemed to be going. These slight shifts in perspective made all the difference.
All the elements came together as we were cruising down a road between Ellora and Dhulie. Approaching on a frontage road was something I mistook for a mirage. The everyday reality of an over-packed delivery truck combined with a child’s birthday party and a dadaist prank. Time ran fast and slow as I managed to shoot four exposures of the greatest thing I have ever seen. It was simultaneously absurd and real, garish and beautiful. I have turned it into an animated gif in hopes of recreating the sensation of the moment. A moment split into four moments, three of them brief and the last stretching just a little bit longer. Click here to see a larger version of the last image.
Rickshaws are notoriously easy to break and only slightly harder to fix. Powered by a two stroke engine and composed of a minimum number of parts, there is a reason there are so many of them. Their simplicity and pervasiveness, mixed with a high population density and generally helpful spirit, meant that none of our rickshaws were ever broken down for long. No more than five minutes of sitting on the side of a ride went by before a guy on a motorcycle, or a guy walking by, or a shopkeeper, or a kid on a bike would stop to help or promise to go get someone who could.
The most spectacular version of this came about about a kilometer from the top of a mountain pass and about 5 kilometers into the longest traffic jam I’ve ever seen. Hundreds and hundreds of giant lorries cued in both directions. Progress was so slow that most passengers and many drivers were out of their vehicles walking around or taking a piss. With our tiny rickshaw and fellow team For Tuk’s Sake, we wound our way between trucks. Up the center line or over the shoulder, we slowly passed miles of traffic. Along the way people cheered us on, which was a better reception than a lorry driver who tried to get ahead by driving the wrong way down a lane. He hit a point where he could no longer move forward or backward and became instead a de facto road block. As we passed by, another driver jumped out of his cab and smashed the offending driver’s side-view mirror with an axe. He was about to destroy the other when the original troublemaker tried to stop him. The last I saw, the axeman was chasing him down the road while traffic police watched, but never intervened.
ABOVE: For Tuk’s Sake attend to mechanical problems. This is from days before the story told here.
About five minutes later, For Tuk’s Sake broke down. Immediately someone came and fixed the problem. A problem that remained fixed for another two hundred meters. This time the police got involved. They were much more interested in us than the axe fight. I asked them just to make sure. After deciding it had to do with the transmission, the chief suggested that my rickshaw tow theirs down one of the steepest mountain roads I’ve ever driven on. Instead we decided to push it to a plateau a little over half a kilometer up the road. This is where we spent the next five hours while a man on a motorcycle rode 45 kilometers to his cousin’s garage. The cousin then road the motorcycle back, bringing his ten-year-old son along. After a ten minute inspection, he knew the problem and how to solve it. Upon discovering we didn’t have the right tools, though, he rode back to the garage to get his tools and a replacement part. In the mean time, we sat under a tree and threw a ball against an empty building. The mechanic’s son loved this game, but was so enthusiastic that he kept throwing the ball into traffic. Had it been a kilometer down the road in the traffic jam, there would have been no problem. At the top of the pass, though, frustrated drivers saw open road and accelerated urgently. In the interest of not killing the kid, the ball had to disappear for awhile.
ABOVE: Trucks rush past the boy, motorcycle and building.
After another couple of round trips (he picked up the wrong part once and the reason for the other trip shall remain a mystery) all the problems were taken care of. When it came time to settle a bill, the part cost plus five hours of labor and driving was about one tenth what the time would have been willing to pay. With very few exceptions, people had the chance to take advantage of me and my fellow travelers but decided not to.
ABOVE: Another example of For Tuk’s Sake broken down at a time not described in the above story.
Though most of the daylight hours were spent either in a rickshaw or trying to fix one, we still managed to stop at some of the classic tourist destinations. Before sunrise in Agra, we walked to the Taj Mahal and spent the morning watching the sun arc over it. The white marble is semi-translucent and changes color with the angle of light. Despite being four hundred years old, it feels like a living building.
A week earlier we stopped at the Ellora caves, which are well over a thousand years old. Each serving as a temple for Hinduism, Buddhism, or Jainism, they could have earned World Heritage simply for demonstrating evidence of peaceful religious coexistence. The architectural achievements are most impressive, though. The Kailasanatha Temple started as a single piece of rock. Over hundreds of years, diggers removed 200,00 tons of stone, leaving a tower 30 meters high and numerous pillars covered with intricate carvings. After seeing dozens of stone temples in Egypt and Asia, Kailasanatha is the one that touched me most emotionally.
Despite being so close to some of history’s great wonders, I think I preferred my time in the rickshaw. By virtue of being so recognizably out of place, our barriers from locals seemed to fall away. One of them told me it was because they respected our willingness to experience their country the way they do instead of in a tourist bus. While there is some truth to that, I’m not going to pretend we ever walked in anybody else’s shoes. No, I think this mode of travel allowed us to offer them a diversion. For once, the tourists became the object of interest. It was like we knew a password that allowed us to talk, ask questions and participate for just a moment or two.
Truck drivers seemed to have a special interest in us. Often times it manifested in protection as they guided us through passing lanes or lit our way at night. The batteries in rickshaws are so weak that when I honked my horn, my headlights dimmed. Other times the drivers were curious. They would pass and then fall back over and over to yell questions or just give a thumbs up. When it was finally time to cross the border into Nepal, they got out of their lorries to pose for pictures and inspect our rickshaw. This proved very helpful when we discovered that the tools the race organizers had provided didn’t fit our lug nuts and we couldn’t change a flat tire. For the dozens of lorry drivers watching who make their living based upon self-reliance and mechanical know-how, this was the funniest thing that could ever happen. While I contemplated running back to India (I could see a store selling the tool I needed and a Nepali cop told me to go for it) the lorry drivers mounted a search of their own. After chickening out from an unauthorized double border crossing, I returned to see the final turn of the nut on my replacement tire. I think they even let us keep the tool.
ABOVE: Just past the Nepal border, drivers celebrate solving my problems.
Two days later we arrived in Pokhara where the race officially ended. A parade gave everybody one last chance to drive our beloved rickshaws. Having shared so many intense experiences, what would normally be passing pleasantries had become the basis for strong friendships. Many of the teams were seeing each other for the first time in days or even weeks and it somehow felt like a graduation party and class reunion rolled into one big event. As we drove down the road, people jumped from rickshaw to rickshaw. Kids ran next to us and eventually hopped in and on top. From the sidewalks and windows, tourists and locals tried to make sense of what was going on. Chaos had come in the form of honking horns and swerving vehicles. Drivers decided to forget their deposits and ram into each other. We had all survived the last 3000 kilometers and a wreck in the home stretch seemed all right.
