Dhanyavad from India

10:30am 18 Jan 2010 6 comments

BY GLEN CROFSKEY

A little Namaskar can get you a long way in India.

The bowed greeting touching hands in prayer position and saying Namaste, or I praise the God within you, acknowledges the dehin, or soul, and that on a higher level we are all the same.

But on this third dimension, or samsara, the wheel of life and death, circumstance dictates we are not all equal and some are suffering way more than others.

We are currently in Kali Yug, the worst possible age, the time of Kali the destroyer. A time of darkness, when chaos reigns as Vishnu and Shiva sleep.

In some parts of India this is the case. In winter rural Uttar Pradesh is a grim place to be. It is gripped by a perpetual, smoky haze that blocks the sun. It is cold enough for people to die.

Rickshaw RuNZ First Team Home

11:02am 15 Jan 2010 17 comments

Kochin has been invaded by the Portuguese, Dutch and English and been a port of call for spice traders from Africa, China, the Middle East and Europe for centuries, and now it has been infiltrated by three Kiwis in an auto rickshaw.

Yeehah! I can now declare that team Rickshaw RuNZ - me Darryl and Wal - has crossed the finish line in Fort Cochin in Kerala twelve days after setting out from the centre of Nepal in a rickety, three-wheeled, seven horse-powered auto rickshaw.

We drove 3,112 kilometres, from the Himalayas through the freezing smoky fog of Uttar Pradesh, through rough desert and jungles of Madhya Pradesh, through Maharashtra and into the straight roads of welcoming Andhra Pradesh before dropping through colourful Karnataka and onto Kerala's coconut coast.

And what a long strange trip it's been.

The Arabian sea at last

12:43pm 14 Jan 2010 9 comments

BY GLEN CROFSKEY

Farewell Shiva, Vishnu, Brahma, Ganesh, Hanuman et al, and hello Jesus and Mohammed.

By late morning we had left Karnataka and entered Kerala, and it was like going to another country.

After crossing the border we instantly drove our faithful auto rickshaw through a wildlife reserve, where there were white monkeys, termite mounds and spotted deer in between stands of giant bamboo.

There were signs saying beware of elephants and another that read: "Warning. Your Uncontrolled Celebrations Are A Nuisance To Animals."

After the variety of people in northern India, the Keralans seemed to be practically all dark-skinned Dravidians, who wear their coloured lunghis tied up in the front to make shorts.

Kerala, here we come

08:49am 14 Jan 2010 3 comments

BY GLEN CROFSKEY

Within a couple of hours of leaving Anantapur in the morning, we caught up to two more teams, the only other rickshaw runners we had seen in days.

It was Mocra Off The Rails, an Australian team made up of Dr Nick and the Fairbrother brothers, and The League of Adventurists, aka Batman and the Flash.

The previous day Batman had driven 500 kilometres by himself to Hyderabad as he has forbidden the Flash to drive after he put their 'shaw into a field and had to get some locals to help lift it back onto the road.

Now they were in a small town with a string of shanty shops with mechanical probs. One of the Fairbrother brothers stayed with them as he is a mechanic, which on a rickshaw run is like being a doctor at a party full of hypochondriacs.

We were of no use so we peeled on through the desert with the Aussie team, who drive like maniacs and pulled off a moving driver change at 50km/h.

Armur to Hyderabad to Anantapur

01:32pm 12 Jan 2010 9 comments

BY GLEN CROFSKEY

“Sirs sirs petrol petrol!”

The lads from our hotel in Armur rushed into our room urging us to check our 'shaw parked down below.

It was a case of downing our daily end-of-day ritual Kingfisher Strongs, 7.5 percent local beer, and racing down to check black beauty. The carburettor was pissing fuel and the diagnosis was not good.

Wal clamped off the fuel line to stem the flow. We were in the middle of Andhra Pradesh in the middle of a rickshaw race through India and were now totally hamstrung, but to team Rickshaw RuNZ it was no drama.

It was actually a blessing in disguise as we could enjoy a sleep in after our usual dawn starts. Everything stays open late in India, but it opens late as well, so we were resigned to a late getaway as we couldn’t source a new carburettor until at least 10am.