Kochi - Palakkad

After 4 days without cell service it is back! Let the blogging begin. I am going to retrace some of our last couple days to keep you updated! Ok so let’s head back to January 1st - Launch Day!

Coming out of a superb New Year's Eve Party hosted by The Adventurists themselves, all of us felt a bit groggy - although the excitement of the upcoming journey really put us in place to get this race going. We had met so many people and because of the common terrifying experience we all were about to go out on, many of these friendships already felt like we have known each other for years. One of the teams that we have been working with since we arrived was “Fire It Up” from the Netherlands. They were one of the few teams that we have met (actually only 4 out of the 104 teams) that wanted to go east and then north instead of straight north up the coast. So a toast was made and since then the Gridskippers and Fire It Up have been racing all across the country of India together!

For the last three days, we had adopted a local taxi driver by the name of Aneesh to take us around all the local shops to help us prepare our rickshaw for the journey. Some of the more important items would be items such as seat cushions and water bottle holders; some of the less important items would be things like pimped out wheel covers!

As the 10am race time came closer, we checked out our pimped out rickshaw for any last minute additions and we have decided to name her “Lady Karma”.

Spare Battery (check)
Inverter (check)
Power Banks (check)
3 Spare gas cans (check)
Festive Pimping (check)
Disco Light (check)
Oh Crap Handles (check)
etc…..

We were ready! One last group picture and we were off! All 104 rickshaws racing to the only ferry that would take us to mainland to begin our separate tracks!

(10 mins later….)

Rickshaw Traffic Jam!

And we are stuck! 104 rickshaws back to back as they began to put them onto the ferry at about 15 at a time…. We sat for another hour or two waiting our turn to get onto the ferry and begin this adventure! What it really did was give more time for some special photo ops!