The Beginning

Well it was almost exactly one year ago today that Adam, Hamish, Adrian and Antonio met each other in the sweltering heat of Southern India for the first time (well, Hamish and Adrian knew each other before….. but generally we were all strangers), Antonio was traveling with his lovely wife Giovanna and I was traveling with my friend Anita.

 We were all taking part in the epic Rickshaw Run which was also set-up by the crazy folk at the Adventurists and involved driving a badly made, under-powered, death-trap of a sit-on lawn mower AKA an India made Baja 145E auto-rickshaw from the far south of the massive Indian sub-continent to the far north, around the back of Bangladesh into the less visited and remote eastern states near Burma to a town we had never heard of, in a state that we had never heard of either!

We covered a distance of over 5000km in less than 14 days along with sixty or so other teams who were all racing for the ever-distant finish line, some days involved over 16 hours of driving and I think we can all safely say it was the most stressful thing we had ever done in our lives!

Our daily route typically meant getting up at 4am, driving from 4:30am until 9 or 10pm (some days gone midnight) and living on a banana and the occasional coconut haggled from a street vendor either at a busy junction as we waited or more often than not while we were trying to fix one of the twice daily catastrophic breakdowns.  We used no GPS, only massive maps that covered the whole of India, did not have any support, spares, back-up or way points and were totally on our own when we broke down. Despite the hardship, stress, sleep deprivation and the sheer terror of some of the horrific things we witnessed on the Indian highways and back roads – we did eventually arrive confused, exhausted but so happy to have completed such an amazing journey.

Now one year later we must be mad as we have all teamed up to have a go at the Rickshaw Runs’ – bigger brother: The Mongol Rally – an even tougher challenge with complicated border crossings, missing roads, entire deserts to cross, three or four times the distance and crossing multiple countries that most of us had never even heard of until we started looking at maps!

Planning is a bit more involved than just heading down a line on a map, its more like project management in its own right!

Adam