well well

Just a moment to send you all a note before I go to sleep. It's 10pm here in Ademaly, about 30km west of Munnar. It's been non-stop since our last post. We've had two days of rickshaw lessons, much camaraderie, the launch, and a day of driving.
25th: Lovely Christmas dinner - complete with our first gin & tonics of the trip.
26th: All day driving lesson
27th: Early driving lesson, sightseeing, and late night painting.
28th: Morning packing, painting and the launch in the afternoon.

Here are a few photos of the progress we've made. We have a couple short videos too, I'll try to get those up soon.

We left Kochi at 1:20 with 28.6km on the rickshaw odometer, We've gone just over 100km since then and arrived here at 8:00. We were pressing to reach Munnar, a mountain tea station but as it is we had to drive in the dark for an hour and a half just to reach this town. We're 30km short of our goal but in good spirits. We had decided to head due East from Kochi so we are driving straight up one of the highest mountains in the Western Ghats. We're traveling with two brothers, James (20) and Ben (18) from the Leith team. A couple other teams are on the same route and we expect to see them tomorrow: Ingo and Sam from The Bombay Buccaneers, Fabian from Spirit of Lassi, and one other team that I don't know the name of. I think you can find all of them on the official site. Speaking of the official site I think there's a text message thing up so check that and we should be able to update it soon.

The driving is intense. The traffic is rough but manageable. Dad drove the whole day and I navigated. I think I'll take the stick tomorrow. These mountain roads are quite windy and driving at night is prohibitively crazy. We don't plan to do it often. Perhaps it's good though, that we got some of the hardest driving (first day, mountains, night) under our belts early.


Dad and I stayed up past midnight to paint our rickshaw. We had to change plans because the team from Loaded magazine needed the only can of blue for their union jack so we went with red. We also learned we couldn't paint the plastic roof stuff. So there's more work to be done but we're quite happy with it.






The rear of our rickshaw with the map of India added to the back the morning of the launch. Dad did a really nice job. We'll add a line marking our route as we go.




There were tons of local media teams there and there are a couple film crews traveling with the run. The crew below is going by Jeep and the woman in blue looks exactly like Gwen Stefani.




One of the other rickshaws at the launch, the team driving it is great.




A snapshot of a mountain valley from the back of the rickshaw before it got dark.



Well that's all for now, I'm too tired to proofread.