Curry on Rickshaw

A reasonably early start after a good curry and a few beers with the rest of the rickshawers. (The pimping last night was curtailed due to late arrival of the rickshaws, no light and lack of willing locals to do any work for us.) The local painters got to the holding area at 6.30 am. We arrived at 8.30 am as we had little painting to do but plenty of holes to drill etc.

Alas, we could not get a hole driller to come to us so we were delayed…. apparently they don’t have cordless drills over here. We also had to wait until 10am for the shops to open to get a better battery for our steed to run the extreme lights and horns. We did manage to fit a few decals and try and hussle some locals for help. By the time we knew it, it was time for us to head to the cricket ground for the official ceremony by local officials and the chief rozzer.  This video shows the first rickshaw leaving the ceremony.  Well sort of.  It was a press shoot and the rickshaw turned around and came back sortly after he restarted it after stalling!

Then followed the cricket match with the local team which we had to skirt away from as: a) we have both played cricket (badly) many moons ago; and b) we had a rickshaw to pimp.

Into action we both went. I cornered a local rickshaw wallah (Shaji) to take us around to various places to get batteries, find a workshop, find a hole driller, find some more cable, etc etc. We found a battery supplier after a bit of searching, then i realised i didn’t have enough cash for it but knocked them down a few quid anyway. Then for more supplies via the local currency converter….some geezer in the back of a shop. Found a hole driller…well a workshop with a power supply. By this time, Tim decided to head back to base to pick up the registration documents and stuff. I stayed and acted foreman over the hole driller. They also made up a nice bracket for the new battery:

Then it was back to the Bijou’s workshop (Shaji’s mate i assume), where the battery was wired to the engine, a buzzer put in for the indicators, driveshafts greased, smokes were smoked and many a local tried to converse with me. By this time Tim was getting browned off at being able to do very little at the rickshaw base and also everyone else was getting on the road. He did manage to amuse himself by watching everyone crash into things (and that was just in the car park):

After bunging Bijou and his crew some wad we headed back to base….via the hole driller to redo a hole….free of charge i might add…..and also seeing an elephant on the way made it a worthwhile detour. Shaji also persuaded me to donate our half empty bottle of Morgan Spiced to him…..of course we also bunged him a large wad for all his help and running us around over many hours. Although all the lights were fitted in place, i still had to find time to wire them up along with the horns and control box….without having a Jarvis like cabling nightmare. We decided to defer this activity and get on the road.

We finally got on the road around 3.30pm. We thought we were last but passed some others at a local petrol station. I took charge of driving first and the traffic was absolutely mental. I had ‘rickshaw wrist’ after about an hour. Tim did a bit of driving around a petrol station but decided to save all of his extreme driving skills until the next day.

By 7pm it was almost pitch black and having a headlight as useful as a match in a wind tunnel, we though we better stop. Miraculously, a hotel appeared as if by magic and we got a couple of rooms for the night. An excellent curry and a few beers were definitely in order, with the promise that we’d be up early to wire the rickshaw and get on the road………

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 28th, 2006 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Rickshaw Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.