I’ve only been in India a few days, but I’ve definitely had some entertaining experiences…
Typical cows taking up the road
Shortly after landing our third flight, we found out we had a six hour bus ride before we arrived at our destination. A very nice Indian man who spoke wonderful English had been waiting for us and showed us to our bus. We were all excited because we never get a driver who speaks English. Little did we know, this man wasn’t our driver, he wasn’t even coming with us. And like usual, our driver did not speak English.
About 3 hours into our drive we asked if we could stop somewhere for a bathroom. After a while of just saying “toilet” our driver finally pulled over on the side of the road. It was about 1am so it was dark, and I’ve peed outside before, but never on the side of the road with ten other females standing right next to me with cars driving by. It was definitely an experience…
A few days later, we were heading to lunch after work. We take rickshaws everywhere which in American standards would fit 3-4 people in addition to the driver. Typically, we put 5-6 people in not including the driver (World Racers have a much different standard of fitting people in somewhere).
Rickshaw
Well, on this typical day, the traffic was crazier than normal (which means it was seriously insane) and we couldn’t find a rickshaw that wasn’t full. So we wandered across a busy road and down the street until finally, a rickshaw passed that only had one passenger. So, we talked to the driver and he told us to hop on. So that’s exactly what all 12 of us did. We jumped in. Now, this rickshaw was slightly bigger than the usual ones we ride in, meaning by American standards, you could fit about 6 people. We fit 13 plus driver. All I could think of was how the one passenger probably went home later that day and when asked how his day was he would say something like “well, after lunch I rode a rickshaw with 12 crazy Americans.” Wonderful.
This is a glimpse of our rickshaw adventure:
