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Ramblings on Nepal and India

There are those moments in life that you know will forever live in your memory as a sort of pinnacle of your existence; moments wherein you know you've truly tasted the essence of life and all that it has to offer; moments when you know you've absolutely taken advantage of the single life you have on this planet by doing something so extraordinary that it reminds you you're truly alive in every sense; moments when you come close enough to death that you love life more than you ever have.

Traveling through Nepal and India was a spiritual experience. No, not in terms of religion or finding God or anything like that, but rather in terms of achieving a higher level of spirituality within myself.

You can go on living your life everyday and you forget that you're alive. And when you have that moment that reminds you of just how alive you are, you realize that every other day was a mundane, routine march to the end of your existence.

When I originally heard about the Rickshaw Run and signed up, it was with the expectation that I would get to see a part of the world that I'd never been to before; that it would be a fun and crazy experience; that I would meet new people like myself; and to a certain extent that I would challenge myself mentally and physically. But what I didn't realize was that I would be pushing myself to limits I'd never experienced and that I would learn things about myself that I'd never known.

Upon landing in Kathmandu, the stark reality of one of the poorer countries in the world was apparent. Nestled among the Himalayas, you'd find it hard to believe that a city like Kathmandu can experience such plight. It was poor, and yet by no means the poorest city we would see on our trip. It was built up, but crumbling in all but the wealthiest areas. It had charm, it had edge, and it was beautiful. It was a chaotic patchwork of a former glory and a modern plight.

Probably only half the city had electricity at any given moment. You walked down the street in the Thamel or elsewhere and watch all the lights go out for as far as the eye can see and 20 minutes later, everything would come back up again. When you walked down the street and saw the electrical wiring, literally hundreds of tangled electrical cables being held to a building by some rotting piece of wood, you wondered how this place had any electricity at all.

Electricity, technology, modernity. A recurring theme throughout the trip, you see that when implemented poorly, irresponsibly and without any forethought, how it can destroy a society.

I would've loved to have seen Nepal and India 100 years ago. Countries which had no real modern technology to speak of; where they operated with within the bounds of what nature and their immediate surroundings could provide. I say this because so often we saw how the plight of the cities were a direct result of a lack of foresight and education, of giving people technology and not telling them how to responsibly embrace it to benefit them and making their lives better, but rather of how to use it to attempt to make their lives easier (which it didn't) all the while destroying them and their surroundings in the process.

You can't walk around most cities in Nepal or India without covering your face. My lungs got absolutely shredded in our time there. People burned garbage on the streets to stay warm. Cars, rickshaws, trucks, and buses coughed out black diesel smoke so thick the air was almost unbreathable. In some cities you would wade ankle deep through garbage (mostly plastic, metal, and other non-biodegradable junk) just walking down the street. There was no such thing as clean water (anywhere) or modern plumbing (in most places). Massive vats of water which were manually filled were placed on the roofs of buildings and used gravity to provide water to the floors below. Heat of any kind was non-existent except in some nice hotels where they had hot water boilers powered by kerosene to provide lukewarm water. Herds of animals and families would sit atop the same piles of garbage scavenging for food. But I don't want to paint a horrible picture. These were perhaps the rougher areas, which sadly were more common than you might expect.

Yet through all this, over one billion people maintain their existence, living their day-to-day lives. To us, they were millions of people in an ocean of human life. In such a vast population, one face could hardly be differentiated from the next. Yet they were individuals with individual lives, maintaining an individual existence. They were human beings just like us, but they lived lives of constant struggle for survival.

And yet throughout all this was an overwhelming feeling of love for life, that to struggle to survive is to truly live. Every moment of every day counts. Love for your fellow man is critical to your survival when you have only them to depend on for your life. Imagine a country of 1.2 billion people, 4x the size of the US population, living on land 1/3 the size of the United States. The US has 32 humans per square kilometre. Europe has 70 humans per square kilometre. India has 364 humans per square kilometre. As Gregory David Roberts said in Shantaram, no western country would survive in these conditions. Throw a billion westerners into western Europe and it would evolve to WWIII in just a matter of minutes. Chew on that.

And you can sense the warmth of the people, that their plight was their existence, that perhaps they wouldn't have it any other way, that they willingly resigned themselves to this because otherwise, life might be too boring. And you know, I think they're right.

I missed the toughest part of the travel through India due to my border troubles and visa issues. I missed charging through the poverty of Uttar Pradesh, my fellow rickshaw runners driving with their sleeping bags on through fog and miserable cold, getting sick, staying in the most horrible of hotels, and aching to get south as soon as possible, to the warmth, to the cleaner air.

In the meantime I was dealing with overstaffed and inefficient government offices in Kathmandu, with inflated egos and absurd rules, with legal documents, and written statements. You've never met someone with such a passionate hatred towards bureaucracy as I have. I also have absolutely no patience. So it's obvious that I was being tested.

Five days of complete nonsense. Five days of written statements, senseless waiting due to unmotivated, and underpaid government officials. I couldn't buy a plane ticket. I had no idea how I was going to rejoin my team. I was on the verge of being arrested or deported.

And I loved it all. I loved the living on the edge. I love that I was so sick, I was shitting my brains out every hour. I loved the constant struggle to overcome the odds. I loved knowing that I was pushing myself to my limits and growing up with every huge challenge I faced. I loved that I was living outside my 9 to 5 office bubble. I loved that to truly face my emotions was to truly live. I loved how this insane experience was rendering my life up to that point as completely fucking insignificant. I loved how I was, for once in my life, truly alive.

As I rejoined my team in Indore, India, I looked forward to completing the adventure I had set out to do in the first place.

The reunion was nothing short of spectacular and will truly live among the best memories of the trip. The chaos of four rickshaws parked outside my hotel, 11 other rickshaw runners, fueling up, rebalancing the weight in the rickshaws, taking a breather, having a smoke. Locals were gathering around wondering what the hell was going on and who all these filthy-looking white people were. Team Blighty in their waistcoats and cravats, Team Tukelicious taking a break, Team Rickshaw Knight Riders looking at their engine, and Chris and Seema looking at me and smiling and welcoming me back with open arms, both of them barely able to contain themselves about the difficulties, the excitement, and the craziness of the trip up to that point - how they'd met up with these teams, how they'd broken down in a traffic circle, how they'd driven through some insane cities, how Seema had gotten sick, how bitterly cold the journey was until that day. It was with a bittersweet pang I felt some sadness in my heart at my misfortune that forced me to miss it all, but I knew that there were still nine days left of the journey.

For all of us, the struggle and misfortune experienced up until that day, would completely reverse itself that day into what would become an amazing rest of the trip. For the first time, since the teams had set out from Pokhara, the day was sunny and warm. The Indian countryside of Madhya Pradesh was breathtakingly beautiful. We stopped, picked, and ate chili peppers from a field. We wore t-shirts and shorts for the first time. That night we would stay in a fantastic hotel in a small city called Buhranpur, India. The owner greeted us personally and treated us to one of the best local meals we would have in India. We ate outside under the stars listened to live music. We would sit around on couches in one of the hotel rooms, drink beers, laugh until our stomachs hurt and truly appreciate the moment we were living in. We were whole. We were complete. And that moment tasted so sweet.

Traveling in a convoy sounds like a recipe for disaster. Especially when the convoy is made up of four rickshaw teams and three people in each convoy. I was a little skeptical when I realized we would all have to try to get along for the remainder of the trip. That compromise would be a necessary routine for a group this size. That we would be doomed and possibly leave wishing never to see each other again.

There are times in life when the odds are overwhelmingly against, that egos and personalities are destined to tip the balance, where twelve type-A individuals working together to achieve a common goal are a statistical impossibility.

I have never loved being with eleven strangers as much as I loved being with these guys. No group of twelve people in the world worked together as well as we did. I wish I could say it was a lesson in team-building, but we worked so well as a team that there was hardly any building. People stepped up when they needed to and stepped back when they weren't needed. No one felt the need to take charge, and every individual brought something to the table when it was needed of them. Some were great with directions. Some were great with mechanics. Some were great with negotiation. Some were great with communication. Some were great with providing comic relief when it was needed. It was the most perfect team I've ever been a part of. And I will miss it for the rest of my life. We can all say with confidence that we all made close friends that day. To truly respect twelve people is to do the Rickshaw Run with them and not kill them afterwards. But to truly love twelve people is to do the Rickshaw Run with them, have amazing laughs, accidents and breakdowns, fantastic meals, and to feel like you truly know them in the end. If someone asked me what made the entire trip for me, it was being with eleven other amazing people that I hope to stay in touch with forever. They made this adventure extraordinary.

Sadly just a couple days after I would rejoin the team, Chris was scheduled to depart back for San Francisco. In total, we'd only spent a few days together during the entire trip due to our misfortunes. Chris' departure was a bummer. I'd been looking forward to spending time with him and though the time we had together was amazing, it was simply too short.

Seema and I charged on as the only two-person team, but with the support of the rest of the convoy. We had great conversations as we drove, helped each other to drive at night (which we did far too much of). We worked well as a team, though I'm sure I stressed her out more since I can be such a horrible backseat driver. In the end, we got along great, and I would do it again with her in a heartbeat.

We faced a ton of challenges throughout the trip, but luckily as we continued to trudge south, gaining more experience and feeling the warm weather, things got remarkably easier. The regions down south were wealthier and more developed. Breakdowns were a non-issue; we knew exactly what issues were as they arose. We knew our rickshaws better, we knew the roads better.

But towards the end were a few moments of adversity which challenged us mentally and emotionally more than we'd been challenged up to that point. These were the defining moments of the trip that reminded us we were on a dangerous trip and that at any moment something could go wrong.

The biggest breakdown our convoy would have was the day Chris left. It was supposed to be a "power" day of 500+ kilometres, but we'd end up far short. Team Rickshaw Knight Riders pulled over to the side of the road at around 2pm after they'd more or less lost power. They couldn't get their rickshaw started up again. They'd been experiencing serious power issues throughout the trip and this is where it culminated. We knew this was a serious problem that we couldn't fix on our own. We were in the middle of nowhere in Maharashtra about 30 kilometres north of a city called Solapur. As was the case in the rest of India, middle of nowhere still means there are people around (364 people/square kilometre). Within minutes, a mechanic and a couple of his friends drove by on his motorcycle and stopped to help. After about 30 minutes, he diagnosed the issue. A hole in the piston. A virtual death sentence. To fix it, he needed a new piston. It was a Sunday and the only mechanic open was in Solapur, and that's if we were lucky. He offered to drive one of our convoy on the back of his motorcycle to Solapur where they would pick up the part, then come back and take a few hours to fix it. Two hours later, they returned with bananas for everyone in the convoy, which they had insisted on paying for. The mechanic then spent until 9pm fixing it in the dark of the countryside with nothing but our headlamps guiding his way. At around 7pm, our team and Tukelicious headed to Solapur in the dark to look for a hotel for all of us while Blighty and the KRs stayed back with the mechanic.

On the way to the hotel, I got a call from one of the Blighty guys telling us that there was a very dangerous man following us on a motorcycle. Apparently one of the people that stopped by our convoy earlier in the day when we were broken down was an acquaintance of the mechanic. The mechanic and his friends feared for our lives when this man showed up demanding to know where we'd gone. Apparently the dangerous man had hopped on his bike and was making his way to Solapur on our tails. We luckily never encountered him again. In the end, the mechanic and his friends had spent seven hours of his day helping us, feeding us, and protecting us, and if you want a testament to the kindness of the Indian people, these men epitomized it. When in the end, we offered the mechanic 1000 rupies (20 USD) for his work, he emphatically denied taking something along the lines of a couple hundred (4 USD).

I have a lifetime of stories from the trip. Stories that I will carry with me until the day I die. I never felt more alive than I did on this trip. I never learned so much about myself, about the kindness of strangers, about the plight of mankind, about the strength of teamwork and the power of friendship, about joy and sadness, about courage and fear, and about the thrill of adventure and being alive as I learned on this trip. If you live your remaining years without having an experience like this, then you haven't truly lived.

There is no more an appropriate quote with which to end this post than that of Chris McCandless:

"So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more dangerous to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man's living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun."

Carpe Diem. Make your life extraordinary.