With late notice of a months worth of time off, we decided to do something unusual. Despite almost no time to plan, we decided to fly to the south of India with the specific intention of driving the length of the country in a rickshaw - the end destination being the Himalayas. After a rushed two day visa application and flight booking the day before, we flew out to New Delhi and then on to Kochi, Kerala in the south of the country. 
We arrived in Kochi at night and decided that we better have our first Rickshaw experience. We managed to pile into the first we could find with the driver telling us it was 45km to the hostel we had booked and that it would be more sensible to get a taxi. We declined.
For the uninitiated reading this, a rickshaw - or more specifically an autorickshaw, is basically a modified motor scooter with a kind of golf cart body over the top, it can fit a driver in the front and 3 in the back with a small amount of luggage. It is ideally used for journeys of 1 or 2 km around town, 3500km into the mountains was not in the design profile. It is noisy, bumpy and slow.
The next few days would be spent trying to find and buy a rickshaw, which we had heard would be difficult.....
We arrived in Kochi at night and decided that we better have our first Rickshaw experience. We managed to pile into the first we could find with the driver telling us it was 45km to the hostel we had booked and that it would be more sensible to get a taxi. We declined.
For the uninitiated reading this, a rickshaw - or more specifically an autorickshaw, is basically a modified motor scooter with a kind of golf cart body over the top, it can fit a driver in the front and 3 in the back with a small amount of luggage. It is ideally used for journeys of 1 or 2 km around town, 3500km into the mountains was not in the design profile. It is noisy, bumpy and slow.
The next few days would be spent trying to find and buy a rickshaw, which we had heard would be difficult.....
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