Day 10 - 11 : Midway update! Lots of pictures!

I'm back! Everything still in one piece so far. We're about 50% of the drive in, both in terms of time and distance. It sounds good except that our Catbus is starting to show signs of distress, which means we might take longer to finish the rest. If you pray to any deities, please keep one for us that we might not suffer any catastrophic breakdown. As it stands quite a few teams have already required fixes ranging from new engine parts to being towed away by a truck.

Also, I'm pleased to report that after going through half our route we have stayed in exactly zero of the places that we originally planned to stay at. Part of me is extremely pleased that I didn't put any more effort into research than I did. The other part of me is slightly upset that we had actually bothered to even plan a route.

On the other hand, other teams have done stuff like this:

That name seems... ill-omened

I hope their trip has gone to plan, but from anecdotal evidence so far India has a great way of taking plans and defenestrating* them.

*High-brow, useless word of the day! It means to throw out of the window. Literally. Okay, back to the post.

It's impossible to gauge road conditions other than to drive on them, and by then choosing a different route is completely impossible without doubling back. Also, the exact same road can start as a nicely paved two-lane road and morph into a one-lane-ish uphill road riddled with more potholes than my face during my teenage years.

That presents a big challenge because the quality of the road directly impacts our travel speed much more than the length of travel. Some days we can churn out 100km in 3 hours, but in other spots we might be lucky to get 30km.

Add in the other factors we need to consider:
1. How scenic a route is (pure highways are boring, coasts are nice).
2. Where we can stay for the night (we prefer not to camp, nights are cold). Booking.com has been my most commonly accessed website, as we're no longer young and courageous enough to drive blindly into a town and hope for available lodging.
3. Food stops, break stops, photo op stops, stops for all sorts of reasons.

...and we have an ultimate recipe for driving disaster. Case in point, despite aiming to go northwards, yesterday we did a 50km east to west detour and today we did another 50km but from west to east.

Not sure if I'm doing a good job navigating, but they're stuck with me for now. Hah.

Sometimes we end up in forests

Sometimes we forge through mountains

Sometimes we reach the ocean...

...and sometimes we end up nowhere at all

But along the way we get up all sorts of fun too!

We eat great butter naan with egg and chicken curry

And eat deep fried potato, which was supposed to go with bread but we're barbarians

And eat the best butter garlic squid I've ever had, with some strange corn soup that's sweet

And drink lots of chai

I'm having a lot of fun eating now that the food is getting less spicy the further north we go.

At times it gets crowded

Other times it's just us

Whatever happens it's been an awesome blast so far. Still another 50% more to go!

And with that, good night

Cheerios, Jik
https://give.asia/movement/rickshaw_run_-_driving_for_charity