Rickshaw challenge – seven days of Indian road madness is about to start.

Now we have arrived in Chennai and will soon start our great adventure – a rickshaw race where we will drive our own rickshaw around the state of Tamil Nadu. The race is 1000 km long and we will do it together with 10 other teams. Our nice rickshaw is painted in a ”flower power” theme – which was prepared from our design before we came to Chennai. And it looks absolutely fantastic!!

The first day we met the other teams, altogether more than twenty participants coming from countries around the world such as New Zealand, South Africa, Holland and Australia.

The organizer of the race is called Princley. He is a happy Indian guy who has arranged a lot of rickshaw races together with the other guys in his support team. (He is the guy in the brown shirt below.)

After an initial walk through of how a rickshaw works we were able to try to drive our rickshaws in a large practice driving area in Chennai. It was great fun but Christel found it really hard to handle the clutch and gears (all maneuvered by left hand.) and quickly realized that the Indian roads will be a bit too much to her when it comes to driving a rickshaw safely with full control after just an hours practice.

This first days session was rounded up by a visit to a petrol station and we then had to find our way back to the hotel, an exciting meeting with the Indian rush hour traffic in the middle of Chennai.