The Rickshaw Mission.

But first, the Indianized English of the day:

* It was half way through a five hour bus ride that we saw a sign instructing us to ‘Rest A Wale.’ Were they suggesting we ensure the rest of one of the whales living among the rice patties? Or perhaps that we arrest one? I thought alternatively that they might want us to rest awhile… but the bus sped past without any of us resting at all so who knows?

* We were sitting at a rather highbrow restaurant in a lovely garden setting. There was a little outhouse on the lawn crowned with a sign that said ‘Tandouri Knight.’ We were waiting all night for a knight to appear, presumably brandishing a turmeric-stained chicken rather than a sword. But alas, he never turned up.

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You may well ask why we are on a rickshaw mission, and I can assure you that you wouldn’t be the first (or even among the first thirty.) It is hard to say what inspired me, but one day we were getting a lift in the back of a rickshaw and suddenly the three-wheeler looked like so much more than just a tiny taxi. It looked like a tiny house.

The idea of a portable house has always appealed to me. I remember envying snails when I was a little tyke. They never have to backtrack if they don’t want to because all the hardware they need is already conveniently installed on their back. I liked that idea. At the time I had visions of myself with my plastic Micky Mouse cubbyhouse mounted on my back – but it never would have worked. The ratios were all wrong.

But now, at 29 years of age, it seemed my childhood fantasy might come true! Admittedly, the rickshaw wouldn’t be attached to my back, but I’ve come to be a tad (if only a tad) more realistic in my old age. Its speed would also probably be comparable to that of a snail – but hey! We are in no rush.

So, on naught but the word of a few rickshaw drivers in Mcleod Ganj, we set off to Mandi looking for a rickshaw dealer whose name and exact location we didn’t even know. It wasn’t much to go on, but getting even that much information was like trying to sieve for gold.

The bus trip down brought us through the Kangra valley, where green hills rolled endlessly and each new corner revealed another valley lined with rice patties so numerous as to seem like stairwells for the Gods. Palampur, the tea capital of Himachal Pradesh, was so wet and green I could have been back in Tasmania. Indeed, there were even eucalyptus trees around to scent the air with the smell of home!

A tea farm in Palampur

Smack-bang in the middle of Mandi

Reaching Mandi with no expectations whatsoever, we were pleasantly surprised to find a lovely little buzzing city full of friendly folk and surrounded by more juicy green hills. After choosing a hotel we got straight down to the business of finding out whether a rickshaw was actually gettable in this place.

A goose chase would have been easier than the ensuing hunt for information. I’ll give you a typical example of pretty much every conversation that day:

“Namaste. Do you know somewhere that sells auto rickshaws?”
“You want to ride in an auto rickshaw?”
“No, we want to buy one.”
“… You want to hire an auto rickshaw?”
“No no, we want to purchase an auto rickshaw. We are looking for a dealer.”
“You mean you want to buy a bike, yes?”
“No, no… we want to purchase an auto rickshaw.”

(This is where eyes start to boggle and jaws start to drop.)

“You want to purchase a three-wheeler?”
“Yes, very much so.”
“It is not possible. You cannot do business.”
“Oh no, we don’t want to do business. We just want it for personal use.”

(Silence, blank look, another silence…)

“You want a rickshaw for personal use?”
“Yes.”

(Incredulous look…)

“Why?!”
“Just for fun. We want to drive it around your country.”
“I think you buy a bike is better.”
“Nah – everyone buys a bike. We want an auto rickshaw.”

And this is their cue to start laughing. ‘Rickshaw’ is obviously not synonymous with ‘fun’ in the mind of an Indian. Rickshaws are the little scuttling mice of the auto world, useful only for getting you from A to B and dodging bigger, badder wheels in the process. No one could conceive of buying one and optionally travelling around India in it. But I had, and I was determined that we would!

However, our queries continued to be met with much disbelief, boggling eyes, dropping jaws, amused grins and laughter. You’d have thought we wanted to buy an army tank for casual travelling! Some people said that there was no rickshaw dealer in the city; some people said they didn’t know. Some people said there was and we should turn to the right, some people said there was and we should turn to the left. We asked a policeman where we could find a dealer, and he gave us in return many confused smiles but no answers. Some people really did want to help, and would have if we’d inquired after something normal like where the best restaurant is.

We were in the middle of a busy road, trying to elucidate our mission to a small bunch of Indians who had gathered to witness the spectacle of two nonsensical foreigners, when Latesh and Deep appeared on a motorbike. Because of their English skills, we were able to communicate our goal to them with slightly less than average levels of confusion. After trying futilely to convince us that a motorbike would be preferable, they suggested that we try tourist information.

But tourist information proved to be as elusive as the rickshaw dealer. According to the collective advice of several people, it was this way, that way and the other. Consequently, we went this way, that way and the other. We were trudging in the ‘other’ direction when Latesh and Deep suddenly popped up again.

“We just realised it is Saturday!” they exclaimed. “The tourist place is not open today! How about going to the leader of the auto rickshaw union instead?”

Now that sounded promising! We thanked them profusely as they zoomed off one way and we trudged off the other way (this was another ‘other way’… there were a lot of other ways in this town.)
It was the hottest time of day, and we found most of the rickshaws concentrated in one area like sediment that has settled at the bottom of juice too warm to drink. They sat hickledy pickledy, just waiting, hot little huts on wheels. We asked one driver where we could buy a rickshaw, which resulted in a conversation of the aforementioned variety only less fluent. Another rickshaw driver came to see what was happening, then another. We asked where the rickshaw union was, and they said there was none. I tried again, asking if I could see the rickshaw union leader. “I am the leader,” volunteered one bloke.

I said I didn’t believe him and one of those cheeky grins split across his face. This is the grin that Indians get when you’ve figured out that their version of the truth may not be… well, the true one. It basically says Oh well, it was worth a try. It’s just business – you understand that, eh? It is impossible to get angry faced with such good-humoured cheekiness.

Anyway, there was a growing crowd of gabbing rickshaw drivers trying to work out exactly what the hell these foreigners (or possibly aliens) were trying to get at when – tah-dah! Latesh and Deep materialized before us again! I jumped back and Moonho did one of his ‘O’ faces. They’d appeared in a small cloud of smoke that was either the result of exhaust fumes or genie magic, and we were both starting to suspect the latter. They were our magic Indian genies and were here to grant our wish.

They joined the confluence of rickshaw drivers and there was much chittering and even more chattering. When Indians talk fast Hindi they appear to be having an auction. Words get faster and faster, excitement builds and people seem to be competing, there is a climax and some sort of conclusion, then the excitement dies down… only to start up again when the next item of interest is revealed.

On that day we were the item of interest.

Eventually, after many questions and answers had zipped bullet-fast back and forth between the boys and drivers, a decision was made. We would be driven to a rickshaw dealer.

So this dealer did exist. Woohoo! We jumped into the back of the proffered rickshaw. We were to go with the would-be union leader. Immediately another driver, not wanting to miss out on all the fun and games, jumped into the front with him before anyone else could. And then we were on our way!

When I first saw my rickshaw it was love at first sight. It is Shiva-blue, its skin (ah-hem – metal) is smooth and its little windscreen wiper ever so cute. It’s a truck rickshaw - like a ute that has been squished to a third of its original size by the hand of Shiva himself.

After a few days and an unhealthy amount of paperwork, it became ours.

Or rather, she became ours. Why is it a she? Well, just as I told Mum when she asked little Leah why her favourite teddy was a girl, “Because she has no penis!”

Henceforth, our rickshaw shall be known as Damsel the Speed Demon. I shall paint her blue exterior and she will be art on wheels. She will be our ride, our home and my canvas.

All we have to do now is learn how to handle her. That shouldn’t be too difficult, should it…?

Damsel the Speed Demon!

The lady with her wings spread

Damsel's bottom

The Story So Far...

Considering we don’t have a rickshaw as yet, the title of this blog is perhaps a tad premature. But there will soon be a rickshaw. Yes, there will! I have fallen head over heels in love with the little three-wheeled buggies, and love knows no bounds.


While I am waiting to get my baby I’ll give you some background information. The following blog entry is what you have missed from the previous episodes of rickshaw travels (minus the rickshaw.)

As many do, my husband and I started in Delhi. As many do, we buggered off from Delhi pretty quickly. Although I could immediately recognise the positive changes that have been made in the city since my last visit (fewer beggars, slightly less ferocity required when bargaining), all the construction work made it impossible to be in. Drills grumbled interminably, gaping holes yawned in the roads, concrete cracked and crumbled, dust was omnipresent… I guess if you want to clean up a place it is bound to get messier first, after all.

That has been the standard excuse for the state of my bedroom for some time. I hope Delhi manages to get cleaned up quicker than that.

So, still picking concrete dust out of our orifices, we trundled onto a third class train. That bit was easy enough. It was perfectly comfortable. Getting off was the problem.

You see, we’d expected some sort of announcement at our stop. You know - that disembodied voice that follows you around in stations, trains and buses telling you what you should do? The nice lady with a soporifically smooth voice that we all depend upon so very much…? Well, that voice, it seemed, had forgotten to get on with the rest of us.

Our ticket told us we should disembark at 4am. It was an hour strange seen from this new angle of post-sleep. Usually if I see 4am at all I only ever see it from the other direction. But I slept, 4am came, and all was silent. The all-knowing voice didn’t tell us to get off, so we didn’t. Indian transport is known to be late often anyway, right? But we realised after a few stops, as the hour matured, that people were doing the unthinkable. They were getting off without the aid of the disembodied voice!

Acting like the daft tourists we are, we dragged our bags towards the door and asked a man “Have we gone past Chakibank?” He wobbled his head for awhile and then indicated that it was yet to come. In unison we heaved a sigh of relief and at the next stop asked another man “Is this Chakibank?” He said no.

Nor were the next few stops. We started to worry that we had indeed gone past Chakibank, so we changed the question. “Which way to Chakibank?” Moonho asked. This man responded with a series of hand movements that, had we taken literally, seemed to indicate Chakibank as being skyward. Seriously doubting the inclusion of any Willy Wonker-type technology that would allow us passage skyward on this train (we hadn’t paid for first class, after all), we tried our luck with the next person. And the next.

Finally we found a friendly chap who was obviously a part of the ‘in-group’ with the disembodied voice, for he seemed to know what he was talking about. He explained in concise detail what we should have done. What we should have done is gotten off at the 4am Chakibank stop.

Ah, well. We got off at the next stop and, skipping over several train tracks and piles of turd steaming in the morning sun, we climbed up onto the platform of… where? Ah, well (I said again.) It hardly mattered.

It was the scenic route. There was a lot of scenery in it. Lovely scenery, I have to say. One rickshaw, several buses and uncountable convoluted roads later we were in Mcleod Ganj, where we wanted to be. Wherever there is a will there is a way and wherever there is a way there is a bus. Eventually.

Tibetans in Mcleod Ganj

Mcleod Ganj is the place of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan refugees. During my time there I discovered the Tibetan culture to be among the most charming cultures I have ever come across. In fact, with a large group of Tibetans I found myself in strangely familiar territory. These people are much like Koreans. They even look alike. Take a Korean woman, convince her to use less than a litre of whitening cream daily, get her to build up some thigh muscles and change her name from ‘Min-jong’ to ‘Dolma,’ and there you have your Tibetan woman!

Okay, that may be an exaggeration, but even Moonho agreed that the two cultures are similar. For example, we became friendly with a bunch of Tibetans who run a little place called ‘Peace Café.’ I was unwell, and once they discovered this – well! You’d have thought Death had already come to claim his latest recruit! Crowding around me, they immediately commenced a feisty discussion about what course of action should be taken. At some point the Mum appeared (I’m not in fact sure that she is anyone’s mum, but she seems an all-round motherly type) and joined in on the debate. Occasionally they would pause and look at me as if trying to gauge just how sick I was. Gladly, they stopped short of fashioning a stretcher out of odd bits and pieces from the kitchen.

I wanted to tell them they needn’t fret on my behalf, but I’ve already learnt from living in Korea that such a thing is futile. Finally there was a general conclusive sort of mumbling, and they turned to me as one.

“You come here at seven in the morning and I drive you to hospital on my motorbike, okay?” said the boss of the café.

I got the feeling the question was rhetorical. I tried to disengage myself from the promise, not wanting to cause them to spend valuable work time carting around a sick foreigner. But they wanted to help. In some cultures kindness is so extreme as to be philanthropic.

Similarly, I’ve had more than one Korean drag me off to the doctor, usually reiterating things like “Oh dear you must miss your mother!” and me replying with something like “But I’ve only got a runny nose! We don’t necessarily have medicine every time we’re sick in Australia, you know, but… oh, we’re here are we?... Well, I’m okay but… Yes… Oh, alright, let’s see the doctor.”

But there is a difference. In Korea I might get a runny nose, while in India I get something else altogether.

As it turned out, I didn’t burden the Tibetans with the responsibility of my wellbeing. The next morning, thinking I was getting better, I decided that getting up at 6:30am was too heavy a price to pay for medicine I didn’t need.

Good Lord Buddha, I was as wrong as wrong can be!

The Joys of Amoebae

For me, the stay in Mcleod Ganj was pretty much one big tour of the town’s toilets. I know the condition and regularity of dysfunction of all the public toilets in town. I know exactly which cubicles don’t have locks, necessitating a balancing act to avoid anyone having to witness you mid... well, you get the picture. I even know the distance between certain points in town and the toilets, enabling me to estimate with uncanny accuracy the agony levels upon arrival.

Yep, I know the toilets of Mcleod Ganj.

Moonho and I went to the same restaurants together, ate similar foods and we both drank filtered water. Either his gut is lined with steel or my gut is like an amusement park for microscopic nasties. It was during my stay in Mcleod Ganj about seven years ago that a parasite called giardia decided to move to the highly coveted location of my intestines. The relationship was rather one-sided. I think this giardia bloke enjoyed me more than I enjoyed him.

Well, my reputation evidently precedes me. During my absence the word had spread to the amoeba family that my gut was the choice place to be, and they spent no time dilly dallying. I was so sick that even water came straight back up. My own stomach bile didn’t even want to hang around in there with the new inhabitants. My bottom became a water dispenser, despite my inability to ingest any. I almost started to wish that Death did come and claim is latest recruit.

If it wasn’t for my darling husband I’d probably still be in a miserable heap on a bathroom floor somewhere. Despite almost blacking out every time I stood, he eventually managed to get me to the hospital. The woeful wretch I was, when I saw the number of people waiting I burst into tears.

I nearly burst into tears anew when I heard the doctor would see us. And that she was Korean. A practitioner in New Zealand, she was over for a month of doctoring experience in India. She took special care of us. She put me on a drip, allowing a pulse rate of 136 to dive back down to normal. She spoke to me in soothing words I understood. She gave me pills that would kill all the new residents of my gut. Ah, lovely, glorious, wonderful pills! Never before have I been so happy to take antibiotics.

I could almost hear the amoebae screaming their objections, but I didn’t listen. I feel guilty if I accidentally kill a fly, but I can tell you this: I was out to annihilate these amoebae and I couldn’t wait to do it.

The little bastards put up a fight, but finally they started to push the daisies and I slowly – painfully slowly – got better. As soon as I was able to get around again we left Mcleod Ganj. Of course, it isn’t Mcleod Ganj’s fault, but the place no longer holds the same charm for me. I can’t help but associate it with toilets. Toilets surrounded by stunning hills and snow-capped peaks, but toilets nonetheless. Perhaps I can rectify this at a later date, but for now I’m quite happy to be out and seeing a new India.

Mani, Dolma and Passang

These people are the reason my memories of Mcleod Ganj have not all been flushed down the toilet. Mani is a Nepali with coal-coloured curly locks and a wide grin. He and his pretty Tibetan wife, Dolma, got married despite the taboos surrounding cross-cultural marriage. They work with Passang, a Tibetan man with tragic eyes that transform when his infectious laugh fills the air.

One night Passang, Moonho and I were invited to Mani and Dolma’s house for a Nepali dinner. The house was a humble little structure made from mud and straw. Outside chickens tottered around drunk on fat wriggly treats. Also tottering around was Araman, 16 months worth of little boy. A happier child I have rarely seen. With all the dirt, chickens and puppies a child of boundless energy could desire, he spends hours occupied with the aforementioned items, occasionally stopping to allow one of the adults to dote on him. He wears a cool little pair of sunnies and kicks back with the air of someone who knows they are adorable and is perfectly comfortable with the fact.

We settled down on the ground outside and Mani’s mother prepared us a traditional Nepali meal. This is when the near overwhelming Nepali/Tibetan hospitality kicked in. Mani’s mother became almost apoplectic if I tried to help with anything. We were guests and as such were to be waited upon. She served up an entrée, Nepali/Tibetan fermented rice wine (which, incidentally, is almost identical to Korean rice wine), a main course so huge as to be intimidating (complete with a separate vegetarian course just for me) and she refused to eat anything herself until we had swallowed our final mouthfuls.

Full to bursting point of lentil and spinach goodness, we retired to the one double bed in the only private room there was. Everyone else (Mani, Dolma, their son, Mani’s parents and Passang) crammed themselves anywhere they could fit on the two narrow beds or floor in the other room. Again, any attempts to give up the master bedroom were met with load and adamant protests.

That night thunder and lightning ripped across the sky. Bullets of rain pelted towards the earth with vengeance. It was all very atmospheric seen safely from the inside of the mud hut, which stood firmly through it all like the unyielding piece of earth that it is.

In the morning Mani’s mother greeted us with a beaming smile and more rice wine. We were assured that in their culture it is perfectly acceptable to start the day with a rice wine buzz. We politely sipped a little, but left it at that. A rice wine buzz in the morning may be all very good, but a rice wine belly in the afternoon we wanted to avoid.

When we left with Mani and Dolma on their way to work, Araman cried for the very first time that I’d heard. Further up the path I could hear that he’d settled down again pretty quickly though. He’d probably been distracted by a passing chicken.

Life must be good when all you need is a chicken to stop the tears. Thank you Dolma, Mani and the family for treating us like a King and Queen. Thank you Passang for making us laugh and always giving us good advice.

Because of you amoebae memories do not reign supreme!

Mani and Dolma tucking into Korean food at a restaurant

Passang amused over Buddha knows what this time