If you haven’t done so, check out Part 1 and Part 2.
Welcome to part 3. In this part, we will cover Goa. I’m sure a ton of people have been to Goa who read this blog. It is considered the beach paradise of India, and it is well deserving of that name. When we ended up in Goa, we had been on the road for 4 days, driving a crappy, underpowered Rickshaw. My body was completely numb from the constant vibration of the “engine”. So, when we pulled into the town where the mid-way party was to be held with half a day of no rickshawing, I was more that excited. We found a small room for a few thousand Rupees, but the guy only wanted 2 people per room, so we just lied and said our third is staying elsewhere. Ironically, that worked out for reasons I’ll get into later.
We burned away the afternoon drinking and eating, waiting for the party to start that night. At 8PM, we rolled to the party, already well sauced. The Goa party held up to Adventurist standards. As with the last party, I won’t go into details, but there was a ton of booze and general debauchery. I left around 1 AM, once some hammered brits started boxing. Unfortunately, drunk Eric couldn’t find his way back to the hotel. That guy is bloody useless. I ended up in a weird tent city. The houses were just blue plastic drop sheets strung to trees. I assume it was for the seasonal workers. That part is cool and fine, but some dogs started to follow me, actually nipping at me. I enjoy dogs, but there ones looked rather rough. After a bit, a local ran them off laughing at my inability to shoo them away myself. Apparently, I’m a coward… but I knew that.
After I made my way out of the tent city, I realised my stomach actually hurt from hunger. Now that I think about it, I’m not convinced I actually ate dinner. With a few gallons (obvious exaggeration is obvious) of booze in me, I needed to find some food. I walked restaurant to restaurant only to be told they were only serving beer at this time, which is the last thing I needed. Oh well, I stumbled into my room somewhere around 3. Dhruv was already there, but Rob was absent. I passed out shortly after.
As mentioned, we didn’t lie about having only 2 people. Rob woke me up by stumbling into the room around 8 AM. He was wearing another man’s shirt. He claims he got lost and borrowed a shirt for some reason. I think he went Southpaw for the night (wink, wink). He did return with a bit of hilarity. He checked into a completely different hotel for the night, since he was “lost”. They asked for his passport, but he just gave them his Adventurist ID… which isn’t an ID at all. It’s just got the logo and a bunch of obviously fake information.
Anyway, we got some breakfast, loaded up the rickshaw and headed out. Our first goal was to find a repair shop since apparently Rob took a swim with his phone. While Rob and Dhruv nipped around stores, I took a quick snooze.
Our caravan was officially broken up at this point, so once they were done not getting Rob’s phone fixed, we scuttled off on our own. Once thing we noticed is that at the party, everyone’s Rickshaw seemed to be faster than ours, therefore we decided to get it serviced. We pulled into the next city we passed and looked around for a mechanic. After an hour of fruitless searching, we paid a guy to show us the way. Easy peasy.
This mechanic was a god-send, and horrible at the same time. This dude took apart our entire engine, cleaned it, and fixed a ton of stuff. The problem was that it took for-bloody-ever. We were sitting around for hours waiting. We were hot, hung over, and exhausted. So, I did the best thing I could think of and chewed some paan. It’s a leaf and nut compound that gets you a bit high… like a few cups of coffee with a few little pain killers. That was fun, until I came down… then I was miserable again.
Well, after a painful wait, we were off again. And this time, our Rickshaw hit a solid 55-60 kilometres and hour! Next time, we will get into bribes and driving at night!
Team Strawberry Seahorses 
2 thoughts on “Mechanics and Parties – Rickshaw Run Part 3”