Race Day 10
Money raise for charity:$1,254
Distance Traveled: 2550 km
Fender Benders: 6
Near Death Experiences : 10, details below
We've managed to survive after horribly crashing our rickshaw.
Our first mistake, driving in India. When driving in India it's only a matter of time before you're in a serious auto reck. For some people it takes years, for us, it took 10 days.
Our second mistake, driving in India at night. Driving during the day is pure insanity, driving at night is insanity's older, meaner, scarier brother.
Here's the story...
As the sun dips past the horizon Daniel (the videographer) takes the wheel, pounds a "5 hour energy" and says, "driving in India is like a video game, it's a good thing I'm awesome at video games." His words made my skin crawled, something deep down inside me knew no good would come of this evening.
The driving started out nutty as usual and as the last bits of light left the sky driving became even completely bonkers, as usual. Normally we'd drink heavily to deal with the massive stress of these roads, tonight however we were fresh out of booze, so I decided to meditate. I closed my eyes and tried to think happy thoughts. Less than a minute passes when suddenly Dan screams, "SHIT!" we hear a cow, "MOOOOOOO", feel the rickshaw swerve right and I open my eyes to see our rickshaw falling onto it's right side as two semi trucks barrel towards us.
Sparks fly as the rickshaw's side smashes onto pavement and slides towards the semis. The first semi misses us… the second clips our shaw and we spin like a top, flipping end over end on our side. As this is happening my body is pressed against the ground with Chris (the charity organizer) pressed against me and our combined weight is pressing down against my elbow which is pinned against the ground and being torn to tatters as if the street was a power-sander and my arm was a soft boiled egg, peaces of arm fly off never to be seen again. I watch sparks fly from the metal bits of our shaw and land on the spare gas tank by my feet, if one of those sparks ignites the gas... we're all dead.
After what feels like an eternity the rickshaw comes to stop, we hear the Indian voices shouting in the distance and the pitter patter of running feet. Brown hands reach into the rickshaw and pull us out one by one. Daniel seems to have emerged unscathed, Chris has a nasty scrape on his back and the locals are looking in horror at my right side. I look down to discover a red mess where my elbow should have been and road rash from my hip to ankle. I ask, "hospital?" in broken Hindi and two young men break from the groaning crowd to act as escorts.
Sparks fly as the rickshaw's side smashes onto pavement and slides towards the semis. The first semi misses us… the second clips our shaw and we spin like a top, flipping end over end on our side. As this is happening my body is pressed against the ground with Chris (the charity organizer) pressed against me and our combined weight is pressing down against my elbow which is pinned against the ground and being torn to tatters as if the street was a power-sander and my arm was a soft boiled egg, peaces of arm fly off never to be seen again. I watch sparks fly from the metal bits of our shaw and land on the spare gas tank by my feet, if one of those sparks ignites the gas... we're all dead.
After what feels like an eternity the rickshaw comes to stop, we hear the Indian voices shouting in the distance and the pitter patter of running feet. Brown hands reach into the rickshaw and pull us out one by one. Daniel seems to have emerged unscathed, Chris has a nasty scrape on his back and the locals are looking in horror at my right side. I look down to discover a red mess where my elbow should have been and road rash from my hip to ankle. I ask, "hospital?" in broken Hindi and two young men break from the groaning crowd to act as escorts.
The local doctor pumps me full of morphine, wraps a big bandage around my elbow, gives me a handful of antibiotics/bandages and wishes us luck. The bill, about 1% what you'd pay in America. The quality of medical treatment, about 1% what you'd received in America.
Chris & Daniel convince a local mechanic to fix up our shaw good enough to drive to the next hotel while I grab a ride from another team of Rickshaw Rallyers, a lovely bunch from the UK. They have whiskey, glorious delicious whiskey, I drink most of it and smile as it dances tango with the morphine already in my system.
After 2 hours of driving we arrive at a "nice" hotel by Indian standards (about a 1 star hotel by "wester" standards) and Chris helps changes our bandages. We see the bone, fat and muscles of my elbow leaking out as he dresses the wound. Unable to find any sort of stitches we superglue the wound together and hope for the best.
We pass out, the three of us sharing a full sized bed and planning on waking at 5am to continue our adventure. Even after the accident we wouldn't have believed that in the next few days we'd be a man down and ready to quit.
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