Blogs from Kochi, Kerala, India, Asia - page 9

We spent April 6 and 7 in Cochin getting to know our Rickshaw; learning to ride the beast; hunting down spae parts,tools and supplies; and meeting some of the other teams crazy enough to be a part of this In addition to all of that prep, we participated in our Rickshaw's first photo-op. The Incredible India campaign was filming in Cochin and were keen to get the parade of pimped out rickshaws driven through the city. Cant wait to see what this video looks like! We start our Run around 10:00 AM tomorrow morning (April 8), and hope to keep all appraised of our progress through this blog and the following website: http://rickshawrun12s.theadventurists.com/index.php?mode=teamwebsites&name=the-shardles&page=route... read more

Our guide keeps telling that the biggest problem in India isn’t political and it isn’t poverty: it is illiteracy. 40% of their population—that’s half a billion people are illiterate. It is why he tells us not to give money to street children—it only encourages them to stay out of school. Government schools are free, but the goal of many is to send their kids to private schools. The private schools conduct all their classes in English. By the way, that has not been a problem anywhere—most people speak English here. An educational visit to India isn’t complete without learning about the caste system. It is complicated. The easy explanation is that there are four levels: Brahman, warriors, tradesmen, servants. The reality is that there are more than 3,000 castes: a weaver of silk ... read more

Alright! I'll be doing this in english, as it takes more effort to do it in danish as I kind of stopped doing anything in danish... We'll try it! (ignore spelling and grammar mistakes if you happen to be from an englishspeaking country, please) Got my ticket booked to go up north. So now I've got a few things to look forward to: - A 33 hour trainride across India. - To ride a camel (hell yah, woo!) - To be a little bit cold perhaps, as the north is.. Well, north. - More than a week to pass time in the south. I intend to track down one of the five tigers in India and look at it. Today I arrived in Kochi, a town that consist of islands and a little bit of mainland ... read more

Today we went for a long walk around Fort Cochin and Jew town. Mummy was hoping I would sleep a lot in my backpack, but there was just too much to look at! First we went to the port area and saw lots of Chinese fishing nets, the men had caught loads of big fish, crabs and prawns. Many were still flapping about and looked so tasty, but it was a bit smelly! Then we saw the St Francis church, it's really old - 1503 built by the Portuguese. It looks ok from the outside, but was very plain inside. Next was the Santa Cruz Basilica. That was quite impressive, had lots of colours inside. After that we 'explored' the local town market where I got to have more bananas. It was nice there, we were ... read more

Yep, India is pretty crazy. We’ve been here five days now, and there’s quite a bit to tell, so I’ll start from the beginning… The flight was brilliant – we had our own little TV screen with On Demand remote controls so we could pick our own individual films or TV shows. We both decided to watch One Day, which left us both bawling our eyes out :/ for at least 20 minutes. It took two hours to get through customs and bag pick up, which was fine for us, but maybe not for the wee guy who was picking us up – bless him, he was sat in the scorching sun holding a sign with my name on for two hours – I’ve never been so pleased to see a total stranger in my life. ... read more