The Pickle Post

by Sandeep Vasudevan on 8 Oct 2009

Day 1 – September 13 2009 – Goa to Belgaum

And so it began, a festival of colour and pageantry and good cheer. The rickshaws of the Run gathered at Colva beach for the start, nary a dry eye in the place, everyone raring with excitement and the spirit of adventure. The organisers had rustled a minister for the flagging off and he came dressed in his Sunday finery and let the chequered flag have it, and off we went.

We went off the main highway on the back roads and entered the Western Ghats just past Ponda and things started looking considerably brighter. The winding paths up the hills were easy for the crew cars but the rickshaw huffed and puffed its way along. Mercifully the roads were smooth and the vistas spectacular – long swathes of green tree-carpeted hills undulating towards the horizon, getting mistier and mistier as they went on. A very fine spray of mist caressed us as we climbed, and after the muggy heat of Goa it felt as refreshing as a cold mojito.

Most of the way up the ghats we encountered two of the other teams – “runners” – who’d stopped because one of them had broken down – the rickshaw, not the team. In a spirit of camaraderie and Milk-of-Human-Kindness, we too stopped to offer helpful tips and scintillating conversation, advising them to take care of the clutch plates and generally give the rickshaw some TLC.

We entered Karnataka and the descent was much easier on the rickshaw than the Sisyphean ascent. Except that the roads started deteriorating fast and by the time we got to the first checkpost at Anmod we were essentially on glorified dirt. My cameraman Steve Moro though was very happy because all the traffic kicked up the dust which caught the sunlight streaming through the trees and formed an archway of slanting golden beams of light in the soft evening beside the benign forests of the ghats.

The roads straightened up again and night fell, and we drove through the high beam lights and dangerously exciting traffic to Belgaum, finding our way past Chanamma Circle and the lake to Hotel Sankam where we lay our weary arses to rest.

Day 2 – September 14 2009 – Belgaum to Bijapur

Steve Moro, G2 and I in the Silver Car were officially termed the Party Car by Steve French on account of the dour, life-is-stern-and-life-is-earnest co-passengers of his White Car. Moro is a man who loves his craft and is very dedicated towards it, to the extent that he gets his knickers in a bit of a knot whenever he sees something coming between him and his work. He’s not an easy man to please, nor an easy man to befriend, but after some heated words back and forth with G2, and some help from me allowing him creative freedom when taking shots, we were on our way to becoming friendly. Day 2 was literally the beginning of a friendship that was, if not beautiful, at least comely.

The road out of Belgaum towards Bijapur was a revelation. Rolling undulating plains spread out before us, verdant in pasture from the recent rains and slightly overcast and cool outside. Perfect weather for any kind of endeavour, whether it’s riding a rickshaw across the countryside or filming of the same.

G2, Jon and I had worked out the route in detail beforehand and we kept to it for the most part. It wasn’t to be a very long ride, about 200 odd kilometres all done. The day started with Shelley Foster, the tall well built RP speaking production assistant girl from England learning how to ride the rickshaw. We found that all her vi and brio and obvious intellect did translate to a very quick learning curve, and soon she got her motor running and headed out on the highway looking for adventure and whatever came her way.

This was about the time that Jon Moore, wizened and little, decided to shed his inhibitions and go into gladiator mode. Every time he caught sight of the other car up ahead of us and the rickshaw, Little Jon was found leaning out of his window, a video camera in his hand filing shots of wheels, rickshaw, passengers and driver and the rolling countryside. This, when he had a true blue, dyed-in-the-wool Aussie cameraman with him. It seemed, indeed, that Little Jon did rush in where fools feared to tread. We decided to call him Indiana Jones. And the Rickshaw of Doom.

We reached Lokapur, a dinky, dirty little town on the SH20 in the afternoon and decided to shoot the rickshaw going through the town. But as everywhere in India where someone getting out of a car with a camera in hand draws a crowd faster than moths to a flame, a bunch of white people, including a blonde dame, being shot by a white crew had the entire village in a tizzy. People crowded around like it was Diwali, smiling, excited, curious. The Runners got off to mingle with the crowd, posing for photographs with school kids, Katie getting the gratuitous India welcome of being felt up, Gordon signing autographs. It was hearty cheer all around, but the crowd grew alarmingly large and we decided to take off quickly.

Bijapur was reached by 4.30pm, which brought great happiness to all concerned and we decided to go check out the Gol Gumbaz, which was a mausoleum and I’d read was the second largest dome in the world after St Peter’s. We ran down Bijapur’s only main street Station Road – about as filthy and pig-ridden a main street as has been my misfortune to go through – and entered the complex to the sight of a magnificent dome in the distance. Up close, the sight was even more imposing. A huge square colossus of a structure, stern and imposing, flanked by minarets on four sides with observations levels on four stories. The inside was amazing in the half-light, with me straining my neck to see the top of the dome, five graves lined up under the centre of the dome. It was a tomb for a king and looked awe-inspiring and Spartan at the same time.

We climbed up the stairs through one of the minarets, labouring under the strain and finally reached the top. Inside the effect was even greater. The Whispering Gallery was a masterful example of acoustical architecture. Apparently if you whisper into the wall at any place in the balcony overlooked the tombs far far below, one could here it all the way across at the other end of that balcony. But any ideas of testing that claim out were belied by the shouting, clapping, laughing and general banter of all the visitors; I had to be content to say something rude into one of the halls and hope someone I didn’t like was standing at the other end.

The whole visit had the effect of dropping the fatigue off me like a cloak. The endless vista of verdant countryside under an overcast sky washed the heat haze off the landscape and off my mind and left me prepared to face the dump that was our hotel. They called it Madhuvan International, which I take meant that it should be sent out of this country as soon as possible.