A follow up to “Travel and the Power of Serendipity” by Candace Rose Rardon
They say patience is a virtue, but when it comes to travel, I’m not always that virtuous. Whether it’s a flat tire or a flight delay, anything that sets me back from where I’m trying to go often makes me tap my foot and check my watch every five minutes. But when my friend Citlalli and I arrived in India a few weeks ago to complete the Rickshaw Run, I quickly realized that mentality wasn’t going to work.
After landing in Calcutta, we went straight to Shillong, an old hill station in the northeastern corner of the country, where we had our first chance to test-drive the rickshaws. I’m no mechanic, but even I could see that we wouldn’t be getting anywhere fast in the little machines. With a 7 horsepower, two-stroke engine (most commonly found in a lawnmower or chainsaw), the auto-rickshaws we’d be steering across India run best at an average of 35 mph. We had to rethink our itinerary.
With nearly 2,000 miles to cover from Shillong to Jaisalmer, a town on the western edge of the Rajasthan Desert, it wasn’t going to be a race. Instead, it would be a gradual process of putting a small amount of miles behind us each day. But as we began our journey from east to west, I slowly grew to love the pace at which we rattled across India. Every traffic jam or breakdown that happened to the teams in our convoy caused us to go slower but, strangely, I no longer cared—not only because of the time it gave us to see the country, but because if we had gone straight to Jaisalmer, we would have missed out on so much.
For example, we would have missed the people. Unlike shop owners in bigger cities such as Agra and Jaipur, those we met in the rural villages simply wanted to talk, not hassle or haggle us. They asked questions about where we were from and where we were going. In the state of Bihar, one of India’s poorest that has been affected by flooding and a recent earthquake, we often attracted crowds of more than a hundred villagers. During a particularly massive, fifteen-mile traffic jam outside Bihar’s capital, one man brought me and Citlalli cups of chai while we waited for the worst to pass.
We would have missed the food if we’d raced through India. Each day we stopped for lunch at a dhaba, the Indian equivalent of a roadside diner or truck stop. It was there that we joined crews of lorry drivers taking their siesta, waiting out the heat of the day in a wooden rope bed in the shade. Local villagers served us fresh dal and chapati made from scratch right before our eyes. They rolled the dough and baked them on the walls of a coal-heated oven as we sipped chai and gave our rickshaws a rest.
And we would have missed watching the country change as we rolled across it. From the hills of Assam and rice paddies in West Bengal, to Bihar’s banana trees and cornfields and the sanddunes of Rajasthan, the landscape flowed past us in a single fluid motion. And with the changing scenery, we could watch other changes, too: the style of saris the women wore, the color of school uniforms, and the shapes of houses. Especially striking were the shifting facial features—from the Nepali and Asian influences in northeastern India to the wide eyes and darker skin of those in the desert.
So when we finally pulled into Jaisalmer, the golden walls of its fort illuminated by the setting sun, the single moment of crossing the finish line wasn’t that satisfying. It was the miles we’d covered before it that made that moment so sweet. Because life isn’t always about where you’re going, but how you get there.
Candace Rose Rardon
