Today Antoine wore his t-shirt inside-out for the whole day. Our day was from 5 am to 9 pm. The original plan was to wake up early and go to an animal sanctuary, unfortunately, it was closed for monsoon season. So we drove on the highway and nothing happened until about 4 pm.
Sunset is around 6:30 pm and one of the many suggestions is to never drive at night. We were also on the Mumbai highway, the one highway that rickshaw’s are not allowed on because the cars go insanely fast on it. We had two hours left to get to Mumbai, and the engine just stopped. We rolled to in front of some highway patrol cars, hoping we won’t get in trouble. They couldn’t care less and helped us call a highway mechanic. A guy showed up a few minutes later and assessed the situation. Something in the engine was missing. He took apart a few things but he couldn’t fix it on the spot so he used his motorbike and pushed us until we got to a town hill part of the highway. Then we just rolled. We rolled and rolled and rolled until we got to another little village, where he called some guys and they pushed it up a hill to get fixed. Who I’m guessing is the boss, came out and looked at our engine, right away he said, the CDI is missing. He put one of his own in and almost immediately the rickshaw started working again. By the time all this finished, we gave them about $7 to pay them and it was 6 pm.
We already booked a hotel in Mumbai, so we had to go and drive at night. We filled up the gas one more time before the sunset and took to the road. All I’ll say is that people, including Antoine, are crazy for ever wanting to drive at night. However, Antoine was the one who got us through it alive, so props to him.
We have two nights in Mumbai, hopefully, we can do a lot of souvenir shopping here, and that it’ll be a relaxed trip.
-Jamie