Cooking Challenge: Traditional Food, Traditional Dress!

 

Each team had to cook pongal, a sweet south Indian rice dish, traditionally cooked during the Pongal harvest celebrations in January. But if you think we made it easy and gave them a kitchen, you couldn’t be more wrong!  First, for cooking traditional dish, you have to be dressed traditionally, right? So all the guys had to put on a lungi, a Tamil type of sarong and all the girls were given a sari and the help of many local woman to put this complicated piece of cloth on.
 

Then they started cooking – in a pot over open fire, which they first had to build. It was a rather smoky business, this we can tell you. Without further cooking instructions, the teams were rather left to their own creativity and many turned to some local ladies for help, who, in many cases, kicked them out of the “kitchen” and overtook the whole project. In the end, our tough judges were waiting for the teams, giving points not only for taste, but also for presentation. In the latter category the teams outdid themselves – we’ve never seen such levels of pongal pimping! In the end, team 3, the Legenda Trio, won the competition and could earn the valuable extra points.
 

A Great Excuse for a Party: Ten Years of the Travel Scientists

 
 

The hard competition was followed by a wild party at Bremajothi Farms near Tuticorin. Usually we don’t need a reason to celebrate ourselves, but this time we actually had one: The Travel Scientists have turned 10 years old and this edition of the Rickshaw Challenge Classic Run is the 10th one. There was a DJ, a rock band, a dance group, hundreds of guests and more food than it was health to eat. Oh, and of course there was also a bar.
 
 

 
After this exhausting day, the teams were invited the next morning to just relax and chill out in the tropical paradise of the Bremajothi Farms, before taking on today’s destination Thanjavur, just about an hour away.
 

The All-Important Briefing

 

 
Aravind Bremanandam, Chief Scientist and founder of the Travel Scientists, made sure to brief the teams explicitly on the special ways of driving in India, whose traffic chaos is an immense challenge for every foreigner. Aravind’s pre-rally briefings are legendary, with many essential tips for navigating the days the ahead.
 

And on to Training!

 

Soon all teams rushed to the training ground, where they met their new travel companions, the rickshaws, for the first time. Just a couple of hours later, after all of them had more or less successfully passed the 9-seconds start-stop test, they were sent off into the real Indian traffic to fulfill their first challenge: getting petrol at the next gas station. On a straight line only one team managed to get lost and we were very proud of them. The day’s success, of course, had to be celebrated with some well deserved beers.

 
 
Things were getting serious the next morning: the first stop of the Classic Run, about 150 km from Chennai to Madurai demanded to be mastered. The distance was not too far, but the temptation to get lost in the dozens of sights and just in the Indian life was big. Many teams also experienced already the limitations of their rickshaws hardly out of Chennai, and the Service Van had to come to rescue and exchange a blown engine. But the number of breakdowns is what the Rickshaw Challenge’s stripes of honour are made of and thanks to our talented mechanics, all teams were sent back on the road in no time.
 

The First Day on the Road!

 

 
Today’s first point of interest was Mahabalipuram, where dozens of temples and monuments were carved directly out of the stone in perfection between the 7th and the 9th century. Also the Dutch Fortress at Sadras and the Fort at Alambarai challenged the teams firstly to find them without sufficient signs and secondly to dig into Tamil history to answer the quiz questions.
 

 
All teams arrived with so much time to spare before flag-off time that we are seriously considering building in some traps and delays for next year’s Classic Run, as it seemed just to be too easy. Team Rusty Couple had already arrived at 1 pm and we are working intensively on making their life a bit harder on the road! Tomorrow will lead our teams from Pondicherry over 200 km to Thanjavur and we will be sure to keep you updated about their successes and their failures!
 

Laish La: Rickshaw Challenge