after a good night’s sleep we drive towards baramati. rolling hills welcome us to rural india. roads vary between bad and very bad. since the TWIKE’s suspension is not necessarily designed to take the punishment, it’s our backs that take it instead! but who are we to complain? every 5 minutes or so, a car pulls up alongside us and wants us to stop, which we obviously cannot because otherwise we’d be averaging about 5km/h 🙂 instead, we answer questions on the go. after 120km we arrive at baramati and arrive at a local college. the turnout of students […]
WAVE India Day1: Mumbai > Pune
after staying at the shopping centre overnight, we retrieve the cars at 11am and set off on our first official WAVE india 2011 stage! the stage will take us to pune, a city on a plateau about 600m above sea level about 130kms from mumbai. it takes ages to get out of mumbai. when we reach the outskirts, traffic lightens up immediately and thanks to good road surfaces are able to get a decent average speed. the climb itself is impressive. the road takes us from about 30m above sea level to about 800m. the other cars stop for a good hour to recharge […]
first day on official duties
we got back pretty late from customs. mumbai inner city traffic was very dense (we shall learn today, however, that the traffic we got to know was “light” traffic, according to locals, and now, after the fact, us, too!) for today, we are scheduled to attend a press conference and show our cars at a mall. we plunge back into bombay traffic. it is very dense but unlike european traffic, everyone looks out for the fellow driver. thanks to google and our indian sim, we easily find our way to the bombay press club. first journalists arrive and we are […]
releasing the twike from customs
after arriving at iitb at around 830am i decide that i will not go to sleep but rather stay up and try to sync to indian time the hardcore way. the 4 hours 30 minutes time difference to switzerland are quite noticeable. we head out to customs and a very long while later we arrive and meet our agent, john. entering customs free zone, we proceed to our container. the container looks very interesting, since there are cables coming from it and going into the local power distribution centre. the cables and the installation itself looks very dodgy. but interestingly […]
mumbai, 1st contact
touchdown mumbai 0450. did’nt get any sleep but still wide awake. got off plane and progressed though customs and immigration for over an hour. the sheer amount of people trying to get through customs is staggering. furthermore, being in india and all, queuing is part of life – it’s just interesting to see all the people from all walks of life trying to enter the country. be it the indian business man in a crisp suit (even after 8 hours of flight) or the european hippy heading off to you know where – every one of them is treated with […]
2nd TWIKE team member arrives
wow, time flies when you’re working hard and preparing at the same time… november 30th, 10am i leave from zrh to istanbul after an uneventful flight i settle down in the lounge and start working again. my communication setup works very well, routing swiss mobile calls down to a skype instance running on my computer. was on the phone for more than 2 hours and no caller suspected anything. leaving istanbul later that evening, we took off over the city and were treated to a very nice view of the bosporus – the gateway to asia. landing is scheduled for […]