Gearing up to gear down

Ah...fish curry, watermelon juice, blinding vodka - no better legal way I can think of to enjoy the first of our last days here. After catching up on some ridiculously-needed sleep following our rickshaw-gas-station-surrounded-by-trucks night, we crashed hard in our luxurious air-conditioned room. Woke up around 3 or 4pm, walked along the beach, partook in the a few refreshing drinks. Actually, just one. Due either to not drinking for a while, exhaustion, dehydration, and strong drinks, Jau and I were both pretty rocked after one fruity drink, which was just fine by me. Made it more fun to dig up wee crabs and clams hiding in sand so fine it felt like mud. Clean, clean mud. Goa this time of year has transitioned from Western tourists to Indian tourists, making it a little easier to spot newly-arrived rickshaw runners on the beach.

Tide-line critters are cool. I spend some time just watching tiny mollusks and crustaceans emerge with the incoming waves and then quickly burrow as the water retreated, looking like weird little living bubbles coming up from the beach. Bubbles that, uh, then sank again. Still suck at metaphors.

We've come in 8th place out of around 50 or so teams, and so far 22 have arrived at the "finish line", which is a bar where we go to sign in on the arrivals board, quaff a few brews, and reconnect with teams whose names I forgot, telling vastly exaggerated stories. Apparently we don't have permission to be tooting around town in our rickshaws, and are to turn them in post-haste upon arrival, which really messes with my plans of keeping it another few days to drive around the area and explore a bit. When cornered by one of the organizer folk, I tentatively agreed to turn over our dirty, broken baby tomorrow after dropping off Jau at the airport - we'll see how that goes. Provided I find a memory card reader, I'll be posting more random photos and stories from the road over the next few days, or just join Jau in posting more after we get back to our respective homes (or for me, a Sacramento hotel).

Meeting up with a Texas-friend-working-in-India tomorrow, bidding Jau a very sorrowful farewell after driving him to the airport, and then diving into incoherence at the finish party tomorrow evening!

Early evenin' tonight, going to (try to) get up with the sun (again) to enjoy the beach before Jau heads out.