Across India in a Rickshaw

Meet Jack, one of Audley’s Southeast Asia specialists

By Audley Travel

December 21^st, 2018

The extensive travel experience of Audley’s country specialists set us apart. We believe it takes true passion for travel to craft unforgettable vacations for others. Southeast Asia specialist Jack, named one of Travel + Leisure’s A-List travel advisors, recently returned from a trip to India, where he and five other Audley specialists competed in a 2,000km coast-to-coast Rickshaw Challenge.

We sat down with Jack to talk about the rickshaw challenge, his time at Audley, how he fell in love with Southeast Asia and why he won’t eat tarantulas.

Tell me a little bit about the Rickshaw Challenge?

We followed a route that starts in Mumbai and goes down the west coast through Goa then along the Malabar Coast and finally across to Chennai on the east coast. It’s about 2,000 km (1,240 miles) in these tiny, three-person auto rickshaws, the typical sort of public transport in India. There were 16 teams from around the world, two from Audley.

How long did that take?

About two weeks. We started off, flag up, every morning at about 8am and were usually at our hotels by about 6pm. Though that didn’t always hold. Our shortest day was 90 km (56 miles) and our longest was 21 hours and covered about 300 km (186 miles).

You drove for 21 hours?

Yes. We were there in August, which is the monsoon season. We were lucky and didn’t get a lot of rain, but there was some terrible flooding that made the news. We weren’t caught in that, but there were landslides in our area that forced us down some major detours.

We tried three different routes and got stuck behind a mudslide for about four hours as it was cleared. Even then, we only got through because we were in rickshaws — some of the truck drivers were clearly unhappy.

We lost all Wi-Fi that night and our maps didn’t cover our unexpected location, so we had no clue where we were going. One of the teams from Australia took charge after we lost our support vehicles and we all managed to get to the hotel at about 5am.

That’s a long day.

The funny part was that at about 3am, we all gathered together and stopped on a roadside, in the dark to, you know, relieve ourselves in the bushes and make a plan. We found out later that we’d stopped in a tiger reserve.

That could have been bad. I’m glad that none of you were eaten.

Me too.

Who did you go with?

There were two teams from Audley. The boys were the Meat Mimosas, and that was me, Scott and Niall, and the girls’ team was called the Bottomless Samosas, and it was Amanda, Jess and Allie.

The girls thought that auto-rickshaw meant that it was automatic transmission and none of them had ever driven manually before. On the first day of practice, in Mumbai, which has the worst traffic in all of India, some people weren’t sure the girls would make it.

But it turned out that Amanda is a crazy driver, as is Jess, and they just leaned into it.

What inspired you to take on such an enormous trip?

I’d heard about the Rickshaw Challenge from one of my friends in the UK. They started in India, but you can do them in Nepal, the Balkans, Morocco and other places. Going on the trip raises money for a charity that builds schools for disadvantaged kids in India.

Last year, I was in Ethiopia with Scott and Niall and we had lots of long road journeys. It got us talking about it and me and Scott thought ‘Yeah! Let’s do this!’ Niall was keen, too, and we liked that he was an India specialist so could help with some local knowledge.

That’s right, you haven’t traveled extensively in India before — your expertise is Southeast Asia. How did you get started? Both with Audley and with traveling Southeast Asia?

I first visited Vietnam in 2001 to see a friend in Saigon. I absolutely fell in love with Southeast Asia and went back each year. I joined Audley back in 2006, at the original office in Stratton Audley (in the UK), as a specialist for Vietnam and Borneo.

Because I’ve traveled so extensively throughout Southeast Asia, both before joining Audley and during my career here, I’ve added new countries, gradually expanding my repertoire to cover the whole region. Then I moved to the new office in Boston.

What’s your favorite country in Southeast Asia?

I have to say Vietnam – my first love. Last year I had my eighth visit there and even though it’s changed a lot, I still hold it very fondly in my heart.

What’s your favorite thing to do there?

I like going out and drinking with the locals. They have these little beer bars in the cities called bia hoi that are generally frequented by Vietnamese men (the women tend not to drink in bars). You sit on these tiny plastic chairs like you’d buy for children. There are four people around a table sharing a bowl of peanuts and draught beers for about 25 cents.

Do you speak Vietnamese?

No, I don’t speak any Asian languages. You don’t actually need to. Everyone you encounter will speak English, certainly in the restaurants and shops and hotels. It replaced French in the schools in the 1990s, so now it’s the second language.

In fact, you can travel through most of Southeast Asia without any language problems, especially in the cities. Though we use guides for when you get off the beaten track, in the villages and countryside, who can handle the interpretation for you.

Is there a guide you particularly recommend?

I think all our guides are excellent. They really make a trip, especially to Southeast Asia. We pick great ones and pay them a good salary. But if I had to pick, I’d choose Sinath. He’s a guide at Siem Reap in Cambodia and he’s won our Best Guide Awards for several years. If you’ve seen Travels with my Father on Netflix, he’s in that.

What do you like to recommend for people who are going to Southeast Asia?

I like to start them off with a street-food tour with a professional food blogger. It’s a good thing to do on your first day, because it introduces you to the local food. That way you have a good idea for the rest of your trip what you like and what you don’t like.

But, because we do tailor-made travel, we build your trip around anything that interests you. So, for example, we can arrange for you to spend an evening talking with a local economist or attend a cocktail reception with an American artist who lives there. One time, I arranged for someone to spend time with a local historian to get the Vietnamese perspective on the war.

I like to get people away from the crowds. We use lodges far from the backpackers. In Cambodia, all the guidebooks say to watch the sunrise at Angor Wat, but I always tell everyone to go to a different temple and to watch the sunset in Angor, just to get them away from the busloads of tourists.

We can also do some unique food tours. You might go out on a Vespa in Cambodia to the really local markets where, again, you won’t see any tourists. It’s where they sell insects, so you can eat your crickets, scorpions and tarantulas. That’s a really good tour.

Have you eaten the bugs?

I’ve eaten quite a few of them. Crickets taste like chicken. I couldn’t eat the tarantula, though.

What put you off about the tarantula?

The size of it. The legs. That bulbous body — you don’t know what’s going to happen when you bite into it. It turns my stomach. I’m not the most adventurous eater.

Anything else you suggest?

We just added an Audley-exclusive experience in Cambodia. You can camp out overnight in one of the temples. It’s only offered to Audley guests. It’s very much like an African safari tent with a proper bed, toilet and shower, and there are chefs and a full-service bar.

At about 10pm, they give you a traditional torch, where you light the resin, and you can explore by torchlight, like in Tomb Raider. Then, in the morning, you wake up and the temple is right there, there’s no one else.

What’s the best hotel you’ve visited?

There’s a new place in Indonesia called Bawah Reserve. It’s on a private island in the middle of nowhere — you can only get there by seaplane from Singapore — and it’s absolutely stunning. It’s the only resort on the island, there’s no one there but guests. They’ve got overwater bungalows and private beaches, paddle boarding and movies on the beach, you can see baby sharks swimming around your ankles in the water. This is the best resort in Southeast Asia.

Back to the Rickshaw Challenge. What was the best part?

The people. People from all over the world, from all walks of life were doing the challenge, from CEOs to university students out for a laugh. We’d have some beers at night and just talk. All the people we met along the way, not just those participating in the challenge, really made the experience. They were just really genuine and lovely, though many were surprised because they’d never seen Westerners, certainly not Westerners driving a rickshaw, sometimes in costumes.