Cycle India 2010

Friday 11 January

The journey home. A lie-in till 6.30! Yours truly not feeling at all well. Suffice to say, an 18-hour journey home with a fever and your head in a sick bag is not much fun!

So, that was it. What will I remember from the trip? Well, it was remarkable on many levels. On a personal level, there was the physical and mental challenge of actually doing the ride, as well as a lot of practice miles beforehand in cold dark winter months. For Terry, there was also the added setback of badly breaking her leg not long before the ride.

Collectively, as a group of thirty or so people that had mostly never met before, the experience was fantastic. In a short time together, the group, of all ages and backgrounds, went through so many new experiences together and mixed and bonded amazingly well.
Emotionally, it was mind blowing. We saw such contrasts between the few ‘haves’ and the many ‘have-nots, and we received an awful lot from people who had next to nothing. It was a humbling experience.

I found India to be a mind-boggling place, a real conundrum. When I was looking for sponsorship ahead of the ride, I could sense a number who were reluctant thinking ‘they have the second fastest growing economy in the world, they’re wealthy, why can’t they sort themselves out and look after their poor?’ I’m not sure I know an answer – it doesn’t make sense does it? How does a country like India get the basis of an infrastructure; who is going to stop child labour? The truth, it seems, is that so much of India’s thriving economy is fuelled by child labour. Who has the incentive, or the ability or power to do anything about all of India’s problems?

So many questions and so few obvious answers. What I did see that made sense though was the Children’s Village and the schools that HEAL is supporting to give children a good education and the moral where withal to maybe make a difference as they grow up. It is working on a very small scale but it is working from the bottom upwards and that has to be a good start.