Bay To Breakers 2011

Full set here.

tattoo

Don't let the rain slow you down

transport tribulations

the moon and mars-1

San Francisco, CA.

flow

San Francisco, CA.

motor vater

San Francisco, CA.

great jorb

San Francisco, CA.

Three heads, six arms, nine lives, twelve dozen, fifteen..., oh look, nevermind, just look at the pictures

India 2010: part 4 - on the go

Rickshaws in Gujarat have been largely upgraded since I last visited - the engines run quietly and cleanly on compressed natural gas. However, a few of the old-style rickshaws remain - they scoot along making a distressing smell (it's like they run on kerosene) and an odd putt-putt noise as they move along.







If it has wheels, it's used to move goods. This old rickshaw has been converted for use as a truck to deliver bread.






Bicycles are also a common mode of transporting goods - I saw quite a few of these bicycles with a large tray and axle on the back. Note the complete lack of gears - I saw quite a few riders sweating and pedaling with difficult strokes on uneven, bumpy roads with a huge load of cargo on the back.






Complex, beautiful modes of dress were no obstacle for determined bicycle riders in Rajkot.






Scooters and motorbikes seemed to be, by far, the most common mode of transport on Rajkot. You'd see as many scooters with two or more riders as you did with one rider; again, they seemed to be yet another way of getting people and goods around. The sheer volume of them and their sooty exhausts let me to wonder if they were a big part of the pollution problem in the area.



Honda Heroes were the most common type of motorbike that I saw over there. The roads were chaotic (traffic driving in both directions on a one-way road, general multi-way chaos when it came to roundabouts) but, in the end, accidents were few and there was a bizarre sort of logic to it. The driving algorithm went like this:


1. Start the vehicle, honk your horn.
2. Head in the direction of where you want to go (doesn't matter if you're moving against the direction of traffic). If there is someone where you want to be, honk your horn.
3. If there is someone bigger than you, give way.


It's completely insane, but it seemed to work even with the insane combination of pedestrians, bicycles, rickshaws, cars, trucks and cows on the road.











There are plenty of family-carrying motorbikes out on the highways.






Family transport.

India 2010: part 3 - architecture and Ahmedabad

As I mentioned previously, cows are an extremely common sight in Rajkot. They're an ancient part of the system here, and aside from blocking traffic they really are used to produce milk. Secondarily they also consume refuse, which frequently seems to be liberally thrown out into the street.



The brightly coloured house opposite my grandmothers place.












There are occasions where, wandering around, you can almost imagine that you've stepped back a hundred years in time.









I'd occasionally stumble across temples - some stood on their own, some nestled in laneways. Of these, some were lavishly decorated - sparkling clean and strewn with flowers amongst the surrounding grime. I'm not sure, however, how to feel about this - overseas, many of organisations will ask for donations to build temples, and while they are beautiful I'm reliably informed that they don't really give back to the surrounding community. I could chalk it down to just another example of the gap between rich and poor in India but there's something insipid about using religion as a front for accumulating wealth.



This is the interior of my grandmothers place - it's a small, square courtyard that's open to the air that's surrounded on three sides by rooms. It has three levels; the top one is the roof and the water tank. The middle floor became unsafe for living in after the earthquake in 2003; you might also note the yellow stripes painted on the step edges - my uncle, who visits often, is a safety engineer in New York.



This is the exterior of my uncles place in Ahmedabad, the state capital of Gujarat, which we visited in the couple of days of the trip. The small houses like my grandmothers place are long gone, replaced by high rises and tall apartment blocks.






There are parts of Ahmedabad that are quite wealthy - investment and just general economic development means that it's a fast-growing part of the world. There are shopping malls there that, when inside, are indistinguishable from malls in the rest of the world. The only giveaway to indicate that you're not in the western world are the shop assistants that constantly hover inches away from wherever you are. While the wealth is great for those who have it, there's also a certain blandness to it - local flavour is gradually being replaced by what seems to me to be a generic sameness.