Adventurers Report Back On Himalayan Rickshaw Run

In their journey towards the finish line, Team Robot House negotiated the dangerous black market for gasoline, watched outside the Katmandu palace gates with cameras as the Nepalese monarchy ceded power to the Maoists, declined multiple invitations to attend animal sacrifices, and did laundry with the locals in the same lake ("actually a scum pond," Travis corrects himself) where animal carcasses lay heaped in the water. The first time they saw their rickshaw, it was surrounded by giant marijuana plants.

Their recollections of the extreme poverty are vivid and gut-wrenching. "Urine, feces… curry. Nepal smelled like curry," says Matt. Travis recalls seeing poverty-stricken Calcutta Indians roasting rats over burners made from burning cow dung and metal scraps. "Everything's dirty, there's trash everywhere. We had our ideas of what it would be like. It's poverty like you've never seen before," he says.

After awhile, Matt stops trying to string together a narrative and just makes a list: "We saw a pack of wild dogs ripping apart a rotting horse carcass. We saw a bus that had flipped off the Himalaya with people in it. Dead rats everywhere. We stayed in a hotel that we got for free because it was too dirty….by Nepalese standards. The first time we saw the Indian Ocean, there was a guy three feet away from us taking a shit in the sand."

Another highlight (or low point, depending on how you look at it) was the monsoon that hit after two days on the road. The road turned into a flash flood, and the rickshaw was stuck. "We had to break out an Everett comfort cocktail, which was beef jerky, a Marlboro cigarette, and Nickelback," Matt remembers. "Nickelback became very popular." When the team reached their hotel for the night, "the air conditioning's broken, the lights are broken, and there are geckos all over the place. When we saw all the bugs, we were like, 'get as many geckos in our room as possible.'"

"This was by far the greatest adventure ever undertaken by Team Robot House. The greatest adventure. I would compare it to a real life Indiana Jones. We had bad guys, weird modes of transportation, we had quests. We even had the swastikas everywhere," Travis marvels. "We were served a very large slice of humble pie," says Matt. "When you're ten toes deep and the shit's thick, you really see what you're made of. You get tested personally."

Is this kind of adventure for everyone? "It's fun," says Travis. "But you have to be a little off. You really do have to be nuts, you just do. There's no way around it."