My friend Rich and I were trying to think of something challenging\u00a0to do during our final summer at medical school,\u201d says Jason, \u201cand\u00a0he came up with the idea to cycle the entire length of India.\u201d<\/p>\n
Not a normal summertime conversation to have you might think,\u00a0but then Jason\u2019s friend Rich speaks Hindi, and had also been to India\u00a0a few times, so knew what to expect.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe roads are well known for being poor quality and the traffic\u00a0is awful, however most of the country is relatively flat. We gave \u00a0ourselves five weeks to cycle the 4,000 kilometres from north to\u00a0south, and considering it takes people about two weeks to cycle the\u00a01,500 kilometres from John O\u2019Groats to Land\u2019s End, we thought we\u00a0were estimating about right. Plus, it sounded like a ridiculous task\u00a0and would definitely be a challenge.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jason and Rich also decided they\u2019d raise money along the way,\u00a0and chose the international health charity Merlin, for whom they\u00a0eventually raised over \u00a33,000. Starting at Atari in the Punjab, on\u00a0the northern border with Pakistan, the intrepid cyclists were aiming\u00a0for the most southern point in India, in Kanyakamari.<\/p>\n
However, things didn\u2019t go completely to plan, as Richard\u00a0developed an abscess after 1,000 kilometres and had to have an\u00a0operation in Indore before fl ying back to Wales. Jason faced further\u00a0problems when he was arrested while travelling through a small\u00a0town in Maharastra.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s rare for tourists to visit the town, and the hotel manager\u00a0seemed a bit suspicious of the passport stamps I had from Middle\u00a0Eastern countries. He called the police, who escorted me to the\u00a0police station, before, fairly comically, interrogating me. The chief\u00a0of police then apologised, saying there were suspicions I was an\u00a0Islamic terrorist, he then invited me to his house for dinner.\u201d<\/p>\n
Next for Jason will be a year working at the American\u00a0University of Beirut Hospital as a fellow in cardiology\u2026\u00a0the adventure continues!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In an attempt to challenge themselves during their final year of medical school, Jason and his friend Rich decided to cycle the entire length of India and raise money along the way. ","protected":false},"author":823,"featured_media":146,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-43","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"meta_box":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/823"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=43"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2102,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/43\/revisions\/2102"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=43"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=43"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/alumni\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=43"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}