Also known as trishaws, sidecars, pedicabs, cyclos, becaks and a host of other local names, the cycle-rickshaw is much more than just a means of transportation. The 12 Asian cities visited in this book cover the whole spectrum of the rickshaw and cycle-rickshaw story. In Beijing they disappeared during the Cultural Revolution, only to reappear in the 1980s. In Penang the riders are old and fading, while in Manila they’re often teenagers dreaming of moving on to jeepney driving. In Dhaka the cycle-rickshaws are both everyday transport and moving art galleries. In Singapore they’re disappearing as day-to-day transport but simultaneously being reborn as tourist attractions. In Hong Kong they’re both city icon and endangered species.

Not only does the rickshaw’s position in the transport mix vary from city to city, the riders and other rickshaw people are an equally mixed bunch. But they all have stories to tell. In our Asian travels we met with riders, owners, administrators, repairers, manufacturers and, of course, passengers. In Beijing we were lectured on how good rickshaw riding was for the health, in Calcutta we visited rickshaw pullers’ dormitories and in Dhaka we talked to the artists who paint and decorate the region’s most dramatically colorful rickshaws. In Hanoi we tracked down a scrap yard where confiscated rickshaws awaited their fate and in Penang we met with the city official who put riders through their riding test. Our favorite passengers were, without doubt, the schoolchildren who, in city after city, pile into rickshaws to ride to and from school each day. In two cities, Beijing and Manila, we encountered women riders (that is, pedalers). Encouragingly, neither of them had experienced any difficulty breaking into an overwhelmingly male occupation.

The rickshaw designs are as widely variable as their riders. Hong Kong still has a handful of the old hand-pulled rickshaws and Calcutta is the only city on earth where they are still used as everyday transport. In the other cities, the rickshaw, a creation of the 1880s, gave birth to the cycle-rickshaw during the 1930s and 1940s, but no standard pattern developed for this new-fangled device. In Manila, Rangoon and Singapore, the cycle-rickshaws are standard bicycles with attached sidecars. The Manila versions with their mini-bikes and youthful riders look like a toytown model, while in Rangoon the passengers ride back-to-back. In Agra, Beijing, Dhaka and Macau, the rider is out front and the passengers sit behind, as if the front part of a bicycle was mated with an old hand-pulled rickshaw. In Hanoi, Penang and Yogyakarta, the meeting of bike and rickshaw produced precisely the opposite result, as if the back part of a bicycle had been joined to the old rickshaw seating; as a result, the passengers sit, sometimes frighteningly, out front, watching oncoming traffic hurtling towards them.

At some time during our visits to each cycle-rickshaw city, I jumped on board and went for a test ride. Surprisingly, it was not as hard work as it looks, for despite their hefty weight, cycle-rickshaws are generally pretty low geared; as long as the streets are flat, it doesn’t take a great effort to roll them along. In Rob Gallagher’s exhaustive study of the rickshaw business, “The Rickshaws of Bangladesh,” he concludes that although rickshaw riding is hard work, it’s not any more arduous than other manual activities, like farming. What I found much more difficult than merely going forward was steering and stopping.

Cycle-rickshaws do not have a bicycle’s natural stability. Taking a corner on a bicycle is a simple matter of leaning slightly into the curve; when you straighten up, the bicycle does as well. That certainly isn’t the case with a cycle-rickshaw, which has to be wrestled into the corner and hauled back out of it. My first rickshaw experience, on a Yogyakarta becak, included a brush with a wall because I did not use enough brute force to straighten the beast out as we exited a corner. Riding a rickshaw in Agra, I had quite the opposite experience. The subcontinent’s rickshaws use a normal bicycle front fork and wheel, and as a result the front half of the rickshaw wants to act like a bicycle and veer off to one side when a sideways force is applied. I was cruising along a quiet road in the Agra cantonment district when a minor bump in the road suddenly sent my rickshaw diving off the road, skittering across the grass and plunging into the bushes!

Even without steering problems, the lack of rigidity which many cycle-rickshaws suffer from makes riding a less than straightforward activity. Most cycle-rickshaws are a mix of bicycle and rickshaw parts, joined together with a distinct deficiency of engineering precision. The front and back halves often feel as if they are squirming around and intent on disappearing in totally different directions. The Agra and Rangoon versions were particularly lacking in rigidity and disconcerting to ride.

Having got your rickshaw moving and round the odd corner, the final problem is bringing it to a halt. Cycle-rickshaws have lousy brakes. In most cases the problem of designing brakes for both ends seems to have been too much for the rickshaw’s designer, who’s opted to make do with braking at one end only. As a result, a weighty rickshaw with three people aboard has less braking power than a bicycle. The passengers-to-the-rear cycle-rickshaws of Agra and Dhaka have a regular bicycle front brake, although it is operated by both front brake levers in tandem so at least you can squeeze it twice as hard. The passengers-to-the-front cycle-rickshaws of Hanoi, Penang and Yogyakarta have different forms of brakes on the rear wheel only. The Penang and Hanoi versions are operated by a foot pedal which allows the rider to stand his weight on the brakes but requires an awkward motion when taking his feet off the pedals. All three are remarkably crude in their operation, and the Hanoi rickshaw not only provides minimal braking but makes horrible noises into the bargain. None of them stops very well.

Rickshaws have appeared in books and films — the becaks of Jakarta featured centrally in “The Year of Living Dangerously,” while Calcutta’s hard-working rickshaw-wallahs were the stars of “The City of Joy” — and the machines, their riders and their customers have been studied by engineers, evaluated by transport economists and analyzed by sociologists.

We set out to create this book for a variety of reasons — partly to record a fascinating means of transport and human activity before it disappeared, partly because rickshaws are wonderfully varied examples of technical ingenuity, partly because they’re often beautiful examples of folk art and partly because it looked like a fun thing to do. In fact the last part of that equation proved to be the biggest surprise of all. Putting this book together has been enormous fun — in very large part because of the people we’ve met: the rickshaw pullers and riders, the rickshaw owners and operators, the rickshaw makers and repairers. They’ve all had a tale to tell and they’ve all been remarkably enthusiastic about telling those tales.

They’re celebrated in this book.

Excerpted with permission from “Chasing Rickshaws,” published by Lonely
Planet Publications; text and photos © 1998 by Lonely Planet,
photos © 1998 by Richard I’ Anson.

I’ve spent half a lifetime wondering who goes where, and the results of my surveys may be unscientific but they’re certainly conclusive: Australians go everywhere. I scan through hotel registers in towns in Africa, I glance back through visitors’ books in churches in southern India, I check who has gone scuba diving with a Red Sea dive operator, I add up who has checked in to youth hostels along the Pennine Way in England. Everywhere it’s the same story: more Australians than there should be. Come on, there are less than 20 million of them. If there’s an Australian on the register there should be three Germans, seven Japanese, 15 Americans. It’s never that way.

One night, after the sound and light show at Chichen Itza in Mexico, a dozen or so of us were left, sprawled on the grass, talking about Mayans, Mexico and whatever else you talk about when you’re in that great Mayan center. And then about where we’d been and where we were going. Mexico is not an Australian destination. Australia is not only a lot farther south of the border; it’s also a dateline to the west, and there aren’t lots of cheap flights to Mexico from Australia, as there are from Europe. Australia doesn’t have a shared history with Mexico or enjoy constant references in everyday life (from Taco Bell to Mexican beer to Mexican politics), as America does.

So why should three of the 12 Chichen Itza travelers be Australians? OK, 12 people in front of a Mayan pyramid doesn’t make a statistically significant survey; this little nationality count really doesn’t count. Except it is, it does. In fact, my homespun surveys and gut instinct are more than adequately backed up by hard statistics and clear indicators. On measurements ranging from per capita expenditure on international travel to number of passports held relative to population, Australians are always up toward the top of the charts.
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Australia, like America, is a wide and varied land, offering plenty to attract the traveler in its own right. So why are Americans perfectly content to see America first, to explore their own country with, comparatively speaking, rarely a thought of setting foot abroad? While Australians seem intent on going everywhere before they give their homeland a second glance.

Perhaps the country’s wanderlust dates right back to its European beginnings. Australia’s European settlement, like America’s, was relatively recent and surprisingly similar, a pattern of sailing fleets bringing hardy settlers to a lightly populated country where they displaced the native peoples (often violently) and then did very well for themselves. The people on those sailing ships, however, were aboard for entirely different reasons. The new Americans were fleeing Europe, going in search of a new home with no intention of ever looking back. In contrast, Australia’s convict settlers were being flung out from Europe, exiled to Australia against their will, with return home always uppermost in their minds. So perhaps that need to leave, that need to hit the road, to go somewhere, anywhere, everywhere, has been in the Australian psyche from the very start.

Or perhaps it’s a more modern affliction, a product of modern media and information. Until the last 25 years, when an explosion of Australian movies, books, fashion and music defined for the first time a real Australian culture, the whole country was said to suffer from “cultural cringe.” This condition displayed itself as an overwhelming feeling of being culturally second-rate, a poor straggler behind the infinitely superior cultural life found in other parts of the world. To make it meant going abroad, because even achieving exactly the same sort of success in Australia as in Europe or America would inevitably be tainted, second best.

As a result, a whole generation of Australians moved to London, turned that city’s Earls Court district into “Kangaroo Valley” and ended up behind the steering wheel, driving half the popular culture of Britain. Just look at Rupert Murdoch and his international media grab; it had its takeoff outside Australia in Britain, and there were plenty of Aussie foot soldiers ready and waiting in Fleet Street to staff his army when the call to arms came. Today the culinary revolution that has swept through London, leading many food critics to opine that the food’s better there than in Paris, has partly been led by Australian chefs, who run the kitchens of many of the city’s best restaurants.

Or perhaps it’s simple mileage that drives Australians to become the world’s premier long-term travelers, the “tyranny of distance,” as the Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has defined it. Flying to Europe from Australia takes a solid 24 hours; even the most direct flight to the U.S. West Coast involves at least 12 hours aloft. To most overseas destinations from Australia, a flight of at least seven or eight hours is a short hop, a mere kangaroo skip for an outward-bound Aussie. When getting anywhere takes that long, there’s clearly an incentive to stay away longer; you don’t take a weekend in Europe when it takes the whole weekend just to get there.

Accordingly, a year off between education and employment became an Australian norm, like the gentlemanly European tour of the Victorian era. Grab a representative bunch of Australians and a surprising percentage of them will have spent a year or more abroad at some point. In this activity the Australians may have simply been a bit ahead of the game, for today the expression “gap year” has found its way into the English dictionary, a year between school and university when young Brits set out to see the world. Reportedly, even in America, a “blank” year or two on your CV, once looked upon as a sure sign of unreliability and lack of application, is now starting to be seen as a sign of adventurousness and a wider understanding of the outside world.

Or perhaps Australian wanderlust goes farther back than modern travel, back beyond the cultural cringe and the tyranny of distance, even back before Captain Cook, the “First Fleet” of convicts and the other pioneering Europeans. After all, the term “walkabout” is just putting an English spin onto what was clearly an Aboriginal concept. Right from the beginning, European observers noted the native Australians’ tendency to put down tools and head off somewhere else for an indeterminate period of time for inscrutable reasons. Perhaps from the very beginning the whole island continent was already deeply infected with Terminal Wanderlust, waiting to be passed on to the next foolish arrivals.

Or perhaps it’s the landscape. When first-time visitors ask me where to go in Australia, I always point toward the Outback. Yes, the cities can be beautiful, but there are other beautiful cities in the world. Yes, the Great Barrier Reef is marvelous, but there are other coral reefs. There’s only one Outback and Australians have a strangely passionate but arms-length affair with it; it’s celebrated in every medium, from songs like “Waltzing Matilda” to movies like “Crocodile Dundee” to bookshops full of photographic essays. The passion and the celebrations are, however, edged with caution. The Outback is like an exciting but vaguely dangerous lover who might just roll over and stab you in the back some night. There’s always a distance about it, an alien, vaguely unsettling, vaguely feral atmosphere. In fact, you don’t really love it; the relationship has a touch of love-hate. The green fields and ordered landscapes of Europe seem infinitely more secure, reliable and trustworthy.

Or perhaps linking Terminal Wanderlust with Australia overlooks the most glaring example of all: There’s a small country slightly to the southeast of Australia — human population about 3 million, sheep population about 20 times as great — where they really have Terminal Wanderlust bad.