Why are we doing such an adventurous thing?

Picture this: It's early Autumn; you're bored and/or looking to do something useful/fun/productive with $900 that miraculously appeared in your bank account... That is the exact situation we found ourselves living out in the wonderful year of 2009. Then Brad found The Rickshaw Run - we knew immediately this just had to be done. Sign ups are April 30.

Prequel

It all started with the GFC, thats right, The Global Financial Crisis. I don't really understand how, why, and when the GFC happened, but check it out on WikiPedia. Anyway what i do know is Kevin Rudd decided that to keep Australia out of recession it need to be stimulated... financially... and stimulated in a big way. And who is going to do Kevin's stimulating? Himself? No sir, no way, he is a politician, he'll just pay someone to do it for him - Enter the Australian tax payer.

So here you are getting on with life, enjoying what you enjoy, and all of a sudden, bang, Kevin Rudd: here is $900, go and stimulate the economy. Well, wasn't that a shock, $900, what am i going to do with $900. Stimulate the economy? I don't like the sound of stimulating anything. It was all very emotional. Anyway. I (Brad) live a fairly minimalist life, i don't like decorations, and fancy stuff, i buy what i need and that's it. I didn't really need $900 to be honest, i had everything i needed, and wanted, and no debts. Sure i could have just waste it, but then I'd have some junk siting in my unit taking up space, and i would have to move next time we moved, see the problem? So i got a thinking/scheming, how can i spend this money in a more productive way. Now $900 is a bit but not a lot, so 4 of us decided to pool our resources - my wife (Kate), brother (Andrew) and brother in law (Matthew) giving us a total of $3600, and let me tell you, you can do some pretty serious stuff with $3600. So anyway we start working on a way to spend this money, buying real estate in a cheap country, buying our own rickshaw, buying a site caravan, getting a ice cream van, etc, etc, etc were some of the ideas, but, the Rickshaw Run was the idea to cut the mustard. Note i found the Rickshaw Run while browsing Wikipedia's auto rickshaw page(trying to find out how much one cost), so don't let anyone tell you Wikipedia's no good, especially university lectures that think its a 'unreliable open' source. All sources are open, think about it, anyone can publish a book... and all sources are unreliable when used independently, if you can verify a information by comparing it with multiple other source then it becomes more reliable. Anyway i don't think Wikipedia is all that bad, but hey, what does it matter what i think.