“I´m going straight back to Kochi now and on the next plain home! I´m ready to give up now!”
A moment later I was laughing out loud about this surprise my mind offered me.
What a ridiculous thought. We didn’t come all this way for two years to be brought to our knees by a bit of bad weather. I immediately thought of Pratish, moving his bike only a few metres behind me through the pelting rain. Who had accompanied me for two uncertain years in the process of setting up our company and was now faithfully riding with me through this cold and wet hell.
During our last break, I had told him how much we Europeans can get upset about the weather and he looked at me rather uncomprehendingly and said that this was totally irrelevant because there was nothing we could do about it anyway. A very Indian way of thinking.

Since I had the idea for this venture two years ago, we have had to show so much patience and perseverance. The pandemic tied me to Vienna and even Pratish in India could not move around as freely as he would have liked. At least I was able to use the forced break to tinker with our website. 
As soon as the travel restrictions allowed it, I wanted to go to India on a business visa. This was the only way I could have enough time to do all the tasks here. A tourist visa would not have been sufficient in terms of time. As it turned out later, only a business visa is valid as a proof of residence for me in India before the Indian authorities, in order to be able to sign further documents, e.g. to open our company account.
In order to get a business visa, however, I already had to be registered as a director of our company. So setting up the company had top priority.

This is how we started on the long road to founding a company in India with the participation of a European Citizen. It would certainly not have been easier the other way round. And it was always clear that our company had to be based in India in order to guarantee the best possible legal security for our future customers and also for us.
My initial naivety of being able to manage this company formation quickly and digitally on my own was brought down to bureaucratic reality by the complexity of the undertaking. Without a tax advisor in India to guide us through this process, nothing was going to happen. So Pratish found a tax advisor who was willing to take on the matter. And then he found the next tax advisor, because the first one had thrown in the towel due to excessive demands.
We now had a whole team in this office to help us and who kept on giving us new tasks on signatures and proof of identity.
In Vienna, I often went from notary to district court to provincial court to get the notarisation (and over-notarisation) of my signatures and proofs of identity and residence required by the Indian authorities.
I had an officially certified translation of my Austrian registration certificate done and over-certified, only to be told after submitting it to the Indian authorities that only my mobile phone bill would be accepted as proof of residence. 

Again and again we were pushed back while our request became more and more urgent. 

All the company incorporation data and the required attachments are submitted through a web portal. Now, at this very time, the Indian authorities decided to change this portal from a pdf-only submission to an AI-based system. For many weeks, a submission was simply not possible due to technical errors, which in turn almost drove our tax consulting team to despair.
This was because all documents had to be submitted at the same time for incorporation and could not be older than two months, which was not an easy thing to do in this process. In fact, my notarised and over-certified mobile phone invoice was then also older than two months again, but the authorities were accommodatingly content with the certifications on the old invoice plus the blank current invoice.

Suddenly, we could hardly believe our luck, the submission system seemed to work. And as I would not have expected anything else from an AI, only hours later in our email inboxes were the incorporation documents with which I could finally go to the Indian Embassy in Vienna and two weeks later had my business visa stuck in my passport.

So I have been in Kerala since October 2022 to put all the ideas of the past two years into practice. I’ll report on how we did in the next blog post. 
Just so much in advance: everything is done, we have found the best routes (a dream come true for every rider), and secured the most beautiful accommodations. We are ready to go on an extraordinary journey with you!