The Last of India

Truly, I had high hopes of translating my last travel adventures into blog posts before returning home, and thus avoiding the troublesome business of writing about a trip that's already finished and started to seem like a very bizarre dream. But the best laid plans of mice and men often fail to take into account abysmal internet signals and a wandering sense of focus. So in the end I find myself writing these last entries from the surreal comfort of a Grand Rapids living room, where I am already wrapped up in the beginnings of a life that bears very little resemblance to the past months' rambling. I hope you'll excuse any shifts in tone or unconscious revisions...the alterations of hindsight are, after all, part of the game in travel writing.

Our last week in India involved some iconic photo opportunities. Finally we were making our way to the postcard-perfect tomb that marks many tourists' first Indian destination: the Taj Mahal. Though we had already had a healthy dose of forts, palaces, and burial monuments, who couldn't be excited to see the Taj Mahal? So off we went.

Majestic and impressive? Yes. But of all the photos we took, that last one in the series is actually most evocative of our experience. Because one thing we certainly hadn't counted on before visiting one of the world's most popular tourist destinations is that we ourselves, as young white women, would in fact be the most interesting thing to photograph for many of the Indian men in attendance. Yes, despite the presence of a centuries-old mausoleum considered the gem of Mughal architecture, we found ourselves - in all the glory of our travel clothes and sloppy grooming - barraged with requests for photos by groups of men, sometimes having to duck behind pillars or upraised hands to avoid the paparazzi. By the end of the day we were yelling "NO PHOTOS, [insert expletive here]!" like Tourette's patients and sporting truly paranoid facial expressions. And thus, the above photo, in which - halfway through an attempted jump shot - Brianne spotted a man videotaping us and hit the ground already lunging to the defense. You can almost see the "NO PHOTOS!" on her lips. As a white person in India, you're never really unobserved.

Fresh off our somewhat trying visit to the Taj Mahal, Brianne and I made our way to Rishikesh - a destination famous for its yoga and for its location on a relatively unpolluted section of the Ganges. A holy place of pilgrimages and ashrams, it's also a haven for Western hippies and a chance to breathe some fresher air in the foothills of the Himalayas.

Our stay in the north involved two short stints at ashrams and long days of reading and writing. And though the calm of our retreat was periodically interrupted by aggressive monkeys thieving snacks, homicidal motorcycle drivers whizzing across "pedestrian-only" footbridges, and stressful graduate school emails appearing (or not appearing) with unpredictable timing, we did experience some of the peace promised by the holiest river in the world. I had the amazing good fortune to receive my first graduate school acceptance letter. We did bizarre yoga and watched prayer candles float down the river. And over falafel and pizza (curries had finally worn out their welcome), we rehashed our beautiful, frustrating, magical, saddening, inspiring time in India.

As our last two stops demonstrated, every one of our Indian experiences was a mixed cocktail of the amazing and the maddening. In four weeks I saw some of the most gorgeous and most awful scenes I've ever witnessed. Closure is going to be a long time coming, but I can already tell that India leaves a mark. It's impossible to ignore, impossible to sleep through, and impossible to forget.

The Blue City and the Spice Girls of India

As has often been the case on this trip, it wasn't until we had already arrived in Jodhpur that we began to scan our guidebook for a sense of orientation and a plan of attack. The famous Mehrangarh fort was a must-see, and after some deliberation we decided to investigate the peaceful gardens at the Jaswant Thada tomb.

But the highlight of our stay in India's "blue city" was hiding in a seemingly innocuous tip to check out the masala mixtures at a store called M.V. Spices. The name, in fact, had almost slipped our minds as we browsed through the market around the clock tower. Feeling bolder than usual, we snapped photos of stalls without our normal pretend-you're-taking-a-picture-of-me-so-you-can-secretly-photograph-that-gorgeous-old-woman subterfuge. We even tried the world's greatest lassi (our much maligned guidebook pulls through with another win).

Eventually our wandering took us pass a small, cheery spice store, with the inviting title of M.V. Spices. Outside was the familiar figure of the hawker, calling out to tourists and touting the store's wares. Be tried to balance the hassle of a pushy salesman with our desire for cardamom and cumin. In the end, our culinary curiosity won out (as it usually does), and we stepped into the shop.

Hours later our arms were filled with teas, tonics, and spice mixes. Our budgets were feebly protesting, to absolutely no avail. And our cups (of delicious chai) were filled with our good fortune at meeting Neelam, who along with her six sisters had been running her late father's spice stores for the past seven years.

Their story is impressive in respect to their age alone: the sisters were still young when their father died, and the oldest were already running the stores and keeping the books at 21, 18, 16. But their success becomes truly remarkable in the context of women's rights in modern Rajasthan, where women are normally not allowed to hold jobs of any kind. (This practice has contributed to our growing impression of traveling in a country composed at least 70% of men.) On the day that Neelam's oldest sister, Usha, arrived to open the store for the first time, she had to push her way through a group of protesting men that included even her own uncles. For the first months she would shake and tear up when she had to step outside the shop and face the stares and comments of the watching men. For years she and her sisters put up with jeers, lewd comments, threats, and even attempts at violence. Their father - the first person to open a spice store in Jodhpur - had eventually gotten his name in the guidebooks and had made connections and formed friendships all over the world. Now jealous imitators popped up, with names like M.M. Spices and Maha Vin spices, in an attempt to mislead tourists and steal away some of M.V. Spices' success. Faced with so much opposition, their determined mother had told her daughters that you can't run from threats and stares: you have to get stronger and fight back.

I devoted much of my last entry to my impressions of the opportunity gap in India, and so I won't belabor the point here. Suffice it to say that Brianne and I were blown away by the strength of these women, who were fighting battles that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had won for us long ago. We were dumbfounded by their grace in dealing with the constant stares that Westernized women attract, stares which already - after only two and half weeks as visitors here - had made us feel at times like throwing bags over our heads or going on a pepper-spray rampage. We waxed lyrical about the aroma of saffron and the flavor of anis seeds. We momentarily entertained the idea of throwing graduate school out the window in order to open an Indian-inspired tea shop in the United States.

Most of all, we fell in love with the incredible chai and outstanding spirit of these women, whom their father called the Seven Wonders, whom an Australian documentary called the Spice Girls of India, and whom we called inspirations, future friends, and our lifetime suppliers of masala.

Rajasthani Rambling

Getting ready to leave the traffic and tourist-hasselling of Delhi and Jaipur behind us, Brianne and I found ourselves preparing for an Indian expedition of questionable tranquility. So far our inability to produce free pens to distribute ot children, our lack of interest in buying pashminas or changing money, and our confusion at constantly being asked our country of origin had made us feel like disappointing excuses for white people. And our exploratory walks had been hampered by the limitations of attention. While on the road 50% of our brain seemed required to avoid motorcycles and auto-rickshaws. An additional 10-25% was taken up with trying not to step in poop of some kind. That left very little for looking about, and we found ourselves asking the question: why do so many Westerners come to one of the world's most chaotic countries in search of peace?

While many years of experience with India would be necessary before I arrived at a definitive answer to that question, the time we spent in our next three destinations - Pushkar, Bundi, and Udaipur - would get us started on the right track. In these smaller cities, less congestion and a tamer tourism business would free up vital space in our minds and allow us our first good look at the fascinations of India.

In the holy city of Pushkar, stretching around a sacred lake and filled with the semi-constant noise of chanting and drumming, we discovered the photographic allure of picturesque doorframes and women in saris; got our first glimpse of the phenomenon of urban cows; and tasted the joys of good hospitality and great cooking, when our hosts at Hotel Akash made us feel welcome with their mama's delicious desserts.

Bundi gifted us not only our first experience of travel by public bus (note: not recommended for the weak of bladder or sensitive of smell), but also a rare chance to see a picturesque city still relatively untouched by tourism. In our first day we admired palace paintings and rambled around a fort perched high above the city, which as we learned should only be visited in the morning, because at night it's overrun by leagues of monkeys.

The next day we snatched secret photos of the vegetable market with its women dressed in turquoise, saffron, and fushia: a display of gorgeous color almost matched by the view of Bundi at sunset.

Udaipur had been described to us as "fairy-tale-esque" and "the most romantic city in India." Our guidebook has exaggerated in the past (as when the fantastic Indian restaurant it described to us in Santiago turned out to be in a hotel lobby), but this time we were not disappointed. With airy palaces rising among rolling hills and amidst an almost gratuitously reflective lake, Udaipur is dreamlike. We were happy to have three days to wander through the extensive city palace; watch a festival of traditional Rajhastani dance, which included flaming pots and puppets; and sample the city's chais, lassis, and thalis - a culinary exploration that included a budget-breaking, mouth-watering, jaw-dropping dinner at Ambrai, across the lake from the City Palace.

In the interests of disclosing my full experience of time and place, I should mention that I received my first graduate school rejection during this time. The fateful email, reopening a door of personal statements and future consequences that had stayed blissfully closed during the first month of our Asia trip, has brought foreboding and anticipation, unwelcome, back into our thoughts. And as disappointed as I was to lose part of my awareness to shadowy doubts about the future, this event also allowed me to glimpse how India's overwhelming barrage of color, curry, and calls-of-hawkers can actually prove peaceful. Surrounded by something new and shocking and compelling at every turn, forced to devote my whole mind to absorbing sights so unknown and arresting, I found India was capable of demanding my attention even more loudly and insistently than graduate school. India cannot be sanitized, and it will not be ignored.

And so in the middle of cars honking and cows lowing and "hello! hello! your name? which country?" and hold-my-breath scans of my inbox, I am actually finding my own sort of peace.

Passage to India

The reports we'd received from fellow travelers had partially prepared us for culture shock of landing in Delhi. Of the words we'd heard used to describe traveling in India, "overwhelming" had featured prominently, and it wasn't long before we realized why. From the first taxi ride into the capital city, every sense was assaulted with the impression that India was even more India than we ever could have imagined. Streets crammed with vendors, dogs, cows, and motorcycles. Driving worthy of Grand Theft Auto. Smells of burning wood, incense, exhaust, and curries. Cacophonies of horns and drums - ever-present choruses of "hello! hello! your name?" from almost every passerby. And a population so extremely varied that they might have been living in three seperate centuries.

This last contrast especially has struck us quickly, and occupied us endlessly. From the warren of fire-lit, dusty streets in Karol Bagh, to the upscale Euro-chic dining in Kahn Market: Delhi is a microcosm of India's economic extremes. Passing from one side of the city to another, you can observe an upper-class poised on the cutting edge of a modern, techno-savvy, globalizing economy, and a lower-class living (dressing, marrying, medically treating) as if the past two hundred years never happened. For Brianne and I - freshly arrived and still extremely wary of the careening auto-rickshaws that were our only method of transportation - the experience was, to recycle a word, overwhelming.

Perhaps thankfully, we didn't actually spend much time in Delhi this first time around. Through a happy chance we had arrived in India just a few days before an international literary festival in the nearby city of Jaipur. And as we attended the festival and caught up with Divya, an old friend from Hope College who is now a five-year Delhi veteran, we got an even better look at the polar ends of the Indian spectrum. Geeked out beyond belief to be seeing favorite authors like Tom Stoppard and Jamaica Kincaid, we also had a unique opportunity to rub elbows with upper-crust intellectuals from Delhi and Mumbai. Divya pointed out to us famous journalists and poets, who decried censorship and applauded women's rights - all in fabulous English. We met a group of ex-pats from the U.S., Europe, and East Asia who had left struggling economies and waning opportunities back home to find that the doors of creativity and possibility were wide open in India. Now living lives unaffordable in their own countries, they could attend polo matches and long brunches at the Marriot. They founded literary magazines and started up companies. These were the people who had managed to ride the wave India's exploding economy and now lived in a world of unbelievable growth and opportunity.

And then, just across the city, or sometimes just around the corner, were the people for whom nothing seemed to have changed. 47% of India’s children below the age of three are malnourished, which is almost twice as many as in sub-Saharan Africa. More women die in a week in India from minor complications due to pregnancy than die for the same reasons in Europe in an entire year. Approximately 1.72 million Indian children die each year before turning one. All of this in the fifth richest country in the world, according to GDP. Though income inequality is no strange phenomenon these days, it's difficult to comprehend disparity on this great of a scale, not only of economic resources but of education, civil liberties, religious expression, and public health.

Okay, enough of the heavy lifting, you say. Where are the photos and fun? I promise more of those in updates to come, and I'll leave you with some of the bright moments from our first few days in India. I hope you'll forgive this departure from the light (some might say fluffy) tone of the last few updates, as I attempt to share some of the shocks - both thrilling and troubling - that India presents to the first-time traveler.

Very excited for the Jaipur Literature Festival



Meeting (stalking?) Jamaica Kincaid at the City Palace



The City Palace in Jaipur, known as India's Pink City



City Palace



Hawa Mahal



Chiang Mai, or Stuff White People Like: Thailand Edition

We came to the idea of visiting Chiang Mai rather at random, inspired by an article my mom saved me from a budget travel magazine. But everything we heard from fellow travelers seemed to confirm our hunch that we should go there, and just a few short hours after we had arrived in the northern capital we knew we couldn’t possibly have chosen better.

A riverside city of monks and markets, boho boutiques and divine vegetarian food, Chiang Mai seemed to combine the energy and excitement of Bangkok with the laid-back, beer-sipping relaxation of Khao Lak. We’d worked hard to give ourselves four full days there, and in truth we could have easily filled four more. We browsed night markets, ducked into art galleries, sampled curries, and sipped coffees.

And – though our cameras were already bursting with closeups of incense and long-range (rather stalker-esque) candids of monks – we couldn’t resist wandering through every temple we passed.

We made sure to mark out a full day for one of our trip’s “bucket list” items: a vegetarian cooking course at a delicious Thai restaurant. We racked our brains to select the nine dishes we most wanted to attempt, and felt like the hosts of a cooking show as we threw together pre-arranged ingredients into sour soups, curries, and Pad Thais.

The indescribable delectability of the feast we prepared that day will unfortunately be difficult to replicate in the United States. Not only because of the challenges involved in locating ingredients like kaffir lime leaves and galingale root, but also because our flavor will certainly suffer without a Thai chef eyeing our measurements and muttering, “No. Too much. Still too much. Okay good.” But the techniques we learned, and the flavors we sampled, were more than enough to make the day a highlight of the trip.

Our last day in Thailand found us actually rather sorry to leave. After so thoroughly enjoying ourselves in Chiang Mai, we would have been ready for a side trip to Cambodia or Vietnam, as we had originally planned before shortening our trip from six months to five. But one thing I’ve learned in traveling is that limited time and energy (and money) always force you into leaving some adventures for “next time.” And though it’s a project of mine to live in the present as much as possible on this trip, I don’t mind admitting that I look forward to a return visit to Chiang Mai.