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.



Of Tourists, Temples, and Time Spent at Peace

Just a few hours after landing in Bangkok, Brianne and I were sitting in a tiki-style sidewalk restaurant, gulping down watermelon shakes and sweating uncontrollably. We had just met up with a group of Brianne’s Swiss friends, who were to be our traveling companions for the first week in Thailand. The six of us were catching up while surveying a parade of passing tourists ranging in dress code and sobriety level from “unfortunate” to “straight-up offensive.” These, Diel told us, were the sights of Khao San Road – or, as Brianne and I now call it, the gringo ghetto. We began to understand the impatience of the Thai servers and masseuses working in this purgatory of shirtless Westerners confused enough to think they were minutes from the beach.

My first impression of the city, unfortunately, was highly touched by this uncomfortable relationship between clueless vacationers and hardened locals, which often crops in the heavily touristed areas of Bangkok. Service with a smile, a taxi driver not trying to profit from our ignorance, a sightseer with the appropriate amount of skin covered: these things seemed frustratingly hard to come by.

But given a little time to adjust to the city’s sprawling layout (and stifling heat index), we began to discover the quiet moments hidden in Bangkok’s tucked-away places. Our long city walks brought us (with varying degrees of purposefulness) to artisan ice cream stores, delicious restaurants filled with genuine smiles, and even to Asia’s highest rooftop bar.

And wandering into the city’s countless temples, we found ourselves surrounded by a meditative buzz of prayer, incense, and song. Everywhere we looked there was an intersection of bright colors or a reflection of sun-brushed gold that begged, no demanded that we snap another photo.

Bangkok is, truly, a city that never sleeps. And sometimes I did wish the whizzing traffic, the bored hawkers, and the drunk tourists would put themselves to bed for just one night. But our peaceful moments, snatched from busy streets, showed us that Bangkok is still a city that knows how to pause and breathe.

And really we had very little to complain about. Because we were about to head south, where we would join the Swiss for a four-day stay in the beach town of Khao Lak.

Surely at this point my reader will cease to feel any pity for me as I sipped Chang lagers, spooned up spicy red curries, and took a nap to the tune of crashing waves. All I can say in my own defense is that days of beach picnics and long swims were full of great conversation and new friendships, which I did my best to lay in store for the more intense culture shock to come. With the Swiss wrapping up their month in Thailand, and with Brianne and I just getting started on our Asian adventure, four gorgeous days were more than enough to remind us all not to take for granted the chance to get outside the normal and everyday.

Happy New Year, Hong Kong

Ignorance is a state that yields mixed results for travelers. Sometimes, the reprecussions can be unpleasant, as in "who knew traveling in Chile was so expensive?" But at times, a certain sunny blankness of expectation can be just the clean canvas that invites unanticipated adventures.

Such was the case in Hong Kong. A simple Wikipedia search would have told me that Hong Kong is the world's most vertical city, and also has the highest rate of participation in public transportation. But despite the countless advantages available to us in this information age, Brianne and I arrived in Hong Kong without ever having cracked a guide book or run the simplest of internet searches. Luckily my more proactive aunt helped arrange a lunch date with a former coworker, Martin Tang, and we looked forward to the chance to ask for some insider's advice.

"What are your plans for Hong Kong?" he asked us. "Nada," we admitted. "Well then," he replied, "why don't you take my personal car and driver, make an itinerary with my assistant, and take a tour of Hong Kong island?" "Well..." we answered, "that's certainly better than anything we've come up with so far."

So thanks once again to the generosity of strangers, to my fabulous aunt, and to a rather incredible stroke of luck, we found our two days in Hong Kong packed with sights: kaleidoscope views of the city and harbor, chic sidewalk restaurants, surprisingly secluded beaches, and bustling urban temples. I've included a sample of our photography haul below:

View of Hong Kong harbor at night from the Peak

Across the harbor near our shoebox-sized hostel room

Street market near Soho

 

Repulse Bay



Incense burning outside a small temple in Stanley



After two busy days, our conclusion was: Hong Kong is pretty happening. As cosmopolitan and hip as London, it still has a flavor all its own and just the right energy to jump start our Asian adventure.

The Things You Carry With You

The process of packing for a long trip has something mythic and existential about it. You begin to feel that these clothes before you are not just a random assortment of quick-dry pants and non-cotton tops. Oh no. Not only have they been carefully selected for maximum utility across temperatures and dress codes, scrutinized for wrinkle-free packability, and weighed carefully on the scales of “added weight versus added happiness.” They will be the companions on every adventure, the splash of color (or more likely earth tones) in every photo. They will help set the mood and character of the days ahead.

And more imporant even than my rain jacket or pack towel are all the traveling companions I'm not even aware I've tucked in my backpack: preconceived notions, subconscious expectations and fears, hidden attachments to antoher time, place, or people - all of which will subtly alter the course of my experience. Perhaps a very accomplished guru would be able to cleanse her aura of all that extra baggage and walk forward with clear, open eyes. But yours truly has yet to find a way of not dragging it all along. The best I can do is try to be attentive, slow to form judgments, and eager to embrace the day rather than shape it to my own will.

As Brianne and I enter the second, arguably more culturally challenging Asia phase of the trip, an open mind and a present focus seem particularly important. I want to put my energy into inhabiting each beautiful, uncomfortable, tedious, heartbreaking moment. I'm taking for my mantra a Mary Oliver quote I often turn to: "Look, I want to love this world as if it's the last chance I have to be alive and know it." In what will perhaps be my last long wander for a great many years, I don't want to miss opportunities to be alive and be grateful for it.

So if you've made it this far, thank you for reading, and stay tuned for Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Nepal, and Dubai.