“A good traveller has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.”
After leaving my Indian family behind, I decide to spend a day by the river reading (500 pages, a whole book in one sitting) and camping as I had been craving a bit of alone time with my tent.
“You never leave someone behind, you take a part of them with you and leave a part of yourself behind.”
I meet and befriend more people in a month than most of you do in years. That being said, I also say goodbye to that many people as well. That’s the cruel irony of travel, though you meet the most amazing and inspiring people, you never get very long with them.
“I dream of a better world where chickens can cross roads without having their motives questioned.”
People in this part of the world are creative. In India I have seen people carrying absolutely everything on a bike, wagon, or on their body, including a group of men each carrying a bed strapped to their head! There are car fixing stations every so often with piles of what looks like scrap metal and junk, and somehow they are able to piece it all together to fix any problem. And though everyone here stills throws their trash out the window without a second thought, they have come up with a creative recycled use for old paper.
“Now and then it’s good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy.”
Attending an Indian marriage gave me an insight into just how different cultures can be. The day of the ceremony itself was filled with food (served from buckets as everyone ate rice, mutton, and dal with their hands) and Indian music and dancing. From the outside it looked like a pretty simple affair, until I learned the details about marriage in India, which confirmed what I already knew… I will never marry an Indian man!
“The open road is a beckoning, a strangeness, a place where a man can lose himself.”
I was in Kot for one of the many festivals that happens during this time of year. It is the festival of women, where the women wear a new suit and bangles, do henna on their hands, and fast for the day in order to ensure a long life for their husband. They fast until the moon comes up, at which time they look through a strainer at their husband and the moon. They then throw rice and water, and eat certain foods such at a bite of coconut, sweets, and a piece of bread to break the fast. I am not sure if they actually believe this will ensure a longer life for their husband, or if they do it purely out of tradition.
“The most freeing and liberating part of this whole trip is that…I rarely have any place to be other than where I am, which truly lets me live in the moment. Every single moment.”
Here is the house (the green and white one in the bottom right corner) I stayed in while in the village of Kot. Like all the houses in the area, there were no roads up and down the hillside so the only way to reach the house was on a small foot path. Throughout this region there were little clusters of five or six houses that were considered a “village,” though they also identified with the town a few kilometers away.
“When I was 5 years old, my mom always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.” They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, I told them they didn’t understand life.”
Though these guys were shy at first, after I brought out my camera and showed them a picture of themselves, they quickly began posing and playing with me.
“All journeys have secret destinations of which the traveler is unaware.”
If it’s possible to be overwhelmed by hospitality and kindness, I have definitely found the village for it. Though I had only planned to stay one night, within an hour, the first lady to take me in made me promise I would stay at least a week, and, well, why not! Throughout my stay, she and others then tried to get me to stay for a month (and a year!), and finally after nearly two weeks, I managed to leave, but not without turning down countless offers, from just about everyone I met, to stay at their homes at least a few nights. People had heard I was staying in the area and were calling the two different families (related somehow, cousin of cousin or something) I stayed with everyday to invite me all over to their homes. I couldn’t even go for a walk without being invited into multiple people’s house for tea. The families I met first fought for me, turning down offers from others, and sharing me like a child with divorced parents. Since families here are so intertwined and enormous (they have “the uncle-of-my-sister’s-cousin’s-brother type of relationships), basically everyone I met in the village and surrounding area was somehow family.
“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.”
Ladakh and Spiti aren’t really India. I mean sure, they are technically, but the people don’t look Indian, the culture and language is Tibetan, and it’s clean, cold, and deserted, words never associated with the rest of India. For the past week I have been in the real India though. The crazy, chaotic, busy India, filled with people, cows, and monkeys. An India, that, unfortunately, I wasn’t looking forward to cycling through. Though I will someday visit the rest of the country, it is not an endeavor I plan to undertake with my bike. That being said, my last few weeks have shown me that it’s the people, not only the climate or scenery, that makes travel what it is.
“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is an adventure wrongly considered.”
That’s right, this post is all about toilets, or more accurately, the lack there of. India has a very large toilet problem, and it’s not just the homeless who have no where to go. In many of the small farming villages I have stayed in, where people live in nice clean houses, they have no facilities. One of the issues with this (besides sanitation) is in the dead of winter when there is three feet of snow and you have to walk ten minutes to the field everyone goes in. Sometimes in these villages there is one communal toilet, but other times there is no space (or they just haven’t gotten around to it). Cities are definitely the worst since they are so densely populated and there are many homeless and slums. Plus, there are no fields to go in. The stench in some areas is horrific after the sun has been warming up the streams of sewage all day.
The Wandering Nomads 