Interlude

Seeing as I’m about to shift from India to Southeast Asia, I thought this would be an appropriate time to reflect a bit on my time in India. Never have I had such complex and conflicting emotions about a place. On the one hand, I loved the experience of being somewhere that was so entirely different from any place I’d seen before. India is truly fascinating; one could spend entire days just standing still, observing the strange, often surreal, goings-on of the place. I loved meeting fellow travelers and exchanging stories. I loved the food. I loved the helpful, warm locals that I met, from Omar in Kashmir to Mr. Singh in Jaipur. I loved the natural beauty of Kashmir and Ladakh. And most of all, I loved experiencing a place with so much history, culture, and conflict.

That said, there were certainly things I struggled with as well. I found the culture to be quite harsh, at least superficially—most of the people I dealt with on a daily basis treated me with little respect and blatantly tried to suck as much money out of me as possible. The touts lied to me routinely and pestered me incessantly. And the heat was nearly unbearable.

But all in all, I’m very glad I went. I only wish I could have spent more time in each place—I think much of my frustration stemmed from the pace of my travels. If I’d been traveling at a more leisurely pace, I likely would have enjoyed myself a bit more, I certainly would have stayed cooler, and I might have even clashed less with the touts.

Being someone who prides himself on learning from his mistakes, I’ve vowed to slow things down on the next leg of my trip. I’ll spend more time soaking up my surroundings, meeting people, learning the local language, and generally enjoying myself. Accordingly, my blog posts will change as well. Rather than full outlines of my days, my posts will tend to be more anecdotal. I still plan to log the details of each day, but I’ll do it in a Word document and leave the interesting stories to the blog. For those of you who appreciate my obsession with minutia, I apologize. For the rest of you, maybe you’ll actually be able to stomach my posts from now on.

Thanks for reading. Next stop, Singapore.