"Anything is Possible in India..."

The idea of writing a blog that encompasses all that we’ve seen and done in the last three months in India is daunting and, for me, bordering on impossible.
The first challenge is to put even five minutes worth of experience here into words. All I can do is lean on an over-used cliché and say that it is a land of contradictions. In every step there is life and death, horror and beauty, smiling faces and scowls, great food and stomach problems…the list could go on.
These extremes extend beyond the everyday as well – climates, landscapes, governments and cultures all differ drastically from one region to the next.

Joined for a month by Alex’s mom, Liz, the three of us took in as much of ‘India’ as we could while we travelled around the states of Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Our experiences wandering through the streets, visiting palaces and forts and eating delicious food completely lived up to my image of India. Women were clothed in bright coloured saris and men in gorgeous turbans; camels, cows and monkeys were commonplace; and the landscape stretching out towards the Thar desert was dry and barren. I was also not surprised to find unbearable heat, extremes in socio-economic status and people trying to scam us at every turn.

The next leg of our journey took us to some of the more northern parts of India; Punjab and Himachal Pradesh. Our brief stop in Punjab was spent in the Sikh ‘holy city’ of Amritsar. It’s here that many Sikhs pilgrimage in order to visit and pray at the ‘Golden Temple’. We stayed and ate in the temple’s surrounding complex area along with many of such pilgrims…a very strange and wonderful experience. Amritsar is close to the Pakistan/India border (luckily a non-disputed region) and the nearby border town of Attari is home to the famous ‘border show’. Everyday, each set of border guards puff out their chests and strut their stuff in a testosterone competition during the lowering of the Pakistani and Indian flags.
A little further north and to the east, Himachal Pradesh was a nice ‘break’ from the India that we had been visiting. Many of the towns we were in rested in the foothills of the Himalayas – they were cool, made a slightly larger attempt to promote and maintain their natural resources and were filled with great hotels and restaurants catering to foreign tastes. One of these towns, McLeod Ganj, is home to the Dalai Lama and many other Tibetan refugees that have been in exhile since the 1950s.

The final stop in our travels around India was my overall favourite area within the country…the south. We visited Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Karnataka. The south was easy to travel around, people seemed much more friendly than elsewhere in India and there was plenty to do. Tamil Nadu was a land of grand and colourful Hindu temples, Kerala an oasis of jungle and palm trees and Karnataka was home to a strange bolder-covered historical area called Hampi. If I were to return to a place already visited in India it would definitely be the south.

When it comes down to explaining my overall feelings about India I’ll have to fall back on the famous paradox…I love it and I hate it.

In other news, pictures from most of our trip are now posted. They’ve been separated into Northern and Southern India. We had some picture CDs stolen so are missing some pictures from the very north and parts of the south…we’re hoping to get these recovered from memory cards once we return to Canada.