I think it would be safe to say that I really did not expect to have had so much of a good time in India. I thought it would be harder and more effort to move between places and that rooms would be miniscule with dodgy plumbing – if any! I was expecting to want to go home, and don’t get me wrong, there have been those moment, just very few of them.
Arming myself with a Lonely Planet and a sense of humour was probably the best thing I could have done, aside from packing the appropriate luggage, and I have needed both constantly. I have enjoyed the hectic and the peaceful, the funny and the stressful, the easy and the hard and also the downright surreal aspects of India and I feel better for the experience.
India was not a place that I thought that I would ever have got to, not in a million years, so to have come this far and spent so long here, I count as a massive personal achievement.
Many times I have been in situations that you really couldn’t make up and I am grateful to say that I must have the most patient friends in the world! There are not many people who will put up with my fussy eating, complete lack of General Knowledge, sporadic personality and huge fear of the unknown, unplanned adventure.
To this end I have tried so many new things! Mopedding, auto-rickshaw driving, bangra dancing, fried eggs, walking through bat caves, trekking through tea plantations, eating fresh fish, sleeper trains and busses, eating chiquoo, guava and custard apples, kayaking, camel trekking, eating an omlette, swimming in the sea – properly – extreme flip-flop hiking, monkey scaring, spotting wild elephants and trying a lot of strange Indian cuisine…to name but a few!
Whatever the ‘real’ India is, I think I’ve seen it, from the subtle Indian head wobble to the villagers pumping their water into large silver urns, the crazy auto-rickshaw driving and what seems like fifty children riding to school in them, the Cows, Pigs, Goats, Dogs and sometimes Sheep wandering around the streets foraging for food and Elephants and Camels leading people through them. In the backwaters you have the villagers out for their dawn fishing trips alongside small children getting into their school boat and going off to learn. You have the wild animals and the people out in their jeeps eager to spot them, the monkeys out to steal your food and the mosquitos out to steal your blood. You see the hunched over pose of the gaggle of grannys picking tea by hand on a vertical hill in the morning mist and wander how they manage to do it, or people bathing in the Ghats.
All these things make up part of what is the ‘Real India’.
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