Why Travel

Mumbai

Mumbai was to me, as one of my friends from India suggested, "Like New York so you will like it."  For me, the big, bustling, but relatively westernized city was relaxing.  I ended up stayed at an amazingly cheap hotel, despite budgeting 10 times what I had for the rest of India based on my research, because others weren't available.  And I loved it.  The room I moved to on the 2nd night had a view of the ocean, and I was less than a 5 minute walk to the Taj hotel, where no one minded if I sat in the lobby (as long as I didn't approach the pool, the one area with a big sign declaring it for "residents of the hotel only"), and the Gate of India.

I decided to make an effort to spend all the money I'd saved on hotel costs by enjoying the dining scene in Mumbai, and taking taxis everywhere.  The taxis in Mumbai were great, though relatively expensive, the drivers always used the meters without prompting and generally knew where everything was.

One exception to this was when I decided to go to Swati Snack in Kemp's Corner for a late lunch.  A whole restaurant dedicated to snacks, that is known for having a wait at almost any time of day.  Wow!  I got a taxi as far as the general area but the driver couldn't find the address for me.  So I went into a lamp store.  High end lamps seem to be all the rage, and wives (presumably of bankers or other high earning professionals) seem to have many lamp stores to choose from.  In an amazing lamp store, I asked the proprietor where Swati Snack was and he had vaguely heard of it, but a woman shopping in the store was an enthusiastic expert.  She said yes I was on the right track, and yes it was worth getting another taxi, and waiting in line.  She came out into the street to get me a taxi and give directions to the driver.

At Swati Snack I ate two snacks and drank fresh watermelon juice, and was seated with a Johnson and Johnson executive.  We chatted about food, he asked me about the food I'd eaten around India, and told me about the neighborhood.

Another great establishment in Mumbai is Leopolds, a bar that is famous for travelers going there to meet other random travelers.  Leopolds was also a 5 minute walk from my hotel.  Within 5 minutes of arriving there for the first time, I met two of the most interesting people I've ever met.  The first was a Norwegian woman who had bicycled from Norway to Varanassi, India through Turkey and Afghanistan then spent 4 months in Varanassi relearning Reiki which she used to practice a couple of decades ago.  The second was an English freelance journalist who had spent the past several months trying to get an apartment in Mumbai after staying in hotels there several weeks a year for years.

New Delhi, Take Two

I thought after 7 weeks in India New Delhi might seem totally different the 2nd time around, less overwhelming, more manageable, I though I might even like it. I would see things through eyes that knew what was going on, that could read the street, rather than making false assumptions or simply being bewildered.

This turned out to be partially true. For my return visit, before flying on to Beijing, I stayed only 2 days, booked a boutique hotel half a mile from Connaught Place, and booked a car and driver for the 2nd day to see the remaining sights I still hadn't seen, do a little shopping, and get to the airport at the end of the day to await my 3:15 a.m. flight to Beijing.

My main mission besides catching my flight and seeing if I could like New Delhi, was to stock up on English language books to read in China. India is great on English language books and bookstores, and I had easily been able to stick to my plan of reading books about or by authors from the regions I was in, without carrying many books. I also discovered there are many books published in India (possibly more than the U.S. or U.K.), books were already available in paperback that weren't back home, plus there were lots of Indian authors available, etc. Luckily the Books issue of Time Out Delhi happened to come out while I was in India, so I'd read up on what bookstores to go to.

I had arrived in New Delhi mid afternoon and attempted to take a nap at the hotel, unfortunately it was the one hour that the new giant TV was being installed. So I set off for Connaught Place, walking a few blocks to the Metro and taking it one stop. The Metro in New Delhi is easy to use, and I already knew my way around it. I knew where to buy an electronic token, and then to open my bag and line up in the separate women's line for security screening.

Walking down the street for the couple of blocks to the Metro stop, walking alongside the overhead Metro tracks, the street was as chaotic and crowded as I remembered, and after one block, when I was half way there, dozens of bicycle rickshaws and auto rickshaws were there, and many drivers approached me suggesting a ride to the Metro. I didn't feel like bargaining about the price just to ride one block when I'd rather walk anyway. The air was thick with smog, there were many lanes of traffic and no clear sidewalk.

In Connaught Place I went to the Oxford Bookstore, which was having a huge sale. It was just after 5 p.m. so still daylight but people were streaming out of offices. On my way from the Metro to the store, I met a middle aged woman randomly waiting to cross a street, whose son lives in Boston. We chatted for a while, and she invited me to visit her at work at a bank headquarters on that street the next day. When I mentioned this to a woman at my hotel who used to live in Delhi as an expat and returns every few years to visit, she said, "You met a woman?!" Its true that it was generally hard to meet Indian women in India especially randomly in public. Partly for this reason, I started staying in home stays (more like Bed and Breakfasts) which are usually run by women, it is a great way to meet a woman and her family, and if you're a woman traveling alone, often her neighbors, friends, and business contacts who are women. Despite this I didn't visit my new friend the next morning. I had to continue my book shopping and squeeze in a few sights before leaving India.

The next morning I traveled by car and driver, I went to Khan's market which is famous for its bookstores, and also the hub of expat and upper crust shopping for central Delhi, so I wanted to see this other side of Delhi I'd missed the first time. The traffic barely moved but we got there, and then the driver found a spot in a paid lot on one side of the market and slept in the car while I went off shopping. I went to a few bookstores, finally buying books in the one recomended by Lonely Planet, Full Circle Bookstore, and eating in its Cafe Turtle, paying the same as you would in New York at a similar cafe, for portions half the size, of pasta, and coffee and cake. It was very luxurious. I found a shop that could not only change my watch band, but had the exact same band I had been repairing with duct tape. I found a nice card for a friend's birthday at a stationary store.

And then I had to find my car. It seemed to be a combination of drivers staying with cars and a valet for people who drove themselves, so all the cars had moved around since I left. The attendant asked me about my car number, and I hadn't even though of that. I'd never hired a car with driver before, and was beyond clueless about the parking arrangements. Luckily I spotted the car a few minutes later, paid for the lot, and we were off.

I had a very nice driver, who was an interesting guy, and also knew his way around the city, and knew the bookstores, but I wouldn't want to travel that way on a regular basis. It's not only hard on my budget, but I like being more independent and doing things more on a whim without explaining them at all. However, it was nice to have glass between me and the smog and beggars and magazine sellers, and to easily get to places that weren't close to Metro stops without haggling with an autorickshaw driver over every trip.

In the afternoon, I went to Gandhi Smriti (where Gandhi spent his last weeks and died) which was more moving than I expected and then to Humayun's Tomb just before sunset which was beautiful, and extremely calm. I had an extravagant dinner recomended by my hotel, stopped by the hotel to pick up my backpack, and went straight to the airport at 8:30pm for a 3:15 am flight as recomended by my hotel.

***

If you happen to know my itinerary, you may have noticed that I'm writing about places I went on my trip in loosly referse order. I forgot to mention this in my first post. I'm also planning to cover some themes or tell some stories that aren't place specific. And eventually, I'll write about things other than this trip, including my home neighborhood, probably about the time the tourists descend here full force.

"I'm Home, Almost": Culture Shock

I recently got married, but a few months later left my job and hit the road for an 8 week solo "backpacking" trip around India with a brief stop in China (8 days in Beijing).   Since I've made a living for the past 8 years mostly from my writing skills, many people asked me why I don't try travel writing, or at least do a blog. I didn't write a blog because I never had, didn't know how to set one up,  never read them, and don't read travelogues either.  Instead, I was planning to send out emails under the title "this is not a blog" with my own thoughts rather than a chronicle of what I'd seen or done (sort of like a blog for Luddites like me who are nostalgic for interesting group emails).

But it turned out for the first two weeks of my trip I barely had email access.  I was able to access the Internet easily, but the connections were so slow I could barely send one short email, and sometimes I could only access Facebook not Yahoo or Hotmail.  It turned out I wouldn't have been able to make an entry to a blog, and my original plan didn't work either.  This was in India, the IT capital of the world, an interesting thing to write home about, if I'd been able to.  So I kept a paper journal and some other notes, and took about 900 photos.

After traveling "alone" for  8 weeks in India and China, I've been making a slow re-entry to the USA over the past 2.5 weeks.  First I met my husband in San Francisco for 10 days in the Bay Area and Napa Valley to visit several friends and take a vacation together (my first ever true vacation from a vacation, a fantasy I know many share) then home for 2 days to repack for 4 days at his conference in Syracuse, NY.

Yesterday, finally back in Boston for good, I went to buy the Boston Globe and tried to pay 50 cents, the guy behind the counter told me the price went up about a month ago (raising his eyebrows as if to say "have you been living under a rock?").  I mentioned I'd been traveling, and it turns out he's from Nepal, where I didn't go even though I was within a few miles, because of strikes on both sides of the border.  We chatted for a while.

A lot of the culture shock of returning home is the shock of having to pay attention to the little things, like buying a newspaper,  which seem normal to pay attention to when abroad, but upsetting to not know how to do when home.  For the first week I was back in the US, I had to focus every time I entered a bathroom, to remember to put the toilet paper into the toilet rather than the trash can.  I will return to the fascinating topic of toilets another time.  But this is what people mean when they talk about  culture shock, needing to think about how to go to the bathroom when you wake up in the middle of the night, you do not feel normal.

The many friends I've seen and strangers I've met during this slow return have most frequently asked "What have you missed the most?" I noticed a long time ago that I tend to not miss anything or realize I miss it while I'm away, and then I have nice surprises waiting for me when I return.  Today I ate a bagel with cream cheese for the first time in 3 months.  Yum!  I am looking forward to eating spaghetti with sauce from a jar.

I tend to adapt easily to wherever, and then experience a lot of culture shock when I get home.  While traveling, I tend to notice the things that strike me as obviously more logical or better than how it is done in the US more often than what is "weird", and then wonder when I get home "Why do we do this?"

This is why I travel, more than to see the world, more than to see how different other places are in some ways and the same in others, more than to see how great the world is and/or have stories to to tell. 

Now that I've answered my question, "Why Travel?", why go on?  Now that I'm home, I want to think about what I saw and experienced, what I learned, what I'm learning now by coming home, I'd like to show rather than tell what I mean about why I travel, and I'd like to share that with my friends (and whoever else might be interested).  So I finally broke down and started this blog, to write about my own experiences, and eventually other things that might help answer the question "why travel?" 

Also it turns out to be very easy to set up a blog, and I even got a 14 day free trial.