We got out of the cab in front of a hotel just off Sadoun street. The driver put his number in Oyv’s phone and told us to call if we needed anything, and then he drove off.

Baghdad, one-time capital of the Muslim world, was founded in the 8th century. At this moment the ‘City of Peace’ was enjoying another (possibly self-declared) title: ‘Capital of Arab Tourism 2025’.

‘That’s interesting’ we thought, and with the major tourist attractions in mind, set off to explore. But despite that lofty designation, the tourist attractions were mostly closed. It didn’t matter: we strolled along the Tigris and rambled in the hectic streets. We drank chai and browsed in the stacks at the booksellers that line Al Mutanabbi street.

We went to Iraq in part for its jaw-dropping 7000 years of history. But we also wanted to experience Iraq’s well-known culture of ingrained hospitality. And after a couple of days of getting turned away from closed monuments in Baghdad but warmly welcomed by nearly every person in the street, we set off for Mosul.

Rising from ashes

We’re no strangers to police checkpoints. Good thing too, because there were many on the way to Mosul. The only problem we had at one of them was with a soldier lounging barefoot on a sofa in his office in a dense fog of shisa. He questioned us about our plans, and then he frowned deeply and took a long pull on the waterpipe. Finally, he revealed the reason for his reluctance to give back our passports and send us on our way: he didn’t like our choice of hotel. He tried to dissuade us from going. Not to Mosul, just to that particular one-star hotel.

At reception in the hotel where we went anyway, the power went down as Oyv tried to pull our marriage certificate out of the cloud (the power went down a lot). In the darkened lull, since we couldn’t check in to a double room without proof of our marital status, we asked the receptionist if he gets many foreign tourists. ‘Lots! Europeans. Not tourists. Friends’ Mustafa answered. ‘Have some now in fact’ he added, as a couple walked in the door. ‘I just told them there are lots of tourists from Europe here’ he announced to the couple. ‘And here we are’ said the woman. Despite Mustafa’s claim that the city was practically overflowing with Europeans, we met one other traveler in Mosul and would spot only a handful more the entire time we were in Iraq.

The power came back on and Mustafa leaned in closer across the desk. ‘Can I ask you something? Why do Europeans always feel better when they see other people like them?’ I tried to explain that we were just curious about the state of tourism in Iraq, but Mustafa was convinced we were terrified of his hometown. So he expounded on Mosul’s safety, general awesomeness, and the extreme hospitality of its people. As proof of every Mosuli’s generosity, he insisted we guzzle sugary tea and take his whole pack of blueberry cigarettes.

But Mustafa wasn’t exaggerating, as we saw the second we went outside. Iraqis are welcoming in general but almost nowhere is this trait more apparent than in Mosul, where resilient citizens rebuild every day but still have time to offer snacks and kindness to strangers. Wherever we went, people invited us to tea, wished us welcome, asked if we needed anything, and kindly said it was good to see us.

ISIS captured Mosul in 2014. By the time the army ousted them in 2018, around 70% of the old city was destroyed in the fighting. During the occupation, suicide bombings were regular occurrences, schools and businesses closed, life ground to a halt. In the final months citizens retreated to underground bunkers and existed as best as they could while their neighbourhoods were blown to bits, hundreds of years of history and culture literally razed to the ground around them.

We hired a local guide to show us around what’s left. Osama spent three months in 2017 living in a bunker under his house with two other families while the coalition forces fought ISIS in the streets out front.

Some families live in the old city still. They just stayed there the whole time. Others, with nowhere else to go, have moved back into the bombed out shells splattered with bullet holes, and live amidst the mountains of concrete rubble, twisted metal and tangled wire that once amounted to homes and lives.

There’s constant reconstruction underway. We stood outside of Nouri Mosque with Osama and looked up at the ‘hunchback’ – the minaret leans slightly to one side. ISIS self-declared their ‘caliphate’ right here in 2014. Their black flag flew from the tilted minaret right up until the Battle of Mosul in 2017, when they completely destroyed the mosque themselves rather than lose it. But as of 2025 Nouri Mosque stands newly rebuilt, just as it was before – right down to the leaning minaret.

Cities between the rivers

Baghdad wasn’t always the capital of both Iraq and of Arab tourism. Around 836 AD the Caliph Al Mutasim designated Samarra capital of the Abbasid Empire. Then he devoted himself to building a glorious city to reflect his own greatness. After a brief moment in the sun – fifty-six years, to be exact – his city was suddenly deserted and the capital moved back to Baghdad.

Today Samarra is a holy city for Shia Muslims: the Al-Askari mosque enshrines the tombs of the 10th and 11th imams. But the town’s population is largely Sunni and security – which there is a lot of – is shared between an Iranian militia and the Iraqi army. ISIS left their mark on Samarra as well, attacking in 2014 although they never captured the town. Army presence, blast walls, razor wire and sandbags, all point to Samarra’s complicated history and relatively recent tensions.

If you’re thinking all this sounds like the perfect place to grab some lunch – well, it is. We met a friendly family and ate with them in the utilitarian dining rooms at the back of the mosque. The kitchens feed visitors all day long – for free. Women and men eat in separate rooms so I went with Fatima and her daughters, and Oyv disappeared into the men’s side with Ali and his son. And with Hossein, the taxi driver who’d brought us through all the Samarra checkpoints in the first place and now seemed reluctant to let us go anywhere by ourselves.

A huge spiral minaret stands beside the Great Mosque of Samarra, just down the road from Al-Askari. At times you can climb the minaret – but not at the time we were there. It was closed and we could only look at it from behind a fence.

Still, nobody ever said (to me, anyway) that traveling in Iraq was a ‘been there, done that’ checklist of historical sites. To be fair, nobody ever said anything to me about traveling in Iraq, period.

Except Iraq is full of historical sites. This is Mesopotamia, the land between two rivers, the cradle of civilization, and Samarra is not the only ancient city.

We got Hossein to take us to Abu Dalaf mosque. There, a spiral minaret stands on the site of Jafariya, another 9^th century Abbasid city. We climbed that minaret on a steep and twisting ramp, and looked at the desert below stretching away on all sides. There was no one in sight except for Hossein, who’d accompanied us to the bottom of the minaret but shook his head and wandered off when I asked if he was planning to climb it.

And not far from Mosul there’s Hatra. It was the capital of the first Arab-ruled kingdom, wedged between the Parthian and Roman Empires. Once prospering in a string of famous cities like Palmyra, Baalbek, and Petra, Hatra was deserted by the middle of the 3rd century AD.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein ordered some restoration and wasn’t shy about taking credit: new bricks stamped with his name are scattered around the site.

More recently Hatra was attacked by ISIS who tried to bulldoze large parts of the site in 2015, as part of their campaign to erase Arab history and culture. Overall they weren’t that good at it. They destroyed some statuary and riddled the walls with bullet holes, but most of the ancient city is still intact. We’d already got used to somebody nodding and saying ‘Daesh’ whenever we looked questioningly at a pile of bricks partially covered in a tumble of barbed wire.

And then there’s the most famous city between the two rivers: Babylon.

‘Babylon the great, Mother of Harlots and the abominations of the earth’, as it’s called in the Book of Revelation. The city had been standing there next to the Euphrates for nearly 2000 years by the time King Nebuchadnezzar II set his sights on it around 600 BC. The King’s idea was to Make Babylon Great Again – the most magnificent city in the world. It seems he succeeded, considering we’ve all heard of his work – the Hanging Gardens anybody? – even though there’s no trace of those left today.

Nebuchadnezzar died in 562. Decline and destruction (and a spate of Zoroastrian fanaticism) left the city in bits and pieces by the time Alexander the Great turned up. He died in Babylon in 323 BC, and the city changed hands again and again as Empires came and went.

Hulagu Khan and his Mongol hordes descended on Mesopotamia in 1258, kind of like ISIS only without the bulldozers. They massacred the entire population of Baghdad and much of the surrounding countryside. After Timur swept in and unleashed another round of epic violence in 1401, there was nothing much left of Babylon, or anything else in the area for centuries.

In the 1980s Saddam Hussein ambitiously set about restoring Nebuchadnezzar’s huge palace to its original glory. And just as the King had had bricks stamped with his name, so did Saddam. Both can been seen today.

While he was at it Saddam had a palace built to look at Babylon from, like a modern-day Nebuchadnezzar. Now empty and abandoned, the palace looms over the silent kingdom of the distant past.

Just another day…

While staying in Najaf we made friends with a local. Ibrahim took us to his house and out for lunch; we met his family. He picked up a huge fish in the souk, had it grilled on the spot, and we ate it on the banks of the Euphrates after a quick spin on a passerby’s boat.

If ever we had a language issue, Ibrahim just called his friend Mina – in Vienna – and she translated. ‘He has the keys to Iraq’ said Mina, when I told her that he’d gotten the caretaker at an ancient mosque to unlock a heavy old door in the corner and let us go downstairs. The shrine underneath the mosque is thought to be built overtop of the grave of Ezekiel, an Old Testament Prophet. But someone named Dhul-Kifl appears in the Koran, and since it’s potentially the same person, the sanctity of this shrine has gone back and forth between Judaism and Islam since at least the early 14^th century.

Altogether, this was absolutely one of our favourite days in Iraq. It captured perfectly the essence of this hospitable country and its welcoming people.

As we strolled in an old brick-arched souk looking for a suitably huge fish and talking about our families, Ibrahim drew his finger across his throat. His father, a teacher, was killed in Saddam’s purges in 1991. We’d planned to go to Saddam’s abandoned palace after lunch. ‘Forget it Ibrahim, let’s drop the palace’ I said. But Ibrahim shrugged – he wanted to take us there.

Getting into the palace is easier said than done: it’s closed to the public.

But with Ibrahim we walked around Ishtar gate at Babylon and into a family park. ‘They see you as Iraqis, with me’ said Ibrahim and he grinned and waved at the guards standing next to the gate. Not to say that he hadn’t done a lot of smooth-talking to get us that far: the guards managing the site weren’t as excited about the prospect of urbex-times-a-million as we were.

From the family park we carried on to the fenced entry to the palace grounds and after some more smooth-talking persuasion from Ibrahim, we were in, scrambling up the hillside and into the monstrous, abandoned relic.

Together we prowled through the vast rooms, and climbed the exposed staircases to the very top of the palace for another look at Babylon.

But while we were busy admiring the view over Saddam Hussein’s empty swimming pool, somebody closed the fence down below.

Actually, they chained it shut.

Back down, we stood locked inside the grounds and wondering what to do. Even Ibrahim looked a bit flustered, probably since we’d managed to get stuck inside the one place in Iraq he didn’t have the key to. I eyed the lock with mild panic which intensified slightly when a police officer appeared on the other side of the fence. He didn’t have the key either.

But in the spirit of true Iraqi hospitality the police officer and a couple of bystanders pried the gates apart and indicated that I should just slither through. As I wiggled through the gap in the fence in front of the families picnicking in the family park, a random man turned up with a key and unlocked the gate.

It’s not every day you find yourself wandering around a dictator’s abandoned palace, gazing out the dusty windows at Babylon. And then locked inside, to top things off. But it is just another day when you’re traveling in Iraq.

But wait, there’s more

Just the mention of ‘Mesopotamia’ brings to mind ancient civilization. Never once have I thought of ‘wetlands’ although it stands to reason they’d be there, between the rivers.

Saddam Hussein had the Mesopotamian marshes drained in the 1990s. Then he built military access roads on top of them – despite the Marsh Arabs who had been living there for centuries. These families who lived in reed houses on the water were forced to leave their homes and make their way somewhere else.

After the Ba’ath regime fell, the dams diverting the Euphrates were destroyed. As the water came back so did the Marsh Arabs. They returned to their reed houses and traditional way of life, fishing, herding water buffalo, producing milk and cheese.

We strung together a minibus and a few more share-taxis to Al Jubayish, where we met Ali at his reed house that’s now a guesthouse. And then we had a look at still another side of Iraq: from a boat drifting in the reedy channels of the marshes at sunset, followed by masgouf fish and chai around a smoky fire on the riverbank.

Eventually we reached Basra, our last stop before the border with Kuwait. As we sat in the hotel lobby eating one more breakfast of dates and fresh cheese, the hotel receptionist came over to us, with a friend in tow. ‘Hei, hvordan går det?’ said the friend. Back home for a visit, he’s been living in Norway for years. Where we’re from and what we’re doing is generally known to everyone in the vicinity a few minutes after we arrive anywhere and the receptionist was obviously delighted to have found this Norwegian-speaker for us. The receptionist just wanted to check, the Iraqi-Norwegian went on, if we needed anything at all. We thanked him, but we were fine. Christmas was approaching, and later that day we were going to the Basra Family Park for the Christmas market.

Yes, in Iraq.

At the Christmas Market we stood next to a huge inflatable snowman, listening to Jingle Bells on repeat, surrounded by happy families. Out the corner of my eye I saw a boy visibly mustering up his courage. When I smiled at him, his dad nudged him forward. He came over, shyly offered his hand, and said ‘It’s good to see you here. Welcome to Iraq.’

Read more

I’ve written a lot about our travels in Iraq, including guides for daytripping to some of the places I’ve mentioned here in this story. If you’re going to Iraq, check out our guide to independent travel in Iraq. And if you’re crossing the border to Kuwait, have a read here.

Check out the Destinations page for travel guides and stories about our off-beat adventures all over the Middle East and beyond.

The post Ancient history and ingrained hospitality: travels in Iraq appeared first on WhirledAway.

We had some work to do. We loathe making itineraries, let alone sticking to them. Usually we just figure things out as we go. But it’s a different story in Turkmenistan, our next destination. Turkmenistan’s Ministry of Information and Culture – the people who hand out the visas, or not – have no patience for the whims of travelers who don’t like planning in advance.

Everyone knows it’s not easy to get into Turkmenistan. Ok, a lot of people probably haven’t heard of Turkmenistan. But once you do, you mainly hear how hard it is to visit. To get a visa you need visa support and that means booking everything ahead through a tour operator – accommodation, transportation, and an itinerary listing every place you’ll go and every thing you’ll do. Independent travel is not allowed in Turkmenistan. The entire time you’re there, you’re under the mandatory supervision of a guide or driver, or both. And even applications meeting the full criteria can be arbitrarily denied.

Starting my pre-travel research, I read: ‘The country is known for its autocratic government and large gas reserves’. Sounds fascinating, right? Well, having got the visa, I can say that yes, it definitely is.

So why all the visa-fuss? Basically, Turkmenistan doesn’t care about tourism. Consequently, it’s one of the least visited countries in the world. It’s always been difficult to get there. Prior to 1989 Turkmenistan was part of the Soviet Union, so there was that. Post independence in 1991, they’ve had three eccentric dictators in a row and the country has more or less been closed to the outside world.

To give you a hint of what I mean by eccentric: the first President, Saparmurat Niyazov, styled himself Turkmenbashi or ‘The father of all Turkmen’ and then set about establishing the weirdest personality cult ever. He wrote a book called Ruhnama – his thoughts on Turkmen identity, history, and destiny – and made it mandatory curriculum in schools. He named days and months after himself and his family members. He banned the opera, ballet, and circuses for being ‘insufficiently Turkmen’. He commissioned a giant, rotating, gold statue of himself.

After Niyazov’s death in 2006 the next president, Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedow returned the calendar to normal and repealed some of his predecessor’s rules. But he brought in some other winning policies such as a ban on cars of any color other than white, in the capital city Ashgabat. In 2022 Gurbanguly’s son Serdar won a non-democratic election, and now shares power with his father.

Anyway, all that itinerary-making and visa support was driving us to distraction and that’s why we spent the rainy day in the English pub in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Plus, we had another concern. One evening some time ago in Turkey I’d noticed Oyv’s face was bright pink, even brighter pink than is normal for him. Both of us had a headache but blamed it on an afternoon spent in yet another stuffy mausoleum. But I started sniffling like mad and sure enough, it was Covid. Not a huge concern in most places anymore, but Turkmenistan isn’t most places. Apparently, Covid doesn’t exist there and never has. They didn’t reopen their borders until April 2023 and PCRs on arrival are still mandatory. Theoretically, anyone testing positive will go into a 14 day quarantine and neither of us relished the prospect. We were both recovered by now but since PCR tests can show positive for weeks afterwards, we were slightly worried one of us might become Turkmenistan’s patient zero.

Nevertheless, having made this nightmarish itinerary we were determined to stick to it, or at least try to. So it was with some trepidation that we boarded our flight to Ashgabat.

A shining white city in the desert

As it turned out, Turkmenistan is keen to keep its Covid-free status. The PCR on arrival we’d been dreading consisted of a girl twirling a swab in the general vicinity of our nostrils, and then throwing it out. We stood in queues for two hours doing Soviet-style paperwork in triplicate, and then exited the airport. We told our driver we were happy to see him, since we’d half-expected to land up in quarantine. He laughed and wiggled his eyebrows: ‘No one ever had Covid here, but in 2020 we all got pneumonia’. He dropped us off at the hotel and just a few hours later it was time to meet Arslan, our guide, and get our first look at Ashgabat.

You don’t so much look at Ashgabat, as squint and shade your eyes from the white glare of marble, especially in harsh winter sunlight.

The original city mostly collapsed in an earthquake in 1948, and was rebuilt after that in communist-chic. Older parts of the city retain that dreary blockish look, but after independence the first President spared no expense in redoing the city center in marble and monuments. The broad boulevards are eerily empty of traffic, and spotless. Armies of groundskeepers were often the only people around, sweeping and gardening with a vengeance. The actual army is also there to make sure that nobody gets too close to the Presidential Palace or any pristine stretch of grass.

We quickly learned that world records for obscure and pointless things are very dear to the Turkmen heart. In addition to the highest density of marble-clad buildings in the world, Ashgabat has the most fountain pools in a public place, and the world’s largest indoor ferris wheel.

The ferris wheel is in a darkened building and for about a dollar a man turned it on and let us go for a spin. Absolutely no one else was there and it was actually a bit spooky, like a theme park after Armageddon.

Turkmenistan is the only country in the world that’s officially neutral – and they’ve got a monument to prove it.

Although the Ruhnama has been removed from standard curriculum, there’s still a big statue of it. Besides commemorating his book with a statue, the first President had a copy launched into space to orbit the Earth for 150 years.

We were allowed some free time to walk around unsupervised in Ashgabat. ‘There are plenty of cameras, anyway’ said Arslan. We got too close to the Presidential Palace. All that happened was the soldiers outside patrolling around some of the many world-record-setting fountains, asked us for cigarettes and money, then sent us away.

A length of Silk Road

The Silk Road runs through Turkmenistan and some of the most important cities on that famous thoroughfare were here. Thousands of travelers poured through these oasis-cities to trade in everything from silk and spices to religion and culture. In today’s Turkmenistan, we had these ruined ancient outposts to ourselves. Well, to ourselves and Arslan, anyway.

There’s Nisa, at first a Parthian royal residence (or possibly a mausoleum, or maybe a ceremonial center) from 250 BC. The Parthians were a major power at the time, and major enemies of the Romans. At its peak Nisa was a center of art and study. An earthquake destroyed the original site in the first decade BC. The city that followed, an oasis on the Silk Road, was in turn destroyed by the Mongols in the 13th century.

Merv is one of the oldest cities in Central Asia. In the 12th to 13th centuries it might have even been the biggest city in the world. Fitting for Turkmenistan, I thought. It’s just a shame they didn’t have the Guinness Book of World Records in the 1200s.

What they did have in the 1200s was Mongol hordes. When Tolui Khan – you’ve heard of his more famous father, Genghis Khan – invaded in 1221, the result for Merv was nearly total annihilation. Although partially rebuilt afterwards, the city never really recovered.

A cave, a canyon, and the Caspian Sea

We saw a lot of Turkmenistan, which is to say that we saw a lot of desert. Over 70 percent of this country is swallowed up in the Karakum desert. When we weren’t driving endlessly towards an ever-distant vanishing point in the dust, we were riding the train through it.

It stands to reason that you might not think of swimming on a trip to Turkmenistan. But then you thought wrong – unless rather than a sun-soaked beach you were thinking about a simmering sulphurous lake in a cave more than 200 feet underground.

We descended a rusty metal staircase disappearing into sultry humid darkness, to reach Kow Ata lake. It’s about 235 feet long, but Arslan warned us in advance to keep to the near edge – nobody really knows where the water goes and I doubt anyone wants to find out.

The warm water is sulphurous which means you’ll smell like a boiled egg for some time after a swim – but you’ll also reap the health spa-like benefits of sulphurous bathing. The fact that the cave also houses a really big bat colony only enhances the popularity of a day out here. It’s a hotspot and locals swim and hang out in the yurts back up on the surface, drinking tea and eating lamb shashlik, which goes nicely with the boiled-egg smell.

And then there’s Yangykala canyon. Few Turkmen, let alone foreigners, have even seen it. And no wonder – it’s far away from everything and nothing, a wild windblown jagged gash in the desert. We took a night train to Turkmenbashy and then drove a few more hours to reach it. Millions of years ago this was all ocean floor. The water disappeared and the elements etched the canyon in the coral sands.

Shivering in a strong wind next to the car, slurping tea in that vast emptiness, it felt like nothing had changed since the ocean ebbed away.

Turkmenistan is landlocked, although it does have a piece of shoreline on the Caspian Sea. Not really a sea, the Caspian is the world’s largest lake. I’m sure Turkmenistan would lay claim to that one somehow if only neighboring countries didn’t have lakefront property as well. I’ve been to some Caspian beaches before, in Kazakhstan. Given the choice I’d vastly prefer swimming in a bat infested underground gaseous pool so Turkmenistan wins after all.

In the early 2000s Turkmenbashi himself kicked off development of a National Tourist Zone called Avaza, next to the Caspian Sea. Marketed as a Turkmen Las Vegas, it’s full of lavish hotels and over-the-top entertainment options. But, like other Presidential projects such as downtown Ashgabat and the giant ferris wheel, it’s mainly deserted much of the time. The idea was that Avaza would draw in the tourists. But then someone must have remembered they don’t want tourists that much. So we just drove by the tourist zone that we as tourists would have visited – if it hadn’t been declared off-limits to international tourists.

Natural gas and an unnatural disaster

Way out there in the Karakum desert is Turkmenistan’s best kept secret. It’s not that nobody knows about it. Darvaza gas crater, better known as the Gates of Hell – is probably the country’s biggest draw. It’s more that nobody knows exactly how it happens to be there. Or, those who know aren’t telling, since the Soviets liked to keep their massive f**k-ups classified.

Turkmenistan’s got a lot of natural gas – the fifth largest reserves in the world (so hardly worth mentioning, since it’s not number one). It’s generally thought that in 1971 engineers were out in the desert drilling for oil, when the ground collapsed underneath them forming a crater. When they noticed the crater was steadily leaking gas (presumably after somehow climbing out of this 30-metre-deep gas-leaking pit), they thought they’d just set it on fire and burn off the gas in a few days. The fire is still burning now, five decades later.

We drove out from Ashgabat late in the afternoon and stood on the edge of the crater. During the daytime it just looks like a lot of small fires in the sand. But after dinner (in a yurt, of course) we came back in the cold desert darkness and it looked a lot more – hellish.

We asked Arslan about the fallout from this disaster. Engineers must have been killed when it happened. But nobody seems to know. ‘They’ve got pictures of Merv, from excavations in the early 1900s’ he said. ‘But nothing about this, it’s like it didn’t happen.’

A seriously remote finale

And then there’s Koytendag, or Turkmenistan in a microcosm as I like to think of it. In this seriously remote part of the country, near to the borders with Uzbekistan and Afghanistan, you get a little bit of everything that makes Turkmenistan so very Turkmenish. Minus the white marble.

We got there on yet another night train with our long-suffering guide – it’s not a common stop on the typical itinerary. A new driver met us at the station in Kerki. It’s a town where, in the driver’s own words, ‘Dogs go to die’. We drove well out of town and moved into a mostly deserted camp. It reminded me of the sort of place where Rick and his people on the Walking Dead would establish yet another of their short-lived idyllic communities that quickly turns into a desperate last stand.

Oyv and I set off for an unsupervised stroll. Arslan let us loose as far as the edge of the village. ‘If anyone invites you in, just say no’ he reminded us. We already knew that – cultural exchange is not part of a visit to Turkmenistan.

But plenty of other things are.

Like walking in the 150 million year old footprints of dinosaurs. Local legend has it that the footprints actually belonged to elephants in Alexander the Great’s army (yes, he was here, too). We climbed up to the plateau where Megalosaurs once roamed.

Their tracks in a shallow lagoon were preserved over millions of years when shifting tectonic plates first buried them, and then forced them back up to the surface. And guess what! We have another record-setter: it’s the world’s largest number of dinosaur footprints all in one place.

There’s also Buzkashi, aka Dead Goat Polo. We stumbled on a match in the desert. Yes, that’s right. Dozens of men on horseback galloping towards us at full-speed, fighting amongst themselves over the carcass of a goat. It’s a thing.

Our time in Turkmenistan was drawing to a close. There’s no spontaneity here when it comes to your exit date. You get out on the exact day your visa says you’re going, at the border you specified weeks ago on your painstakingly planned itinerary. We’d picked the border to Uzbekistan, another day’s drive from Koytendag.

But first, we unwound with a massage from a (still living) goat, which I think is self-explanatory. Or is it? In Turkmenistan almost anything seems plausible.

And here you go, just in case goat massage isn’t that self-explanatory:

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or, maybe you’re planning a trip to Turkmenistan yourself? Take a look at this guide: Planning a tour in Turkmenistan: our 9 day itinerary.

The post Travel in Turkmenistan: from a city of marble to the Gates of Hell appeared first on WhirledAway.

When we reached Lubango we were still about four hundred kilometers from the Angolan-Namibian frontier. But Angola’s pretty big so it felt like we were getting close. We got pretty excited about it and treated ourselves to a stay at Casper resort. There was a noisy Portuguese tour group staying at the hotel too, and there was a pool. But as usual the pool was surrounded by the wooden frames of sunbeds only one or two of which had cushions on, and the full-time pool staff never did a thing about it.

The Casper was on the edge of town so we had to be careful about walking at night whenever we went to the plethora of American-style bar and grill restaurants for dinner. The woman at the front desk constantly wanted to call us a taxi for an exorbitant price, but we just picked up motos in the street.

One morning in reception as the same woman tried to talk us into hiring the hotel’s driver for the day, we found Milton. He had no reason to be there but was nevertheless sitting in reception reading the newspaper. After we refused the final offer from the hotel desk Milton approached and introduced himself. ‘How much are you willing to pay?’ he whispered. We figured he already knew since we’d been arguing with the receptionist about that exact figure for the last fifteen minutes while he watched over the top of his newspaper. After another fifteen minutes of bargaining while the receptionist glared at all three of us, we hired Milton for a day trip. What with all the negotiating it was more like a half day, but we had a ride.

Milton gave his ID to the front desk and made a short speech about how he planned to start a driving business and hoped we’d be his first satisfied customers. The woman at the front desk informed us she did not know him and could not recommend him on behalf of the hotel, but that he was ‘probably fine’.

Around Lubango, first

‘That’s the university’ said Milton, pointing at some imposing buildings next to the road as we cruised out of town. ‘Is it a good school?’ I asked. ‘Yes it is. For those with no money, no options, and no vision.’ he answered. We were headed to the Christ the Redeemer-lookalike statue, listening to three Christian praise songs on repeat.

After a stop at the statue we headed for Tundavala Gap, a vertigo-inducing viewpoint about twenty-five kilometers from town.

Standing on the edge of the gap Angola seemed bigger than ever, and Namibia didn’t feel so close anymore.

Driving back down, Milton questioned us about our plan for getting to Namibia and quickly deduced that we didn’t have one yet. He said he’d be happy to drive us straight from the Casper to immigration in Santa Clara. It would be a lot more convenient for us and if there was one thing Milton wanted, it was for us not to suffer any inconvenience.

Since the buses from Lubango to Santa Clara really do run at inconvenient hours, we decided we’d take Milton up on his suggestion. We’d save a lot of time, which we could spend relaxing on the slats of wood poolside after breakfast. We decided this after breakfast the same day, since we were already reclining on the sunbed frames. So we called Milton. All of us agreed that time was of the essence now, and he’d get us to the border safely before it closed at six pm.

Cutting it close

Sitting in reception yet again, we watched as Milton pulled into the Casper’s huge carpark already almost half an hour late. He got out and leaned against his car. Then he lingered there on his phone for the next fifteen minutes. We went out to the carpark to speed things along, but Milton was feeling quite relaxed about the five hour drive. That was his brother-in-law who lived near Santa Clara on the phone, and he was pretty sure the border was open til seven pm.

Milton hit play on the three-song praise list and off we went…straight to a bakery, where he picked up some bread. Then we took the bread to his sister-in-law’s place, dropped it off, and picked up some engine oil. We took that to a garage. There we waited for Milton’s nephew, who needed the oil for his driving test that day. Milton was apologetic, but urged us to consider how we’d feel if his nephew failed the driving test. So we waited in the car while Milton disappeared into the garage with the oil and called his nephew, who clearly didn’t care as much about the driving test as we all did.

By the time we set off it was already one pm. As we drove along an endless road in the desert, Milton took another phone call. Then he started to drive faster and faster. And it turned out that when Milton’s brother-in-law said the border would close at seven pm he meant Namibian time. In other words, the border would indeed shut at seven pm – in Namibia – and so at six pm on the side we were currently on. Milton stomped on the gas.

We screeched into the carpark in front of immigration just before six. ‘Thank you Jesus!’ sang praise singer number two rapturously (to be fair, all three of them said that a lot). Realising he’d singlehandedly ruined our entire day, Milton leapt out of the car and ran towards the first official-looking person he saw. ‘It’s still open! Let’s go!’ he shouted, running back to the car. He yanked my backpack out of the trunk, put it on, and started sprinting towards Namibia.

A cross-country run

Oyv and I looked at each other and shrugged. Oyv hoisted his own pack to his shoulders, and passports in hand we started running.

I arrived at the counter just in time to witness Milton’s eloquent plea to Angolan border authorities to allow us through. The officer looked extremely reluctant but at the same time clearly wanted us gone. Stamping our passports, he looked at us and said: ‘Run’.

‘Obrigado!’ Oyv shouted, and we left at a run for no-man’s land. But at the very edge of Angolan territory, Milton put up his hand and stopped us. It was sunset and we’d arrived just in time for the border-closing flag-lowering ceremony. Now we had to demonstrate our utmost respect. That would have been a lot easier to do if the soldier lowering the flag wasn’t raging drunk. He slowly exaggerated every pull on the rope, pausing occasionally to scream at us to stay back, and that was that.

We walked back to Angolan immigration. Now that they were done work for the day, the officers there didn’t seem at all bothered that we were stamped out of their country, visas expired, and trapped in some kind of limbo. The officer in charge took out a huge ledger and his phone. I assumed he wanted to make an official note about it for morning, when we’d be coming back and trying to explain our illegal presence in Angola. But no, he only wanted to document this occasion with a selfie.

After the photoshoot with the officers we returned to the carpark, resigned to just spending the night somewhere in Santa Clara. Once again, Milton had disappeared and we assumed he was running yet another personal errand. But no. Determined to salvage the day, and probably his driving business, he’d hired a fixer. ‘This is Maputo. He knows another way’ said Milton when he came back, and he pointed at the ten year old boy now standing next to him. We didn’t know what to say. What we did know was that we definitely had to see what this was all about. So we piled back into Milton’s sedan, this time with a child-fixer up front muttering in Portuguese.

‘Maputo has an idea’

Turning down a dark side street at the edge of town, we drove past a few huts. The chickens scratching in the dirt scattered in front of the car as we crept slowly into a field. At Maputo’s direction, Milton stopped and turned off the engine. Lights off, he rolled up the windows and told us to keep quiet. Two soldiers approached the car. ‘Maputo knows them’ Milton explained as he rolled his window back down and politely said ‘Boa noite’. The whole thing was starting to remind me of why we generally try to avoid traveling after dark pretty much anywhere in Africa.

The soldiers leaned in and looked at us, and Maputo took it from there. His idea, relayed to us in whispers by Milton, was that we should walk around the long, high fence with one of the soldiers. Out of Angola and right into Namibia. Maputo pointed to a dirt path snaking away into the trees and back towards the limits of Angolan territory. People living on both sides of the frontier unofficially work and trade cross-border. We could see their shadowy outlines flitting between huts, as they made their way home.

While Oyv and I agreed that the beauty of the plan was in its simplicity, we nevertheless saw quite a few issues with it. ‘What about our passports?’ I piped up. Milton hushed me and repeated my question to Maputo. ‘He says you can just walk back to the border on the other side and get a stamp in the morning’. That sounded like a terrible idea to both of us, but Maputo continued to discuss the terms with the soldiers. He was very keen on the whole thing, I could tell, language barrier or not. But he was also ten years old. I loudly voiced my opposition to this plan from the backseat. Neither of us was comfortable with the idea of being smuggled into Namibia of all places by a kid and his contacts in the military.

‘Sarah, you’re right. We’re doing business in the dark, and it seems like we’re hiding something.’ said Milton, suddenly the voice of reason. ‘If we have to hide, it must be wrong.’ he went on seriously, as though we’d been trying to insist otherwise.

One more night in Angola

So we stayed in Angola. First, we dropped Maputo off where we found him. Milton paid him and he went away, I assume to do his homework or maybe some reconnaissance along the border.

Then Milton found us a room at a grim hotel and strongly advised us to stay inside it, not that there was anything to do in Santa Clara anyway. He sheepishly wished us well, and drove back to Lubango early the next day.

We walked back to immigration in the morning. After a bit of explaining why our passports showed that we’d left the night before, we finally crossed the border – at a walk this time, not a run. No one there was expecting us or had ever heard of us so the devout flag bearer must have been sleeping it off.

As we lingered over breakfast in a comfortable guesthouse on the Namibian side, our host regaled us with stories about people wandering across the porous border illegally at all hours and shots ringing out in the night.

Still, we missed Milton. After all we weren’t in a huge hurry, and he’d turned an otherwise ordinary day into something we definitely did not see coming. It’s all about who you happen to meet. And we happened to meet Milton and Maputo.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or if you’re in Angola and planning to travel to Namibia by road, have a look at this post: Crossing the border from Angola to Namibia for some quick info about the border crossing itself.

The post Angola to Namibia: around the fence with a child-fixer appeared first on WhirledAway.

The driver was in high spirits: he sang loudly for a long time, and then announced ‘breakfast time!’ and pulled over at a little brick cafe clinging to the side of the hill. We went in and ate some daal and roti. Returning from the wretched toilets behind the cafe, I passed a wet dog lying mournfully in the mud and said hello to him. A man standing nearby remarked helpfully ‘That’s a dog, madam’.

As we reached the old British hill station the skies opened and the rain poured down in sheets. After two days it showed no signs of stopping. We’d planned to spend some time in Darjeeling, riding the toy train and sipping afternoon tea in colonial hotels, but we’d got soaked through on arrival and were now constantly damp.

So we took another jeep back down the hill to Siliguri, and caught a night bus to Patna. That broke down early in the morning and left us standing on the side of the road. When another bus trundled by, we staggered aboard half asleep and slumped in the aisle the rest of the way into the city.

The sun came out in Patna but we didn’t. Before breaking down, the night bus had stopped in a hectic rest station with dubious hygiene. I’d eaten some daal tadka anyway and paid for that mistake with a day spent in bed in a dingy guesthouse.

The next morning we took a train to Varanasi. We checked into a rambling old family-run hotel looking out over the Ganges and stayed for five days, soaking up the sun and taking early morning strolls on the ghats.

That’s all, folks

And then Holi rolled around: the famous celebration of colour, love, and spring.

But unfortunately surrounding this festival the subject of where, when, and even if it’s safe for women to participate is a real topic because in India an event like Holi often means huge groups of extremely drunk men.

We ventured out into the crowded streets and were soon doused in colour. The atmosphere deteriorated quickly though, and we had to retreat inside. But not before Oyv revealed a side of himself I’ve never seen. A man grabbed my crotch; Oyv chased him down the street and put him in a chokehold. Shortly after that, another man shoved his arm down the front of my shirt, got his hand into my bra, and wouldn’t let go. Stunned, I tried to pull his arm out but Oyv was faster. He hauled the groper off of me, and as I pulled myself together I looked over to see Oyv screaming in his face and throttling him against a wall.

It was kind of an inauspicious end to our time in India. Our visas were on the brink of expiration and we needed to get going, or risk adding an overstayed-visa-debacle to the list of crappy things that had happened recently.

And so with only a day left on our visas, we traveled to the closest India-Nepal border crossing. At passport control the officer decisively slammed the exit stamp down on our visas and we were finished – for the moment – with India.

Buddha has a hometown too

Across the border, we stopped for the night in a little town called Lumbini. We were tired and hungry, but there’s more to Lumbini than just a comfortable bed for travelers leaving India in haste but still wanting to eat at an Indian dhaba.

According to Buddhist tradition a prince named Siddhartha Gautama was born here in the 6th or 5th century BC. When the prince saw the extent of human suffering just outside the palace gates, he renounced his privileged lifestyle and set off to seek enlightenment. Adopting the life of a spiritual ascetic, he meditated and preached his way to nirvana, eventually becoming known as the Buddha – the ‘awakened’ or ‘enlightened’ one.

While he was at it, the Buddha designated his hometown as one of the four most sacred sites for his followers. Pilgrims flock to Lumbini today to visit the site of his birth and modern temples built by Buddhist associations the world over.

This also explained the number of meditation centres we’d noticed on the bus trip in.

Deja vu in Kathmandu

Despite such an auspicious link to Buddhism, the major religion in Nepal is Hinduism. Kathmandu, the capital city, bursts with Buddhist and Hindu shrines alike.

Anyone feeling even a tiny bit nostalgic for India can head on over to Pashupatinath for example – the oldest Hindu temple in Kathmandu. A huge complex devoted to Shiva, it’s been here on the banks of the Bagmati river in one form or another for more than a millennium, although what stands today was built in the 1600s. There’s a Shiva linga in the main temple and as non-Hindus, we couldn’t go inside to look.

But anyone can watch another sacred rite here: public cremation on the river ghats. If you’re coming from Varanasi, this is a familiar sight. Cremation generally takes place the day after death, and the final preparations are carried out here by the deceased person’s family.

We sat on the steps of a smaller shrine opposite, and watched some people shift a body from a stretcher onto a slab that slanted downwards to the water. Some of them gently uncovered the dead woman and washed her feet and hands in the river water. Other relatives hovered anxiously on the periphery, occasionally stepping forward to give a direction or move a limb. Then they wrapped the body back up in shiny orange cloth, and draped the shroud with garlands of marigolds.

The mourners lifted the body together back onto a wooden pallet and carried it to a pyre. Burning takes around four hours. Families sit and watch as the black ashes are swept into the river and drift away. It’s the most auspicious ending a Nepalese Hindu can hope for.

Once upon a time in a Himalayan kingdom

Nepal was a kingdom, once upon a time. But revolution led to democracy in 2006, and the monarchy was abolished two years after that.

I’d never heard of the Nepalese royal family before. They were so obscure to me that the story of their demise didn’t even ring a bell. In a fate on par with that of the last Russian Tsar, nine members of the family including the King and Queen were massacred at a royal residence in June 2001. The subsequent investigation found that Crown Prince Dipendra opened fire on his family during dinner, and then shot himself in the head. Despite all that, and the fact that he was in a coma, Dipendra succeeded his father as king, but died in hospital three days later. His father’s brother Gyanendra was declared king after that – the last one as it turned out, to be deposed seven years later.

Potential motives abound including resentment over a thwarted marriage to an Indian heiress, but many suspect the Crown Prince wasn’t the shooter at all, and that it was a palace coup staged by Uncle Gyanendra. We’ll never know: the spirit of the dead king was exiled from Nepal in a Hindu ceremony and eventually the entire royal family was relegated to history. The ex-king is just another commoner and his palaces are now public museums.

A day in Thamel and you’re ready for anything

The capital was turning out to be a pretty interesting place. And of most interest to us (aside from all the breakfast cafes and streetfood): at a height of 1400 metres itself, Kathmandu is the gateway to the Himalayas. We’d already planned to do a bit of hiking, of course. Nepal is nothing if not mountainous – eight of the world’s highest peaks are found within its borders.

Let me interject: we’re traveling for a year. We’re carrying two huge backpacks with all sorts of stuff in them – an aeropress coffee maker for example, and at least 500 grams of coffee at any given time. What I have got: a hair straightener. What I haven’t got: anything suitable for high-altitude hiking, other than a wool long underwear suit.

Neither of us was enamoured with the idea of hiking for days with a guide and yet we didn’t relish the prospect of getting lost in the mountains with a hair straightener and an aeropress, either. We asked the owner of our guesthouse in Kathmandu if he, as a former guide himself, thought we should hire one. Our host seemed unconcerned. He tried on one of my shoes and scraped it over the pavement like a restless horse pawing the ground. Satisfied with the treads, he reckoned we’d be just fine. Pushing aside the thought of waiting on a peak for a helicopter rescue (albeit with straight hair and freshly brewed coffee) we decided we’d trek Langtang Valley on our own.

Ill-equipped for high-altitude trekking on a whim? No problem. Thamel has you covered. Kathmandu’s most famous backpacker neighborhood is a messy bazaar stocked with endless souvenirs from ropes of glossy prayer beads to soft cashmere ponchos (not to mention constant offers of hashish). Outdoor equipment stores sell real brands and fake copies of everything you’d ever need for activities ranging from an afternoon stroll to summitting Everest. I bought a maybe-Maamut coat, and a not-so-much North Face muffler, and so on. We aggressively bargained for rental sleeping bags and hiking poles, and a mid-sized backpack to carry it all in, and off we went.

Himalayan hiking

We got a taste of the mountains ahead on the bus ride to Syrabru Besi, the little village on the edge of Langtang National Park. I was sure the road was worse than the trek itself could possibly be. It involved teetering on hairpin bends of the sort that made me close my eyes, although I noticed that other passengers seemed to relish the views of certain death, should anything go wrong.

After a night in a somewhat dirty guesthouse, we were rested and ready. Early the next morning we set off for the trailhead and spent seven days hiking Langtang valley, stopping each afternoon for food and a bed in the teahouses strung out along the route.

On day two we reached Langtang village. It lies above 3000m, the height where altitude sickness can set in. That night our teahouse was abuzz with discussion of symptoms. A trekker from New Zealand worried about the intensity of her headache. A group of Germans sitting around the wood stove complained they felt short of breath and wondered how fast was too fast, as far as racing hearts go. I suddenly wondered if my chest was actually constricted, or if I just imagined it. An Israeli doctor (or rather just a hiker who seemed to know a lot and had a medical device with him) went around and checked everyone’s heart rate and blood oxygen levels. But all that’s nothing, really.

On April 25 2015 Nepal was struck by a devastating earthquake that flattened entire towns, destroyed history, and killed 9000 people. In Langtang valley it triggered a landslide and a glacier came crashing down, bringing tons of stone and earth with it. Langtang village and its inhabitants were wiped out in a matter of minutes. Only one building was left standing. An estimated 310 people lost their lives, mostly Langtang residents and around eighty foreign trekkers.

The survivors were evacuated, but they returned eventually and built a new village just above the ruins of the first one. They restored the teahouses and trails and brought life back to the valley. But they didn’t forget. There’s a memorial nearby, strung with prayer flags that flutter over plaques listing the names of the dead, and photographs occasionally placed by families along the route where bodies were recovered.

Namaste, Nepal!

We hiked on in bright sun and sharp wind. The trail got steadily steeper and the air got noticeably thinner. We passed shaggy yaks grazing next to the trail, herded and hounded by big loping dogs.

Green forest paths and rushing streams gave way to scrabbling over barren scree and piles of boulders. We said hello to porters and dodged donkey pack-trains, peeked into shrines, and gave prayer wheels a turn.

On the third day we reached Kyanjin Gompa. At 3800m the village sits at the uppermost end of the trail and trekkers use it as a base for climbs to surrounding peaks that towered over us on all sides.

There’s a cafe there serving pineapple upside-down cake among other retro favorites, and good coffee which was convenient since after all, we’d left our aeropress way back down in Kathmandu.

The cafe was packed with hikers and we listened in on conversations about Everest, glaciers, blood oxygen levels, and helicopters. It was a lot colder now too, and I started wearing my wool long underwear suit around the clock.

Starting from Gompa, we climbed high enough that sometimes we trudged through mud, or snow and ice. Sometimes heavy mist rolled in and we couldn’t see the bottom of the valley. From the safety of the foothills we watched snow thundering in minor avalanches down distant mountainsides.

And then we had our best day in Nepal. From Kyanjin Ri, at 4700m, we looked out over the mountains encircling us in a silent panorama, one lofty peak dwarfed by the next. It was incredible.

Breathing easy

On day seven after breakfast in the cosy teahouse kitchen – Tibetan coffee and tsampa porridge with the resident lama – we set off back down the trail. You can make it all the way back down to Syrabru Besi in one day, but we weren’t in a hurry. We stopped at a teahouse on the river, at around 2790 meters and breathed easy next to the icy rushing water.

We walked back into Syrabru Besi the next afternoon in the first rain we’d seen since Darjeeling. In a serendipitous moment we stumbled upon a little slice of paradise – a tidy guesthouse with warm rooms and cold beer. And, it was right next to the bus station for the steep ride back down to Kathmandu the following day.

Solo-trekking in the Himalayas: Oyv got a nasty blister and that was the worst of it. Although I did miss the hair straightener a bit.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Thinking about taking this solo trek on too? Read our post for advice: Trekking Langtang valley without a guide: itinerary and planning.

Or if you’re still in India and planning to travel to Nepal by road: How to cross the Sonauli border between India and Nepal.

The post Onwards and upwards: from India to Nepal appeared first on WhirledAway.

I’ve been to India many times before, but I just keep going back. India never ceases to amaze me. In part because no matter how much time I spend there, it still feels like I’m just scratching the surface.

India tends to inspire a lot of big feelings amongst the travelers who roam this country for weeks and months. People love it or hate it or very often, a bit of both. If you’re one of those teetering on the edge of hatred and looking for something to push you right over that edge (outside of the traditional methods such as booking a train ticket), then I invite you to shop at an Indian Costco-type hypermart.

I went into one of those not long after we arrived. At least eight employees hovered in each aisle mobbing shoppers with annoying questions and ridiculous deals. One stood right next to me while I tried to pick a deodorant. ”Shower Fresh’ madam? ‘Spring Blossom’? ‘April Rain’?’ he listed every fragrance as I plucked one from a shelf far above his head, and moved on past the facewash. ”Cucumber and Turmeric’ madam? Very healthy! Buy four get six free!’ he added enticingly. He followed me to the long row of pantyliners and pads: ‘For daily use?’ he wanted to know. I’d already asked one of the eight women standing there about tampons (they aren’t so easy to find). She announced my request into a mic and rushed off somewhere. In the lull, my new personal shopper seized the opportunity to make another sale: ‘Tooth whitener madam?’ he offered helpfully. I stopped smiling.

But I was only looking for deodorant and tampons, not a reason to hate India. Actually I love the place.

Let me count the ways…

One morning as we lingered over chai and parathas at our guesthouse on one of Varanasi’s atmospheric ghats, we got to talking with another guest, a woman from Kolkata who’d come to the city with her husband. They’d brought her ancient father-in-law with them so he could lay eyes on India’s holiest city and dip into the Ganges one last time.

She took a break from patiently arguing the old man into eating his breakfast, and asked about our travels so far. It quickly became apparent we’d been to India more than just once. ‘Have you been to Kolkata?’ she asked, and we answered yes. ‘Darjeeling? Up to Ladakh? Orchha? Kerela? Amritsar? Patna….not Haridwar too?’ We just kept nodding, as she reeled off one city or state after another. ‘You’ve traveled more of India than we have’ she said finally, laughing. ‘What is it you like so much that you keep coming back?’ she asked.

Well. India is a lot of things, but disappointing is not one of them. Even now, I can rattle off a list of places I still want to go here and things I want to do.

So here are just a few of the things that – for us anyway – make a trip to India….such a trip.

Religion: take your pick

When it comes to religion, India’s got it covered. Most of the world’s major religions are well represented in India. Four of them have their roots here: Hinduism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Jainism.

Hindu temples alone number in the hundreds of thousands. It’s not so many considering the vast number of gods (the exact number seems open to interpretation). We went to Hampi, once the capital of the Vijayanagara Empire until it was abandoned in the 16th century and left in ruins by Muslim conquerors. The huge crenellated Virupaksha temple still towers over the small modern settlement, broadcasting a reverberating ‘Om’ at all hours of the day.

And that’s just in town – the remains of dozens of temples lie scattered in the surrounding countryside. We hired bikes for a day and lazily pedaled around, trying to get a grip on the mesmerizing pantheon of Hindu gods.

Bikaner is a dusty Rajasthani town on the edge of the desert. Not too far away is Karni Mata, a Hindu temple devoted to approximately twenty thousand sacred rats. The rats live in the temple (and anywhere else they like) in a never-ending cycle of death and rebirth, alternating between rat and human form in the same caste.

Yes, I know, going barefoot on a marble floor overrun with thousands of rats is arguably a health hazard. But I’ve been to Karni Mata before and came back again voluntarily since Oyv hadn’t seen it yet, plus, I don’t mind rats. A spider temple would be another story. There’s probably one here, somewhere.

After Hindus at about eighty percent of the population, Muslims make up the second largest group at around fourteen percent, so in plenty of places a mosque isn’t far away. We were eating dinner outside in Jodhpur when Call to Prayer echoed over the rooftops. ‘I won’t miss that at five in the morning’ said an Australian at the next table, evidently getting ready to head home. We’d heard nothing but Call to Prayer for months, so we appreciated the diversity. And that we could sit on yet another rooftop with cold beers in Varanasi, while the call rang out at the same time as Hindus thronged the ghats for Ganga Aarti (river worship).

Then there’s the unsurpassed beauty of the Golden Temple in Amritsar. One of Sikhism’s holiest shrines, it’s a stunning sight. The temple seems to float in the centre of the Amrit Sarovar – sacred pool – from which the city takes its name.

There’s also a kitchen which feeds fifty to one hundred thousand visitors – of any faith – every day, for free.

Also no strangers to beautiful holy places: the peaceful Jains whose non-theistic religion combines spirituality and a philosophical system. One of the five holiest Jain shrines in India is Ranakpur temple, a white marble palace that has stood gleaming in the forest near Udaipur since the fifteenth century.

We went to Darjeeling planning to visit the Buddhist monasteries scattered around the hillsides but the weather was so unseasonably appalling that we caved and left without seeing much.

Speaking of caving, we explored a sixth century temple complex much further south (where it was also sunny). The Ellora caves are one of India’s major draws for tourists and pilgrims alike: more than a hundred Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain cave temples and monasteries carved side by side in the rock.

There’s a long-standing ideal of peaceful religious co-existence and equality in India but it’s not always harmonious. In 1528, the first Mughal Emperor Babur built a mosque on land that to Hindus is the Lord Ram’s birthplace. Militant Hindus finally leveled the mosque with sledgehammers in the 1990s and the riots that followed left two thousand people dead. Modi and his Hindu nationalist government have long promised to formally reclaim the site. In January 2024 the country kicked into high gear with festivals and fireworks and Bollywood stars to inaugurate a brand new temple on the disputed spot, sparking debate about just how secular India will continue to be in the future.

Mughal mayhem

For around two centuries starting in the 1500s, the Mughal Empire ruled much of today’s India, not to mention Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. The Empire fizzled out with the death of the last Emperor Aurangzeb, and was eventually dissolved by the British Raj. The Mughals were famed for their Indo-Islamic architecture and gardening among other things (like rather tolerant rule, and introducing Turkish baths to the subcontinent). During their rule they went on a building and landscaping frenzy, as witnessed by the elaborate forts, tombs, mosques, and gardens scattered around these four countries today.

Everybody knows the Taj Mahal. But what about Bibi Ka Maqbara – the Mini Taj? The big Taj in Agra is the final resting place for Emperor Shah Jahan’s favourite wife Mumtaz. Their son Aurangzeb’s first wife is entombed in this lesser-known mini-version.

Incidentally, Aurangzeb overthrew his father Shah Jahan, and imprisoned him in his own creation, Agra fort. While he was at it, Aurangzeb commissioned Badshahi mosque in Lahore. It’s a replica but bigger, of his father’s masterpiece Jama Masjid (Friday mosque) in Delhi.

And let’s not forget the mosque that Babur once built on the site of Lord Ram’s birthplace.

There’s plenty to unpack in that family tree.

There’s no time for ‘hanger’

There is nothing like Indian food. Sometimes I literally worry that I won’t get hungry enough to accomplish all my food goals in a given day. Oyv likes it especially, as he never has to worry he’ll fall victim to one of my bouts of hangriness.

North, south, veg, non-veg, quick bites in the street or a lunch-time thali – just put it in front of me.

In a country this big and diverse, the food changes as you travel so you never have to eat the same thing twice. Except if you’re me and obsessed with palak paneer (and collecting photos of it).

Give me an Amritsari kulcha for breakfast.

Or a masala dosa.

To me, a sweet spicy curry is the ultimate comfort food.

I’d order Indian takeaway for my last meal if I was on death row.

And since I’m talking about food: wine. We didn’t realise wineries existed in India, but we should have, because it’s India, so why not? We went to one. It was the least atmospheric winery I’ve ever stepped foot on, and the crowds were fierce. We didn’t learn a thing we don’t already know about wine, in fact we could have taught the rudimentary tasting session ourselves, but it was fun.

Also, huge families with kids running around while their parents sputtered over a glass and mainly posed for photos next to gigantic bottles, was a much healthier approach to alcohol than you tend to see elsewhere India – that is, extremely drunk men lying around in the street.

India Rail and all its intricacies

We’ve heard all the old stories about people falling asleep on a train…and waking up to find their shoes gone, right off their feet. And the famous tales of gropers wandering the carriages looking for female passengers to, well, grope. We’ve never seen (or felt) any of this firsthand, and only met fellow passengers who were friendly, or at worst excessively noisy.

In the years we’ve been traveling in India we’ve seen a lot of changes when it comes to train travel, mainly with the advent of the smart phone. Besides being able to set up IRCTC (India Rail) user accounts and book tickets online instead of standing in lengthy queues in ‘Foreigners Ticketing Offices’ at the stations, there’s also an app which allows you to combine a fondness for trains and food, and so not have to worry about food goals as mentioned above. You can look up the stations your train is going to pass through, peruse menus at a list of food outlets at each station, order a meal, and have it delivered during a stop which can easily range from just a few minutes, to an unexplained hour or more.

It’s often slow and painful and budget airlines abound, but I’d still take a train journey any day.

Backpacker vibes

In general I wouldn’t say this as other backpackers and their vibes are not things we usually look for on our travels. But after the preceding months on the road this time – in more, um, austere places like Afghanistan, or southern Pakistan – we welcomed the change in atmosphere. The old Blue city in Jodhpur, the warren of narrow streets around the lake in Udaipur, most of Rajasthan – hello, Pushkar.

And of course – Goa’s beaches.

Those places – and their atmospheric guesthouses, yoga classes, good cafes, delicious breakfasts and smoothie bowls and avo toast – are part of the India we remembered from our first ever trip to the subcontinent eighteen years ago. (Well, not the avo toast, but you get the idea).

What’s not to love?

Yes, India can be a bit extra sometimes. There are the sad street dogs, I can’t even look. Pushy queue jumpers, insane crowds. Tiresome bureaucracy. Unfathomable inequality. Temple cooks preparing giant pots of dal for rats while human beings pick through piles of rubbish looking for scraps. Gropers – I haven’t encountered any on the trains, but I’ve certainly encountered them in the streets.

India might be a little crazy in places, but there’s a method to the madness and we learn more every time. Returning to India from Bhutan, as we walked to our hotel I thought ‘We’ve only been here for twenty minutes but it just feels good. Of course, any second now something outrageous will happen, but…still. It’s good to be back.’ Back scratching away at the surface.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or have a look at these stories from our previous visits to India.

The post India: scratching the surface appeared first on WhirledAway.

Tundla is around an hour’s drive from Agra, so my sister and I left early to give ourselves extra time. The taxi driver talked endlessly into his phone. A transport truck just ahead of us didn’t quite clear the next overpass and with a screetch and a bang, concrete crumbled and rained down on the road. The truck kept going; our driver calmly swerved to one side and resumed his chat despite both of us asking and then ordering him to hang up.

We had a night train to catch. I’ve noticed a lot of people are scared by the very idea of riding a train in India, especially overnight – all sorts of unpleasant stories do abound. Personally I find that speeding down the highway in a taxi with a reckless driver and no seat belts is a lot worse than any train I’ve been on yet.

At Tundla Junction station Goof and I found the right platform and settled down to wait. I bought some chai and sat on the ground drinking it, keeping a close eye on the rat nearby who was watching me just as closely.

Other than having to kick out another passenger who was already fast asleep in my assigned bed when we boarded in the dark, the train ride was problem-free. My sister and I slept comfortably in our bunks.

There were no thieves, lecherous gropers, food poisoning incidents or any other infamous Indian-train-horrors. I couldn’t persuade Goof to use the toilets under any circumstances though (and it was a 14 hour journey).

We climbed off the train the next morning in Varanasi. Two nearby tributaries flow into the Ganges River: the Varuna, and the Assi. And that’s where the city built in between them gets its name – Varanasi. Standing for centuries on the sacred river’s banks, it’s one of India’s holiest cities. That’s saying a lot in a country that seems obsessed with dedicating all sorts of places and things as holy. Pilgrims come from all over to bathe in the Ganges. And, they come to die in Varanasi. Given the city’s sacred status, what better place on earth is there to leave it all behind?

Goof and I checked into a hotel on Assi ghat. Around eighty ghats, or flights of steps leading from the water’s edge to the city above, line the river’s muddy banks.

My favourite thing to do in Varanasi is walk along the river on the ghats, where life goes on unabated by watchful eyes and passing travelers.

As the day starts, the ghats slowly fill with chai vendors, musicians, hawkers selling flowers and incense, holy men, a lot of animals, and opportunistic touts and beggars.

Any walk along the ghats promises a diverse range of sights, from ritual bathing to washing and drying laundry in the sun:

…and from ganga aarti (river worship) at night time and morning puja (prayers), to cremation of the dead.

At our ghat there’s a pavilion where we watched an old man lead yogic breathing exercises.

Also at our ghat: a Shiva lingam (phallic image of Shiva) that’s a big draw for pilgrims.

We spent a few hours one morning with Mr. Aggrawal, a guide who took us for a walk in the winding alleys that lead up from the ghats, burrowing deeply into the heart of the city.

‘This is a city of Learning and Burning’, said Mr. Aggrawal. As for learning, great scholars have sprung forth from Varanasi: Mr. Aggrawal counted the ways they contributed to culture, religion and education. A centre of Hindu devotion, the city is filled with temples dedicated to Shiva and Vishnu. And, after achieving enlightenment the Buddha gave his first sermon nearby, around 528 BC.

The burning part is more obvious: Goof and I had already been to the cremation ghats and seen the process for ourselves. According to Hindu beliefs, cremating a dead body purifies the soul. In the heat of three or four fires, families stand on the steps with the wrapped bodies of their loved ones and wait their turn. Ashes drift on the smoky air and wood for the pyres is piled high on all sides, strewn with red and gold cloth removed from bodies before burning.

Any walk in the skinny streets behind Manikarnika ghat – the main burning ghat – will involve stepping back and pressing yourself up against a wall to make way for processions of chanting mourners carrying shrouded bodies on bamboo stretchers.

Only male family members participate in a cremation: female relatives aren’t allowed, to prevent too much crying (said Mr. Aggrawal. I’m not sure what the real reason might be). The only women at the burning ghat are those amongst the foreigners watching from a little distance as mourners douse bodies in the Ganges and place them onto funeral pyres. Small but significant last moments play out in public view: we saw one man (probably the oldest son) unwrap a dead man’s face and put his glasses on him.

Members of the lowest caste manage the funeral pyres. They stoke the embers violently, churning up bones and body parts with the glowing sparks. It all happens fast: a body is usually cremated within twenty-four hours of death, and takes around three to four hours to burn. Hip bones and sternums don’t burn that well, Mr. Aggrawal pointed out. Ashes and heavy chunks of bone: it’s all thrown into the holy Ganges after.

Up to eighty bodies a day are cremated on the ghats, but not everyone is a candidate for burning. Those whose spirits are already pure, such as babies and pregnant women, go into the river whole.

By dying in Varanasi a Hindu achieves ‘moksha’. That is, their soul is released from reincarnation, the endless cycle of birth, death and rebirth. Sick and elderly pilgrims travel to Varanasi and stay in hospices for the dying next to the burning ghats, waiting their turn for salvation.

As Mr. Aggrawal said, ‘People are dying to die in Varanasi’.

In between sunrise and sunset wanders on the ghats, Goof and I spent time every day exploring the city’s twisting and turning bazaars, crossing busy streets at a run. Traffic is terrible – other people might be dying to die in Varanasi, the two of us, not so much.

But life goes on like normal here, too.

Varanasi has plenty of cool cafes to chill at.

There’s always chai.

Not to mention animals wearing clothes, snuffling in the warm ash on the burning ghats (ok…maybe that’s not ‘normal’).

How about some streetside dentistry then? Apparently this man has no degree or qualifications whatsoever, but years of hands-on experience.

I ate delicious streetfood for two (Goof is more skeptical when it comes to food).

And we got some beautiful henna.

Varanasi’s also called Kashi, or ‘City of Light’. The name refers to its historical significance as a centre of culture and spirituality, but also….there’s a beautiful sense of stillness in the early morning, as the sun rises over the river and the crumbling buildings teetering on the ghats take on a honey coloured glow.

Something not to miss in Varanasi is rowing on the Ganges at sunrise (Goof and I managed to miss this). But we did the next best thing, which is rowing on the Ganges at sunset, admiring the City of Light reflecting on the peaceful water.

And Goof actually did some of the rowing herself, too.

Mark Twain wrote that Varanasi, “…is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend, and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” It only takes stepping off the train to see what he meant. Although most of the buildings standing today are just a few hundred years old, there’s been a civilisation here weathering time – learning and burning – for around three thousand years. Life and death steeped in ancient ritual on the banks of a holy river, it’s India in all of its startling glory.

Read More

For more of my adventures (and misadventures) in India, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

The post Life and death in Varanasi appeared first on WhirledAway.

But first, some rhinos

We’d crossed the border from Bangladesh back into India near Kolkata. Not because it fit well with our travel plans, but because it was the only border India would let us cross at all. Ending up at the wrong end of the wrong state, with a deadline fast approaching – the entry date on our short visas for Bhutan – we needed to make a decision. Should we hang out in Kolkata until the last minute, chilling in cafes and eating momos in the street? Or should we head up to Assam, faraway in northeastern India, to check out Kaziranga National Park and its famous one-horned rhinos? We opted for the latter although it was nearly a tie. There was a place near our hotel serving up delicious dosas and we went there every day, both times we were in Kolkata.

We were running out of time, so we booked a flight to Tezpur and hired a driver to take us the rest of the way to Kohora, a village on the edge of the National Park. Then we changed modes of transport again: at Kaziranga the best way to get close to the rhinos is on the back of an elephant.

The next morning we showed up at the park gates. We were on time; a little early, even. Being early, or on time even, is pointless in India. The selfie-obsessed local tourists we were grouped with straggled in eventually. We all clambered onto the backs of some very patient elephants and lumbered off into the park.

Oyv and I have been on one or two wildlife-viewing-type trips before in India, where noisy hordes of tourists instantly drive into hiding whatever remaining animal hasn’t gone extinct yet from sheer frustration. Let’s just say we’d set the bar pretty low, despite going out of our way to fly up here.

But as so often happens, India had a surprise in store for us. The elephant driver sitting in front of me jabbed his heels into our elephant’s leathery neck, just above its shoulders. The elephant stood still and past his softly flapping ears we watched three rhinos graze nonchalantly from our front row (or you could say nosebleed) seats.

One city, two countries

We waited on the side of the road for the bus out of Kohora. It was over an hour late. When it finally arrived, the driver waved enthusiastically out the front window at us. Then he blasted the horn a few times and beckoned us aboard with frantic urgency, as though time was suddenly of the essence.

We spent the night in Guwahati, the closest big city. The next morning we took a train another state over to Alipurdar, debating all the way if we should actually get off in Jalpaiguri. Alipurdar won out and then we found a taxi to take us another hour’s drive to Jaigaon. It’s funny how places we’ve never heard of before – for good reason, there’s nothing to them – turn into vital destinations and we’ll travel for two whole days, obsessing about arrival times and finding rooms, as though these we were places we’d been waiting to visit our entire lives.

Despite never having heard of it until recently, Jaigaon actually is a place we’ve been waiting to visit for at least the last few years. That’s because Jaigaon is the literal gateway to Bhutan. It’s a city that straddles two countries. The border runs right through the middle of town and there’s a huge, ornate gate where India and Bhutan meet.

We checked into a hotel on a busy, noisy street near the gate. Standing on the hotel balcony in India and sipping lemon sodas that tasted vaguely of hardboiled egg, we looked across the street and into Bhutan.

The rise of the Dragon King

A lot of Bhutan’s early historical records went up in smoke when a fire raged through the old capital, Punakha, in 1827. Steeped in legend, not much is known about the area before the arrival of Tibetan Buddhism around 750 AD.

In the early 1600s a Tibetan Lama called Ngawang Namgyal unified the valleys of today’s Bhutan into a single state, establishing a distinct cultural identity in the process. Also known as the ‘Bearded Lama’, he became a sort of Bhutanese Dalai Lama and is revered to this day. His death in 1651 was kept a secret for fifty-five years, and when the game was finally up, the fledgling state lapsed into conflict.

This fiercely independent nation has never been ruled by an outside power. Bhutan controlled and sometimes fought with nearby Himalayan kingdoms, eventually losing a war with British India in 1865. After signing a treaty to end those hostilities, and the rise of today’s royal house in 1907, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon became a British protectorate. Everything changed again in 1947, and Bhutan signed another friendly treaty: this time with the newly independent India. Both countries recognised each other’s sovereignty, and the UN finally recognised Bhutan in 1974.

Bhutan is now on its fifth Dragon King in the Wangchuck family dynasty. King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck ascended to the throne in 2006 when his father abdicated. Before stepping down, the fourth King (who incidentally, had four wives – all of them sisters) basically abolished the monarchy himself. He initiated the first democratic elections and rendered the next King a figurehead with no actual power. Still, the young royal family is wildly popular with the Bhutanese people and the King consistently shows his determination to ensure the country’s successful transformation to democracy.

A different kind of tourism

Indians and Bhutanese can go back and forth through the gate in Jaigaon with only their national ID. In fact, some towns in Bhutan are accessible by road only with a detour through India.

For the rest of us, grabbing a piece of ID and taking a scenic drive won’t cut it. Entry to Bhutan comes with a fee. At the moment, just being in Bhutan costs one hundred USD per person per day, plus the requirement to book a tour and be accompanied by a guide anywhere outside Thimphu and Paro valleys.

All this is the government’s attempt to prevent the outside world from affecting Bhutanese traditions and lifestyle. Maybe they have a point. The population of the entire country is less than 800 000. Television was banned until 1999. Geographically, politically, culturally isolated from the rest of the world for centuries, Bhutan didn’t allow anybody else in until the 1970s. Even now, visitor numbers are very low and Bhutan likes it that way. They call it low-impact high-value tourism.

So we booked a guide and a driver, and paid the fees. Namgay and Nima met us in India and after all the usual border-formalities, we walked through the gate.

As India faded into the distance, even though we could still see it – we didn’t hear it. ‘Honking’s not allowed here’ said Nima, our driver. Free-range cows aren’t allowed either, judging from the remarkably clean streets, and we stopped watching our step constantly.

More Buddhas than people

Thimpu is one of just two capital cities in Asia that doesn’t have a single traffic light. The other one is Pyongyang, North Korea. Rules don’t generally seem to mean as much here as they do in North Korea though. ‘My license expired and I forgot to renew it’ said Nima, as he and Namgay got out of the jeep and exchanged seats for the third time ahead of a police checkpoint on our way to the city.

Thimphu is home to about 100 000 people and they are outnumbered by Buddha statues. The golden Buddha Dordenma stands 169 feet tall, built in 2015 as a 100 million dollar birthday gift for the fourth King. The statue is hollow, and inside it are another 125 000 smaller Buddhas. And counting – for a set donation anyone can add a Buddha to the collection.

Namgay is probably used to guiding tourists who plan their trip months in advance rather than from the back of an elephant. He assumed we’d done our homework. ‘You know Guru Rinpoche’ he said conversationally, as we stood around inside the giant Buddha. We did not. Namgay gestured open palm upwards in the Buddhist fashion, towards a large golden statue of what I’d assumed was just another Buddha who happened to be sporting a skinny black mustache.

In the middle of the eighth century Guru Rinpoche, or Padmasambhava (the ‘Lotus Born’) came from Tibet bringing Buddhism with him. While he was at it he prophesied the future construction of the very statue we all were standing in. Like the Bearded Lama or the ‘Unifier of our Country’ as Namgay persistently called him, Padmasambhava is revered to this day. He’s so venerated in Bhutan that he’s often referred to as the second Buddha and he’s just as important as the first one. Namgay briefly mentioned the Guru’s birthplace in modern day Swat Valley, Pakistan. Swat Valley was once a stronghold of Buddhism, as unlikely as that might seem now.

But all that did sound familiar to us. As we burned our faces off over chilli chicken at dinner that night, we realised that having been to Swat Valley ourselves a few years ago and seen a lot of the Buddhist leavings there, Padmasambhava was one and the same as the famous Guru we’d learned was from the area and therefore we’d been to his birthplace. So in a way we had done our homework after all. We couldn’t wait to impress Namgay with this information first chance we got.

Auspicious numbers, phalluses, and fertility

We drove from Thimphu to Punakha through Dochu La, a Himalayan mountain pass. We got out of the jeep to admire the view of the highest peak in Bhutan. Gangkar Puensum is also the highest unclimbed mountain in the world, and it towered over us at 7570 metres. It never will be climbed, either. The government has designated it off-limits, rather than disturb the spirits who live in its distant snowy peaks.

We took a look at the 108 stupas clustered at the top of the pass. They commemorate the Bhutanese soldiers killed in Operation All Clear in 2003, a fight to oust Assamese insurgents who’d established camps inside of Bhutan.

108 is an auspicious number to Buddhists. The path to Nirvana is fraught with earthly temptations – 108 of them to be exact – and so Buddhists have to overcome 108 challenges in life. And I’ll let you guess how many volumes of sacred text it takes to contain the Word of Buddha.

The old royal city of Punakha lies in a fertile valley full of rivers and rice paddies. We made the standard tourist stops. There’s the Punakha Dzong, a fortress/monastery built by the Bearded Lama himself around 1637.

And, one of the country’s longest suspension bridges swaying over the Po Chu river. Visitors are free to stagger across it in the wind.

But that’s not all. Rice paddies aren’t the only testament to fertility in the valley. And dzongs and suspension bridges aren’t the real tourist draw here, either.

Chimi Lhakhang is a Buddhist temple better known as the Fertility Temple. Drupka Kunley, the erstwhile monk to whom it is dedicated, was born in Tibet in the mid-fifteenth century. It’s not known exactly when he arrived in Bhutan, but he did, bringing a wooden phallus with him. His luggage made his intentions pretty clear. By the age of twenty-five he’d renounced his monastic vows to take a wife, supposedly to show that celibacy isn’t a prerequisite for enlightenment. His unorthodox methods of enlightening others, mainly women, included humourous songs and risque poetry but it was probably the sex part that earned him the title he’s best known by today: ‘The Divine Madman’.

Legend has it that the Divine Madman subdued a demoness with his penis, which had a nickname of its own – the ‘flaming thunderbolt of wisdom’. It’s not clear who came up with that one. The demoness changed herself into a dog but the Divine Madman captured her anyway, exclaiming ‘Chi Mi’ (‘No dog’) as he did so. He built a stupa to mark the spot next to the temple that’s now called Chimi Lhakhang – the ‘No dog’ temple. ‘No dogs to this day!’ said Namgay brightly as we approached the entrance, conveniently overlooking the two or three dogs sleeping outside.

As you might expect of someone whose penis has such an arresting nickname, the Divine Madman is Bhutan’s fertility saint. Women hoping to have a child can visit the temple to receive blessings from the monks. The wooden phallus from Tibet has a handle that makes it perfect for tapping these women on the forehead with. Alternatively, a family-minded woman can carry a large wooden phallus around the temple three times. It has shoulder-straps, and I can only describe it as a penis-backpack. Inside the temple again, she rolls some dice and according to the number – odd numbers are particularly auspicious – the monk announces if the ceremony was successful.

Oyv and I stood in semi-darkness amongst dozens of flickering butter lamps, leafing through a photo album of chubby babies belonging to couples from all over the world who’d visited the fertility temple. I watched as a woman returned from her clockwise trek around the building and a monk helped her wiggle out of the harness and remove the wooden phallus from her back.

Over time, the phallus has become a symbol of not just fertility but also of good fortune. Once you’ve seen it you can’t not notice it: penises painted on walls of homes, carved on the eaves, protruding from door frames.

A huge wooden phallus adorned the dresser in our hotel room. Visiting the temple before check in cleared up a lot of questions in advance.

The omnipresent guru and a hot stone bath

We couldn’t leave Bhutan without crossing paths with Guru Rinpoche again. Paro Taktsang, better known as the ‘Tiger’s Nest’ monastery clings to a nearly vertical cliff nine hundred metres above Paro Valley. It’s believed that Guru Rinpoche flew to this place on the back of a transfigured tigress. He meditated and taught Buddhism in a cave here, and so the monastery was built in 1692.

It’s a short walk on a forest path festooned with prayer flags, and then a steep hike up the cliff-side to reach the monastery at 3120 metres.

We explored the cool dark rooms with Namgay, stepping carefully around worshipers prostrating themselves in odd-numbered repetitions. The small spaces were filled with effigies of the mustachioed Guru in his eight manifestations, and we clearly disappointed Namgay with our inability to recognise each one of them.

After a climb like that, why not scald yourself? The Bhutanese use hot stone baths to treat all sorts of ailments. Namgay and Nima dropped us off at a farmhouse in the valley, where the owner was poking at a pile of glowing rocks in a firepit.

He showed us to a room with two wooden tubs filled to the brim with simmering water. At the foot of the tubs was a perforated partition, and on the other side of that – an underwater heap of still-sizzling rocks. We undressed and slipped into the percolating water. ‘If you’re too cold, just shout ‘Another stone!” the owner called through the wall.

Back to India

Early the next morning we piled into the jeep one last time. On the road again, we stopped at another suspension bridge. It’s the oldest one in the country, constructed in 1420. Another one meant for today’s use hangs beside it.

Then we drove for hours through the tiny kingdom in Himalayas, back to the city that has two sides. You can always fly in and out of Bhutan’s single international airport, but we were much happier with walking through the big gate.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or have a look at these stories from our previous visits to India .

The post Bhutan: in the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon appeared first on WhirledAway.

When I decided to travel in Bangladesh, I noticed that my plan generally drew a vaguely surprised reaction, like ‘Bangladesh? Really?’ It wasn’t alarm or concern. It was more like bewilderment, as though the country’s actual existence was up for debate. It’s got to be the last place anyone thinks of if they think of traveling in South Asia. Next to all its popular neighbors like India, Nepal, Sri Lanka…holidaying in Afghanistan probably comes to mind quicker. Bangladesh has sort of been lost in the shuffle; there’s a forgotten feel to it. (Let me just interject here, I’ve now been to Afghanistan since I originally wrote this post. Both countries draw surprised reactions.)

If you decide to go to Bangladesh – and especially if you go alone – you may occasionally find yourself questioning your decision. Like when you wake up from a deep sleep on the train to find every person in the carriage staring intently at you. Or maybe when you’re perfectly comfortable eating at a bakery, but the baker tells you that you are in grave danger. Don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s Bangladesh.

Before I went, I didn’t really know what to expect from South Asia’s forgotten country either. So let me share my roundup of surprises and random quirks you will just have to get used to, when you’re traveling in Bangladesh.

1. No question is too personal. ‘Madam, where is your husband?’. If you are female, and even worse than that, if you are alone, then get used to this one in particular. Upon arrival in Bangladesh, and every single day after that, multiple times a day – I had to establish both the existence and the whereabouts of my husband. Husband questions inevitably lead to baby questions so from time to time I’d spontaneously volunteer information about our son, Hugo (Hugo’s a cat). If you’ve been married any longer than nine months (and people will ask), announcing that you have no children is not going to go down well, and will result in pity at the very least. Don’t think you can get away with vague promises about having babies ‘soon’, unless you are ready to lie (convincingly) about the next question too: ‘How old are you?’. Basically, if you aren’t married, then just pretend to be, and toss in a fake baby for good measure. It makes things easier for everyone.
2. Staring is as popular as cricket. Get over it. Staring at strangers as a means of passing the time of day is something you’ll encounter in a lot of countries around the world but it’s a major hobby in Bangladesh. You can draw a crowd of interested onlookers just by sitting down at a street stall and eating. Stop in the market to chat and a crowd will gather to see what you’re up to. They’ll closely observe your entire conversation, eyes darting back and forth between you and your interlocutor like fans at a tennis match. Many people will want to document this encounter with a photo or twelve. ‘Madam, selfie? Selfie Madam?’ – is a phrase that haunts my dreams.
3. You’ll gain new followers. I’m not referring to your social media. I mean literally, people following you around. During my time in Bangladesh I was followed from time to time mainly by people who were bent on assisting me with things I didn’t want any assistance with. Like showing me to and from trains, volunteer guiding at historical sites, police officers (both real and possibly fake) checking if I was safe, and random citizens who just wanted to practice speaking English. If I genuinely wanted help I’d accept it. In other cases I politely refused. Occasionally I had to ask to be left alone, in order to get away from my well-meaning stalker. Which brings me to the next item on this list.
4. Safety warnings for no discernible reason. Ever been warned off visiting an ashram due to extreme danger? I didn’t think so. But that happened to me in Sylhet, and in plenty of other places too. One man warned me not to spend time by myself anywhere in the entire country. More than one person took it upon themselves to inform me that ‘Bangladesh people are not good’. Bangladesh does have a long history of political unrest and violent protests. I saw heavy police presence during Friday prayers, and it’s definitely best to avoid big crowds (easier said than done, in Dhaka). But I don’t think that justifies staying away altogether, or constantly approaching a traveler to inform them that the very place they are standing is not safe for foreigners/women/solo-travelers or foreign-women-solo-travelers. And ironically, not one of these safety-conscious individuals tried to warn me about the most obvious and real danger in the entire country: any form of transportation.

   

   And that brings me to my next point…

5. India’s trains start to seem orderly. Actually India in general starts to seem pretty chill. Bangladesh is probably one of the very few places in the world that can make train travel in India seem sedate. Boarding (or better yet, disembarking) a train late at night at the station in Old Dhaka is no small feat. The glare of lights from the trains, patches of impenetrable darkness in between platforms, hordes of people rushing in every direction. Most people ignore the footbridges and cross the tracks, or just linger on them, waiting for the incoming train to get dangerously close before they move. A train pulls into the station, packed with riders both inside and out. Total chaos ensues: pandemonium as passengers wrestle each other to get in and out of windows, let alone the doors.

   

6. Shalwar kameez is the new black. That’s traditional clothing – a long top over baggy trousers, with a flowy scarf, and you’ll probably want to buy some. I bought a couple because I like them but also because (speaking as a female traveler): regular t-shirts draw attention to your chest. See point 2. Also, a shalwar kameez is way more comfortable even than yoga pants. Actually, yoga pants would be wildly uncomfortable here – again, see point 2.
7. Five-star service at a no-star hotel. Check into a hotel, unpack a little, maybe start running the cold water for your bucket shower. And surprise! The hall boy will burst in, without knocking. Even if you always lock your door, he will rattle the doorknob frantically instead of just knocking and waiting. Why all this urgency? Because enthusiastically spraying the room with toxic clouds of bug spray every night is part of the service.
8. Banana pancakes? Nope. There aren’t a lot of travelers around, nor the amenities that tend to accompany them. This is both good and bad. It’s real, authentic, independent-travel territory, not just another typical destination crawling with backpackers. But in those cases where you want to find others to split a boat trip with, you’re most likely out of luck.
9. No hassle; real friendliness. Best of all, and probably related to point 8, you won’t find touts wandering around flogging souvenirs and pestering you to book activities. When you’re exploring a market and it’s obvious you aren’t going to buy anything (Live eels? A couple of roosters? A giant funerary wreath?) the vendors are still genuinely welcoming. Anyone who can speak a few words of English will probably want to chat politely. Go to the same restaurant or shop a few times and the staff will treat you like family, calling out your order on sight, offering you little tastes of everything or small gifts, or joining in when you FaceTime your mom.

   

Whenever I mention my travels in Bangladesh to anyone (before or since), they usually just ask ‘why…?’. All I can say to that is, well, why not? It was a lot of fun; it’s different. The people are nice and I felt welcome there. If you want to read more about the ins and outs of travelling in Bangladesh, have a look at my stories, here.

Read More

Are you in India, thinking about heading for Bangladesh? Or vice versa? Here’a post about crossing the Benapole/Petrapole border by road between Bangladesh and India.

The post It’s not you: 9 things to expect when you travel in Bangladesh appeared first on WhirledAway.

On one of our very first train trips in India, eighteen years ago, we both awoke in the night to the sound of retching. Propped up on our elbows in our berths, we watched as a distraught passenger ran the length of the darkened carriage towards the toilet at the end, hands over his mouth. Whatever was disagreeing with him sprayed through his fingers and soon the aisle was slick with it. It stayed that way until morning, when one of India Rail’s many laconic employees sloshed through pushing a dirty mop. With more than a million employees, the railway is India’s second largest employer, but nobody was on hand to clean up the mess (and it’s quite possible that the pantry car was responsible for the incident in the first place). I’d forgotten about the whole thing until Oyv started reminiscing about it when we boarded a train just recently.

Still, we’ve spent many a day or night happily clacking along, when we aren’t surrounded by snorers, or hoarkers, or loud phone-talkers. Or pukers.

One way, or another

If the trains are booked out – which happens surprisingly often – there’s always the nightbus. Literally a bus with bunkbeds, the only difficult part is finding the one we’re meant to be on in a fleet of them zooming past on the highway or parked, heaving exhaust, on the side of the road.

Once we’re on, assuming the sheets are somewhat clean, we’re in for a good night’s sleep night of violent swerving, crashing bumps that can toss you in the air, and whatever rest is possible in a coffin-like slot meant for someone at least six inches shorter than I am. It’s also quite likely that we’ll wake up to find extra passengers packed into the aisle – mostly snorers and hoarkers – one after another sleeping on the floor head to toe.

But we get where we’re going, and usually bright and early too. Or else really late, like the last nightbus we were on which broke down and left us standing on the side of the road in the wee hours of the morning.

In short, it’s rare that we’ve not been able to get somewhere we want to go.

Except the time India wouldn’t let us in in the first place, and I’ll get to that in this post. But once we’re inside the country, we’ll find a ride one way or another. And keep in mind, India is huge.

First class to Kolkata

Leaving Chennai we got a first class coupe on a train bound for Kolkata. It was a twenty-eight hour long journey and first class meant we’d have our own little room with a door to shut at night, instead of sleeping in berths stacked four to six in open compartments and two more on the side.

We’ve never gone first class before because free-spirited last minute bookers like us aren’t spoiled for choice. It wasn’t fancy. It was an older train and alarmingly dingy. But the long journey afforded me the opportunity to binge-watch ‘Love is Blind’ and closing the door guaranteed no snorers or hoarkers.

I got off the train in Kolkata caught up on my series and well-rested, so according to my selective memory it was an awesome trip.

Arriving in Kolkata at six-thirty am is something to mentally prepare for. After London, it was the second largest city in the British Empire back when that was a thing. It’s still one of the most populous urban centres in the world, a megacity with a reputation to match.

We tucked ourselves away in a quiet neighborhood in the south end, filled with cafes and good restaurants, shops, and red and orange street-corner shrines.

Whenever we felt like a deepdive into madness, we just hopped onto a city bus.

Park Street is Kolkata’s most famous thoroughfare, once called the ‘neighborhood of Englishmen’. A lot of the Englishmen are still here – in the big and atmospheric cemetery formerly known as the ‘Great Christian Burial Ground’.

It contains the graves of a lot of G&T drinking colonials who died young mostly from fever, although we noticed a few lost at sea or in various skirmishes, as well.

The most famous person buried in the Englishmens’ neighborhood was Albanian. Mother Theresa is buried in her charity’s headquarters – the Mother House. The convent is still a little pocket of quiet just steps off of the noisy street.

Bussing to Bangladesh

There’s a train that runs straight from Kolkata to Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. It’s only possible to travel right through by rail if you’ve already got a Bangladesh visa in your passport. We didn’t, so we took a bus to the border post at Benapole where you can get a visa on arrival.

Like India’s western border with Pakistan, this border came into being during the partition of India in 1947. The British drew a line on this side of the map too, creating a little pocket of Islam called East Pakistan. But East Pakistan didn’t identify with the country it was a part of, far away on the other side of India, and fought West Pakistan for independence. East Pakistan won the war in 1971, and became Bangladesh.

A border town like Benapole is no place to linger so we took another bus to Khulna, on a patchy road through glassy green rice paddies.

On arrival Khulna was a bit of a dumpster fire. Really – the bus pulled up and put us off right next to a pile of burning rubbish. I’ve been to Khulna before and liked it just fine. It’s an easygoing introduction to this forgotten little over-crowded nation of rivers.

The Rocket and a launch

Ferries are to Bangladesh what trains are to India. Dubious wrecks-looking-to-happen ply the waterways in every direction.

The Rocket is the collective name of a small fleet of old British-era paddlewheel steamers. I took the Rocket once from Dhaka to Khulna and the whole experience had an old-world charm to it, in part due to the fact that basically nothing right down to the bedsheets seemed to have been replaced since the British themselves were aboard.

We had our hearts set on traveling to Dhaka by Rocket. The only difficult part about river transport in Bangladesh is that you can’t find any sort of valid schedule on line – forget about advance ticketing – and nobody seems to know anything about it.

‘Oh no Madam, there is no such thing.’ said the receptionist at our hotel in Khulna when we asked him about the Rocket. ‘Really, since when?’ I asked, entirely unconvinced. ‘Since twenty years ago Madam’ he said confidently. ‘That’s strange, I was on it in 2019’ I informed him. The receptionist stuck to his guns. ‘Oh. Maybe since ten years ago’.

Undeterred, we went to the docks where we asked at a couple of offices touting Sundarbans cruises. We heard varying accounts of the Rocket never existing, ceasing service anywhere from fifteen years to two months ago, and departing very soon – or not at all – from Hularhat, a market town two hours away by bus. The very same market town I’d disembarked the Rocket at in 2019.

Finally, even I doubted the Rocket’s continued existence. But what we did know is that launches – big, somewhat modern ferries – regularly stop in Hularhat on their way to Dhaka. So, we crossed our fingers and took a wretched local bus to Hularhat, planning in exasperation to board whatever vessel happened to sail by towards Dhaka.

This plan worked. After several hours of drinking chai and hanging out on the riverbank, a launch appeared on the horizon and a flurry of activity suddenly took place on the dock.

An old man set up a rickety wooden table and a little stool. He pulled open a drawer to reveal some crumpled money lying loose in the bottom, and sold us a little stub of paper which in turn got us onboard and into a first class cabin.

Settled in, we watched from the upper deck as the launch rumbled to life and chugged into the gathering darkness.

Slow travel may have been invented here

After the relative peace and quiet on the river, arriving in Dhaka is like a slap in the face. It’s one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

During the prosperous Mughal era the city was sometimes called the ‘Venice of the East’. I can see it – cycle rickshaws are to Dhaka what gondolas are to Venice.

From the capital we started to travel north, slowly. There is no other way to travel in Bangladesh.

None of the towns we stopped in had much to inherently recommend themselves to visitors: Bogura has the second highest number of cycle rickshaws in the country, if you consider that a major draw.

But we weren’t really in Bangladesh to sightsee: we just wanted to enjoy being in Bangladesh.

And that is what’s easiest to do here, it’s easier than river travel or trains or buses.

The people are great. They’re friendly and kind and no one ever tries to sell us stuff we don’t want or pull some kind of scheme (ahem, India). We popped into people’s homes to say hello or drank chai and chatted in the street.

The countryside is green and beautiful so whenever the dust and dirt of a busy town started overwhelming our lungs, the next bus trip was actually a breath of fresh air. Rooms are basic but we always had our own comfy space to retreat to if the staring got to be a bit much (and staring is a national sport, in Bangladesh). The food is pretty simple but it’s good, and I love the sweets.

In obscure and dusty villages we rambled into old Hindu temples, and the remnants of a monastic centre significant to Buddhists, Jains, and Hindus alike since the eighth century.

Even in Dhaka whenever a tidal wave of traffic and humanity threatened to sweep us away, we found refuge in cafes and biryani joints, Mughal gardens, mosques and churches and temples.

Well, we tried

And if you can’t get a train or a bus or a boat, you can always get an auto rickshaw.

Bangladesh is tiny, and almost surrounded by India. We entered from India at the southwestern border. We were heading for Assam, an Indian state famous for tea and elephants, far away above the northeastern border – at the opposite end of Bangladesh, in other words. It took us almost an entire day from Rangpur, stringing together one auto rickshaw ride after another to reach the checkpoint. It’s not an entirely ludicrous way to travel.

That’s when we found out that India wouldn’t let us in at this particular border. We spent some time in no-man’s land trying to find out why. ‘Benapole, Benapole! Or fly from Dhaka!’ said the Indian officer, waggling his head and his finger at us simultaneously. We trudged back to Bangladesh.

It didn’t feel so tiny anymore, as we traveled by bus for twenty-four hours straight down the entire length of it, all the way back to Benapole, right back to where we’d started two weeks earlier.

Straggling back into India, we were nowhere near where we’d planned to be just a day or two ago. And we missed the last bus departing for Kolkata. But sure enough, we caught a train.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or have a look at these stories from my previous visits to India or my solo travels in Bangladesh.

The post Trains, buses, and a boat: to Bangladesh and back again appeared first on WhirledAway.

The destinations we choose often lead to all kinds of random holiday-planning considerations. We don’t get all tied up in knots wondering if we’ll find gluten-free alternatives at the breakfast buffet. We don’t join forums to ask if the hotel WiFi reaches the beach. Nope, we talk about things like how to cross obscure land borders in the middle of nowhere, or the likelihood of imminent coups and their possible effect on us (I’m looking at you, West Africa). We’re not even necessarily one hundred percent comfortable with every place we travel. Back in Erbil we sat in a kebab shop masquerading as an Italian restaurant debating which upcoming country – Afghanistan or Pakistan – we felt the least uncomfortable with (to think we ever worried about Iraqi Kurdistan in the first place).

By the time we reached the Wagah border in Pakistan (this time) we’d been on the road for almost seven months. Starting all the way back in Cameroon, we’d seen some wild places and done some amazing things. Still, we were looking forward to a bit of a break someplace restful and chill – like…India? Someplace where I can walk down the street and not be the only woman in sight. Someplace where every public space doesn’t bristle with security. A place where it didn’t feel as though we needed to ratchet up the boundaries of our comfort zones just to leave the guesthouse. No one’s ever described India as restful and chill but it’s definitely that someplace.

And I won’t lie, I was dying for some really good food, specifically Indian food. Desi (local) food in Pakistan doesn’t do it for me. It’s ok for a few days and then the oil overwhelms me and I find myself devouring a chicken Caesar salad in a Canadian cafe chain and wondering if the poutine’s actually half-decent (answer: no, it never is). Then I end up feeling guilty that dinner didn’t involve a ton of chili and some mutton, at least.

So we walked across the Wagah border and caught a ride to Amritsar.

No more boundary-pushing for us, or so we thought.

Easing into India

The plan was to gradually make our way south. Then east. Then north again. So in other words the plan was to just do whatever we felt like in most directions.

First things first – Amritsar. The Golden Temple, one of Sikhism’s holiest shrines, is a stunning sight. Pacing a few barefoot laps on the cold slippery marble around the Amrit Sarovar – sacred pool – from which the city takes its name, feels to me like the perfect arrival in India.

So does eating a bunch of buttery Punjabi food, which is actually the first thing we did.

You can rest when you’re dead – except in India

We moved slowly from state to state, lingering for a little while in Rajasthan, then Maharashtra, and Goa. ‘Where crowds are, there I am not’ said a long-dead Sufi saint whose tomb we’d recently visited in Pakistan. I assume it was his polite way of saying he’d never go to India. That statement really resonated with me. As a huge introvert, I’m no fan of crowds.

Eventually our mission to chill took us to Nasik. If you didn’t realise Nasik is in the heart of India’s wine region, or that India has a wine region…well, you’re not alone. You can’t get much more comfortable than hanging out at a vineyard, right? Actually you can, by going to a vineyard in Italy or France or almost anywhere else instead of one in India – on Republic Day no less, which meant insane crowds. But this is India. There are always crowds, and they are always insane.

Still, Pakistan’s dry (not to mention Afghanistan) and we both felt it was well worth it.

If you’re deliberately looking for a way to test your personal limits, I recommend dropping by the Taj Mahal. Unless you’re traveling in the opposite direction of Agra, in which case the ‘Mini Taj’ in Aurangabad will do nicely.

The Mini Taj is the final resting place of the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb’s first wife. It’s hard to imagine a less restful resting place than one trampled over by millions of tourists annually, but see my remarks above about crowds in India. There’s not much rest for most of the dead in India anyway, since the reincarnation cycle of death and rebirth goes on indefinitely.

As foreigners at any monument of national significance in India, our role is to pay an entrance fee of up to twenty times what the locals pay, and then serve as a extra in group photo shoots. I generally spend this type of activity watching in my peripheral vision for the furtive movements of large families converging on us. Oyv accidentally made eye contact with a proud dad: that’s how he wound up pressed against an empty fountain with a very bemused-looking baby in his arms, posing for portraits.

But as for Goa, the only way you can push yourself there is by drinking too much or overdoing it on shamanic drumming, mantra chanting, or sound healing sessions.

We moved into a little Airbnb near Agonda beach, hired ourselves a scooter, and spent a few lazy sunny days zipping along the coast between laid-back beach villages.

And we ate all that good food we were looking forward to, and then some.

Om Shanti

Then we lingered longer than we meant to in Karnataka, the next state down.

There’s a huge temple in Hampi, which broadcasts a reverberating ‘Om’ at all hours of the day. It makes a nice change from Call to Prayer.

We hired bikes for a day and lazily pedaled around the ancient Hindu temples scattered around town, trying to get a grip on the 330 million-strong pantheon of Hindu gods.

But the citizens of Hampi were gearing up for a festival – the third festival we’d accidentally stumbled onto so far – and the promise of that much chaos was enough for us to move on to Mysore.

Given Mysore’s status as a yoga capital, we checked into a yoga shala (school), envisioning a lot of mindfulness, maybe some left-nostril breathwork. Oyv recognized the man gazing down at us from a flower-garlanded portrait in the meditation hall but wasn’t sure where he’d seen him. As it turned out, the man in the portrait was Osho, a highly controversial guru/cult leader depending on who you ask, and Oyv recognized him from a documentary about his cult in Oregon in the 1980s. If you’ve seen ‘Wild Wild Country’ on Netflix, then you know that Osho’s methods are the kind that could push most people right over the edges of their comfort zones, pretty freaking fast.

To our relief the school didn’t embrace Osho’s more unorthodox teachings, although I can’t say that definitively since sometimes I fell asleep during meditation sessions and might have just missed inflammatory remarks. Either way, we happily slipped into a daily routine of yoga classes and meditating.

Shanti is inner peace, and chanting it three times at the beginning or end of a class is for peace in the body, the mind, and the spirit. We embraced it all wholeheartedly, and then spent our afternoons lounging and reading (and drinking fabulous peanut butter smoothies) in one of the cafes nearby, all of which were filled with people in yoga tights.

But it was challenging, in a whole different type of way.

If, like me, you’ve been practicing yoga for years but looking to discover everything you’ve been doing wrong, then a six am class in Mysore is the way to go. Oyv, whose familiarity with yoga stopped at 1980s-style stretches from elementary school gym class, tore his pants right open in the second class and was just glad his underwear was the same color.

And flexibility (or lack thereof) wasn’t the only challenge in store for me in Mysore. I had a weird, visibly big lump in my neck. Attempting backbends in class I could feel it sticking out. It was interfering with my sense of shanti, so I went to a doctor one night after class. He took a single look at me and said ‘That’s your thyroid’. The very next morning, instead of twisting myself into knots in Hatha, I was in hospital getting stabbed in the throat with a long needle. Next up, bloodwork and an ultrasound, and a couple days of worrying while the doctor threw around words that made us both super uncomfortable, like ‘benign’ and ‘malignant’.

So we extended our stay in Mysore. Only now in between yoga classes we had doctor appointments, hours of Googling ‘thyroid cancer’, and FaceTiming sessions with my Mom (I desperately wanted her to come make chicken noodle soup or otherwise fix all this for me).

On the bright side, healthcare is efficient in India. I could walk into a hospital, take a test, and leave with results in hand the same day. It felt like questions were always welcome, too. After an ultrasound, I went back to ask the technician another one. ‘Come right in’ said the nurse when I knocked on the door. Entering the room I found a shirtless man stretched out on the table getting his own ultrasound. Stammering an apology I backed out quickly. ‘Not at all Madam, what is it?’ said the tech, scrolling the wand over the current patient’s belly. The two of them looked at me expectantly.

Although my test results were benign the doctor wanted to operate and remove half of my thyroid to be certain. Surgery and recovery, in a foreign country: yet another way to expand the comfort zone. I’ve never had an operation in my life and wasn’t keen to have one now, so Oyv and I went after a second (and a third) opinion. The next two doctors disagreed with the first one, advising against surgery. In the end, as Mysore’s newest leading experts on thyroid issues, we agreed.

We’d stayed at the yoga school longer than we planned, but it was one of those things that just worked out. It had to be the best place to stay at when I was taking tests and dealing with unnerving issues. We’d expected India would be pretty comfortable, and mostly it is, but life’s unpredictable. So is travel. So is India.

Read More

For more of our adventures (and misadventures) as we travel from Cameroon to Japan, check out the rest of my stories from the road.

Or have a look at these stories from our previous visits to India.

The post Crowds, inner peace, and a biopsy: comfort-zoning out in India appeared first on WhirledAway.