The India Diaries - Part 1

I've been spending an awful lot of time wandering the internet in preparation for spending a month wandering northern India at the end of the year. So many people have been sufficiently taken by their experiences on the sub-continent to write about it. In detail. I am hoping my experiences will be similarly inspiring. In particular, I've read the travelog of a young British woman who has been trekking for almost four months now. I have across her site after reading a post made on the Lonely Planet forums by her very distressed father. It seems she had not made any contact with her family back home or posted in her log for over 3 weeks and they were getting quite worried. As it turns out, she was just in the northern part of Uttar Pradesh where you'd be lucky to find a working toilet, let alone a computer with internet access.

But reading her travelog and looking at the photographs she had posted, I started to get very enamored of the whole idea of living in an ashran, shaving my head, and spending weeks on end in silent meditation. I've been imagining myself arriving in Delhi and being completely swept into the mayhem and mysicism of India. I imagine myself finally getting caught up in spirituality, meditation, and something bigger than myself. I imagine the email I will write to my friends, family, and coworkers telling them I have found home in the monasteries, ashrans, and temples and won't be coming back. Give my regards to Boris and Griffith University. Then reality comes back into play and I see myself enjoying the experience of a culture so unlike my own and of the opportunity to help people through the clinic. It is just a holiday after all. "Annual Leave" from an ordinary nine-to-five life. I wonder if I would even have the courage to leave all that I have worked for behind. We shall see.