Having been on the road for over 6 months now, I feel compelled to start writing about all the amazing things I’ve seen and experienced along the way. Although a relatively short time, it feels an age since I gingerly stepped a foot into the organized chaos that is India, leaving that frosty English winter behind.
I’ve experienced more in these past months than I have in my whole life. A real eye-opener and education into a part of the world overflowing with colour and personality that functions thousands of miles away while we’re usually asleep. No amount of reading could have prepared me for the sights, smells, vibrance, taste-bud-purging culinary treasures that are conjured up when 1.5 billion people share a land mass as environmentally and culturally diverse as India, and while I’d like to explain it in a nutshell, I don’t think any amount of literature could really give it justice.
The best piece of advice I received was simply: Never ask ‘why?’ India is a country of chaos living in harmony. It manages to function as if by magic, and to see it, still isn’t to understand it.
My journey so far has taken me through the lush, tropical, palm-fringed states of southern India, over the vibrant, spicy, sweltering plains of the north, among the cool peaks of the Himalayas, to the serene, soda white beaches of southern Thailand.
I’ve shared bedrooms and bathrooms with entire ecosystems, slept on a sweaty jungle floor after suffering from chronic food poisoning, taught Westlife songs on guitar to Burmese kids, slept in a puddle on a train floor for 14 hours, trekked for two weeks through the Himalayas and attended a host of religious events including a Muslim wedding and an open cremation beside the river Ganges.
Many of you have shown interest in my tales of travel, and so the new ‘Roam From Home’ Blog will be a great way to share all those stories with you.
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