Good-Bye

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Setting up the tent for our very first night outdoors in Cape Reinga, New Zealand

I've been home for a month today. It's been a slow adjustment - from living in visions of the past to now looking toward an uncertain future. I don't have the self-awareness or the poetic voice to explain what this all has meant to me. I observe that the world feels both larger and more accessible than ever. That I am far better suited to a life outdoors than I'd imagined. That I'm happiest in the mountains, and that Christina is happiest swimming 30m underwater (future irreconcilable differences?). But I don't know what to express beyond profound gratitude. Maybe that's enough.

Thanks for following along and sharing this experience with me. This blog has been an important way for me to feel like I could share the beauty of these places with the people that I so wished could be there by my side. And in this way you inspired me to explore and to continue searching for my own happiness. Thank you and good-bye!

Home

beach

Pro Kadima

The baby demanded Sea Bass. She caught three

In a word: Robusto

Cape Cod was not part of this trip, but I wanted a "home with my family" entry. Happily, Christina joined us in Truro for a few days on her way back from India (her yoga course was a smashing success, but you would have to ask her for more details about that). This has been a joyful reunion, stretched across weeks. And I again thank my family and friends for their support of this trip and of Christina's and my shared dreams.

London

pub

Oxford

Borough Market

The quiet desperation in Peter's face: "No more raclette."

Churchill War Rooms

Christ Church Cathedral

Hospitality is a warm hug at the door and a cup of hot chocolate with boozy whip cream. One of my dearest childhood friends, Peter Mayers has lived abroad in Geneva, in Bangladesh, and in London since graduating from Boston University in 2008. An opportunity to visit him, then, is a major life event. And how better to adjust from India to the United States? England is itself still a developing state, Peter remarked, and it would ease me in my transition back to the first world across the Atlantic.

I loved London. To be sure, some of its joys were a feature of my re-entering the west. I wasn't aware of how on guard I was in India - from thieves, from noise, from traffic, from heat, from pollution, from foodborne illness - until I caught myself battling non-existent enemies in London. And so I spent much of my free time walking the London streets enjoying the air quality and the shocking quiet. What a pleasure just to walk and breathe freely! I was in one of the great cities of the world, but I could as well have been strolling the English countryside.

The cathedrals, the Thames, the hearth-warmed pubs, the museums, the Victorian architecture, meanwhile, all totally charmed me. London is a city best savored on foot, and I loved walking and admiring the brick buildings and old monuments to the empire. I left the city on my own for a day, taking an afternoon trip to Oxford. There I drank with the ghosts of the Inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis were the most famous members of the literary discussion group) in the Eagle and Child Pub, but only after a visit to the thousand year old Christ Church College. I fantasized about how it would feel to study at Oxford, where the school's rich and ancient history is embedded in each assignment (so I imagined).

At night and on the weekend Peter and I played. He basically took me to all his favorite date spots in the city. The boy has it down and you can't argue with success. We ate the Borough Market, took a water-taxi on the Thames, climbed Greenwich Hill, took in a comedy show, visited St. Paul's Cathedral, failed to see an organ performance at Westminster Abbey (too late only because Peter stopped to help a homeless man on our way to the tube), feared for our purity on the late-night drunk bus, indulged in chocolate souffles, admired the water foul at St. James's Park, and talked it all over some delicious local ales in some of the darkest pubs on earth. I have photos of most of the locations, but it's harder to preserve memories of heartfelt and stimulating conversation, of Peter's endless generosity, of Peter's kind roommate René, and of the best shower pressure I've ever bathed in. So I note it here.

Taj Mahal

bo

Trying to outshine the Taj Mahal - and succeeding

The Taj is a mausoleum, built by the grieving Mughal emperor Shah Jahan  for his dead third wife, Mumtaz Mahal 

The movement of the sun gives the marble a new complexion. To the right you can see the eastern gate of the complex, which is beautiful in itself

We visited the Taj Mahal first in the early morning, and we admired it again from our guesthouse rooftop at sunset. There I called my mom while we watched langurs jump from building to building and local kids fly their kites in the dusk wind, all set against the backdrop of the "Crown Palace."

From Agra Christina and I caught a bus to Rishikesh, where we spent our final days of this adventure together. Christina met her peers and took a taxi from Rishikesh to her yoga teacher training course eight nauseating hours north in Uttarkashi. I traveled to Delhi and boarded my flight west. I held it together until British Airways aired A Single Man. Then I cried in the lavatory.

Pushkar and Udaipur

Rah

Bathing ghats, Pushkar Lake

Udaipur Lake palace, the set location of Octopussy,which I have since learned is a terrible movie

Summer is pilgrimage season in Rajasthan, and Pushkar is one of the holiest sites in India. Devout Hindus make the pilgrimage to bathe in Pushkar Lake at least once during their lifetime, and also to visit one of the few remaining Brahman temples (Pushkar Lake was formed by a weaponized lotus petal that fell from the sky after Brahma slayed the demon Vajranabha). There are 52 bathing ghats on the circumference of the lake, including Ghandi Ghat, where Ghandi's ashes rest. The cramped streets outside the complex chime with street music, prayer, frying sweets, and the muted mooing of cows.

Udaipur, with its sparkling lake, island palaces, and steep sandy hills, is generally considered the most romantic spot in India. We wouldn't know. We barely left our penthouse, lake-view hotel room, though this in the most unsexy way possible. Food poisoning again, and this time Christina bore the brunt. As luxurious as our hotel room was, it still only had a single toilet - a sometime point of contention between an otherwise happy couple. Love is gross.

Jaipur

kings

The royal astronomical observatory Jantar Mantar

Jantar Mantar was completed in 1734 by Maharaja Jai Singh II. Singh was a warrior prince who nonetheless preferred the cosmos to the sword

We met this man on the street and followed him down a dark alley to his shop for a private puppet show. Sounds like questionable judgment now, but the puppets were very persuasive

The largest man-made sundial on earth

A swimming pool hidden in the hills outside Jaipur

Amber Fort

It was three hours past nightfall when we stepped off our plane in Jaipur and, before it melted into a flaming plastic waterfall, the airport thermometer read 102 degrees F. The breeze on the ventilated shuttle bus was a heated hairdryer inches from our face. My eyeballs swelled. We were in the desert.

But what liberation to be out of Mumbai! The desert forts, palaces, observatories, museums, and hilltop temples of Jaipur filled us with wonder and soaked us in sweat, but much of the joy came from simply traveling again after weeks of stagnancy. We spent a few days exploring the city, drinking fresh lime sodas to cool down and doing our best to dodge the Rajasthani men and boys who, to totally generalize, were fucking dogs. Though they were beside the point. Freedom was harder to find in India and this was our time, brief though it was.

Mumbai

mum

The Gateway of India

Dosas for breakfast

Racing home in a 60s era taxi on the Sea Link

Jetty near Bandra Fort in Bandra West

Dahi Batata Puri from Mumbai's famed Swati Snacks

Preparing sugar cane juice. Delicious!

Onion pakoda sandwich from a street vendor

Some street scenes feel uniquely Indian: a pig rooting through a flaming pile of garbage, raw sewage bubbling on the pavement, a government employee sweeping trash out of a bin and back onto the ground, rickshaws swerving around cows in the road. But despite its size and strangeness, Mumbai is less chaotic and less charismatic than the mega-cities of Southeast Asia. Mumbai's charms, most of which were edible, easily reshaped my view of Indian food (which I loved to begin with). Though when the food makes you as ill as I was, these pleasures quickly become regrets. ("Immodium: When that lassi blows straight out your ass-ey," was our favorite of about one hundred Immodium ad campaigns we came up with while trying not to get sick on a bus.) Buy a sugar cane juice if you can manage to find one. But avoid anything called a Bombay Breeze - it is a better name for a cocktail when you don't know what the city actually smells like.