INDIA Awaits

As I sit here on the cold tile floor of Bangkok’s Don Meung International Airport, waiting to board our Biman Bangladeshi Airways flight to Dhaka, Bangladesh and then on to Delhi, India, I am overcome with a sense of anticipation, anxiousness, nervousness, and excitement. India has been a mecca to myself and Malcolm. Ever since I can remember wanting to travel, I always thought of the day when I would hike the mighty Himalayas or wander down cobblestone streets filled with colours, scents, and sounds that conjure up images of saris, silks, sitars, samosa’s, and sadhu’s. India is known for its ability to inspire, frustrate, thrill, and confound all at once. It is a multi-dimensional technicolor country, with each region offering its own food, culture, religion, and geography. We have been told that the poverty is confronting and alarming and the sheer crush of humanity can turn walking down a street or entering a train station a struggle. However, the rewards are tremendous, as the culture is so rich, it’s religions among the oldest.
As we only have a limited amount of time, we decided to not try and do the entire country but rather focus on one region so we could fully appreciate what it has to offer. Our trip will see us in the north where most of India’s main spiritual sites and musical offerings are located. We begin in Delhi where we will be staying with some friends from Santa Cruz, Jessa and Mike who live there now. From there we will head up into the Himalayas and to Mcleod Ganj, where the Tibetan government and people in exile are located and where the Dalai Llama lives and teaches. I cannot think of a better place I would want to spend my birthday! We will be taking some classes in Tibetan music and volunteering our time teaching English to newly arrived Tibetan political refuges. We also hope to take in a small lecture taught by the Dalai Lama himself. From there, we will be doing some trekking in the Himalayas and then down to the yoga and spiritual epicenter’s of Hardiwar and Rishikesh. We will be doing yoga and meditation while there as well as taking some traditional Indian music classes. We then head south through Delhi again to pick up some traditional instruments and then it will be off to Varanasi, the city of Shiva, the holiest city in India where pilgrims come from all over to wash away their sins in the Ganges. From there we will either continue heading east along the north of India to Bohdigaya, home of the Bohdi tree, where the Buddha achieved enlightenment, Buddhism’s most revered sites, or we will head up to Katmandu, Nepal depending on the time and money we have left. Nepal has some instruments that we are very interested in so we are hoping to make it there. We finish our trip in Calcutta, the intellectual and cultural capital of the nation, known for its Bengali dance, music, film, and food, and unfortunately, its squalor and poverty.
. We are looking forward to sharing the many sites and sounds that we will be encountering there and know there will be no lack of photos and video. The only thing that we can hope for is that we will have access to fast internet connections to upload our images. Expect the unexpected…