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India: Monkey Business

March 4, 2012
Adventure, India, Religion
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The birthplace of Hanuman (the Hindu monkey god), right outside of Hampi, was one of the more spiritually inspiring places I have been in a long time. Not only did the sheer magnificence of the scenery move me, but everyone else seemed to be genuinely happy just to be there. If I had to gauge a place on its spiritual credibility, I think that would be metric number 1.

Visit at sunset and expect to have every older lady you pass on the staircase to greet you with a “sri Sita, sri Ram” and a smile, expect to have the priests call you into the temple for prasad (a sweet offering/blessing of chai or sugar), and expect to be serenaded not only by the chanting priests in the temple but also by the guitar and drum players teetering out on the rocks for sunset.

India: Hampi

February 22, 2012
Adventure, India
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During the time I spent in Goa, I kept hearing this name on everyone’s lips: Hampi.
People kept talking about it. They wanted to go there, had just been there, or had someone else tell them to go there.  I wanted to know why, so of course, I went.

The adventure of getting from Goa to Hampi encompassed an ever so eventful overnight bus ride – Imagine a late night pick up in a dark deserted market with an early morning drop off at something reminiscent of the Pushkar camel fair if the camels had been replaced with auto rickshaws and the whole dusty scene were set amongst 600 year old ruins. Now put smack dab in the middle of those two scenes one long sleepless night of Indian men crawling over, into, and out of the dark tiny cubby where you are trying to sleep, while being jostled along at 90km/hr over potholed roads.

The reward for such an adventure was figuring out what was so enchanting about this place that everyone just couldn’t stop talking about.

For me Hampi became a beautiful blue balcony lined with flowers, the sight of temples over the river, swaying palm trees, and bright green rice fields only interrupted by the randomly placed boulders that give the area its charm. Now a UNESCO world heritage site, Hampi boasts some of the most beautiful temples in India as well as a geographically unique landscape. If you’ve read the Ramayana you will know the place as Kishkindhya or the monkey kingdom from which Hanuman came. And trust me, all you’ll need is one afternoon bike ride outside the city to quickly see why this place was magical enough to make it into one of the most important Hindu texts ever written, and to still have us all swooning over and talking about it today.

Lesson 2: Finding Clairvoyance

February 17, 2012
Adventure, India, Life Lessons
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“Only an animal does useful things. An animal gets food, finds a place to sleep, tries to keep comfortable. But I wanted to do something that was not useful – not like an animal at all. Something only a human being would do.”

Gerard d’Aboville quoted in The Tao of Travel, Enlightenment from Lives on the Road – Paul Theroux

I remember a conversation that took place before I left for my 365 day adventure, in which I made a remark about how I wanted to leaveNew Yorkand travel for a year because I had lost my focus.  I had argued that travel could give me a clairvoyance that I couldn’t find anywhere else. Six months in, I’ve been rolling this thought around in my head, thinking that there was something else I was trying to encompass in this statement that wasn’t initially coming across.

Finding this quote from Gerard d’Aboville, who rowed across the Pacific solo in 1991, made me realize that what I was trying to grasp in my actions and in my use of the word “clairvoyance” wasn’t just that additional knowledge or experience that comes so easily from walking into a new place. What I meant was that I was craving the awareness of our own humanness that can only arise when we push ourselves to our mental, emotional, and physical limits. Without this, we lose our connection to the humanity around us.

Why was India the first place I chose to come to when I left home? I have been thinking about this a lot lately too. It was not because I had been before and knew the country and the language. It was but because it was and remains the hardest place I have been. Throughout almost 40 countries, no place has broken me down and built me back up likeIndia. No place has shown me the limits of my own person likeIndia. If I am looking for a deeper sense of my own humanity, this is the only place that I could have started.

What I have learned from this, is that if we, as humans, are searching for more clairvoyance, perhaps that can only come by using our biggest challenge, our biggest obstacle, our biggest fear,  as the place from which we start.

India: A Sunset Scooter Ride in Goa

February 14, 2012
Adventure, India
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A scooter ride in India is always eventful; the details of the events just depend on where you are. In southern Goa the towns tend to be small and the streets open but curvy, making them the ideal place for first time drivers on the subcontinent. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy sailing on a scooter. In one 30 minute drive up the coast, we’ve encountered on the road no less than: 32 cows of various colors, 7 chickens, a gaggle of school kids in blue & brown plaid uniforms, at least two dozen dogs in every imaginable state from newborn to nursing, 2 or 3 roaming pigs, a handful of red faced monkeys, and innumerable pedestrians – half of which were carrying something exceptionally large on their head. Luckily, the reward for all this swerving and dodging was a cliff side, palm tree curtained, windswept view of what was quite possibly the most beautiful sunset, ever.