Author: Christina

Going to Nepal was outside my comfort zone.

Nepal was a place that my brother would go. (And did go – and wrote an entire book about it – you can read it here.)

Mountains are his thing.

Still, as I traveled through India, the idea of going to this small country famous for its Himalayan peaks crept into my mind and stayed.

I toyed with the idea of doing some volunteer work in Nepal, which is more “my thing.” But I didn’t really have enough time to devote to make it meaningful.

And I kept thinking about doing a trek in the Himalayas.

But that was REALLY far outside my comfort zone.

Again, hiking is Daniel’s thing. I’ve never enjoyed it much, though I’m ashamed to admit that as a Coloradan. And I’ve always thought that I’m not very good at it. The Himalayas seemed like they might be more than i could handle.

But the idea kept coming back: Maybe I should go to Nepal and go trekking.

And while it scared me, I resolved not to let fear make my decisions.

Growth is about doing things that are uncomfortable. I figured that if it made me nervous, that was even more reason to do it.

And, my friend Eva, with whom I traveled in India, happened to be in Nepal and was available as a trekking partner. So I decided to seize the opportunity.

You might remember me saying that I bought a very last-minute ticket from Delhi to Kathmandu, somewhat impulsively. Doing so meant that I left India in such a flurry of activity that I forgot one of the major things I had feared about Nepal: flying into the Kathmandu airport. It is known as a somewhat dangerous airport, located in a valley, having only one runway and lacking some of the technology that other airports have. It has seen a few plane crashes, including two in 2018. And though I do a lot of flying because I love going places, I actually have a slight fear of flying, based on an illogical belief that planes are huge pieces of metal which will eventually fall out of the sky.

So anyway, it was good that I forgotten about this. That is, until we had almost arrived and the captain made an announcement that the weather was bad over Kathmandu and we would need to circle the airport until we could make an attempt at landing. An attempt? What did that mean? My heart started beating faster and I turned up the music playing through my headphones as I told myself to breathe, that it would be fine.

Some time later, the pilot announced that the weather still wasn’t great but we were going to try to land. However, he said, we only had one chance to attempt the landing because of the location of the airport. There was that word again, “attempt.” Why was he telling us this? What happened if the attempt failed?

As the plane descended through seemingly endless clouds, bumping and shaking like we were driving on a massive dirt road, I gripped my armrest until my knuckles turned white. I honestly thought I might die that day. And oddly, I made my peace with the idea, and I didn’t regret being on that plane. If I didn’t live past that moment, I thought, I had used my time on earth pretty well. Of course I wanted more. But if it had to end there, I realized, at least I felt like I had lived. I closed my eyes, took deep breaths and went over happy memories in my head.

Suddenly, the wheels touched the ground and I was thrown forward in my seat as the plane slammed on its brakes to slow down before the end of the short runway. I blinked my eyes open, unclenched my hands, and looked at the Nepali woman sitting next to me. We both took a breath and smiled.

Still alive. One fear conquered.

When the plane came to a stop and we climbed down the roll-up stairs onto the tarmac, the air felt cool and fresh compared with the air in Delhi, where I had boarded the plane. Beneath the curtain of clouds, everything was not nearly as scary as I had imagined it to be. There were no mountains in proximity to the runway, extremely ample space for a commercial plane to land, and the actual airport was small and cozy-looking. The outskirts of Kathmandu were visible from the tarmac and it looked different than anything I had ever seen.

I felt the excited little leap in my heart that comes from experiencing something totally new and a sincere gratitude to be alive.

Eva and I spent a few days in Kathmandu after my arrival, but we didn’t leave the tourist/trekking section of Kathmandu, called Thamel, a place that I found pretty oppressive. Completely void of Nepali culture, Thamel features rows and rows of trekking agencies, stores selling knockoff trekking equipment and/or traveler clothing, and expensive restaurants featuring foreign foods.

The trekking industry in Kathmandu seemed to me like a huge monster, with tentacles reaching out and sucking money out of the many foreigners who are clogging the streets of Thamel at all times. There are so many people who fly into Kathmandu and go trekking every day that I had the distinct feeling of being an item passing through an assembly line – just one of many identical things that goes through and deposits money and leaves.

Paying for our trek (the Nepali rupee is ridiculously inflated, but it was also a lot of money)

It was a strange place and I was relieved when we finally had procured all the necessary gear and permits and we left the city for the mountain town of Pokhara, the launching point for most treks in the Annapurna region of Nepal.

Despite horror stories that I had heard about reckless Nepali driving and of buses plunging off the sides of mountain roads in Nepal, the 8-hour trip went smoothly and was pleasant, with a bus that stopped nearly every hour for bathroom breaks and snacks. Eva and I couldn’t believe the luxury of this after traveling in India, where buses sometimes stopped only once during a long journey for a bathroom break and even then sometimes there was actually no bathroom, just an opportunity for the men to pee on the side of the road.

That evening, we met our guide, went over our route and agreed to leave early the next morning. Eva and I were both a bit nervous as we had dinner and shared an Everest beer. The Himalayas loomed in our minds, though we couldn’t see them from the town because of cloud cover. We both took mountains seriously and knew there were risks involved in an endeavor like this, just like any time one goes into nature.

We mused about what the next week might be like. We communicated with our families, let them know they might not hear from us for a while. We re-checked our supplies and re-packed our bag. We sent some prayers into the universe for a safe and meaningful trek, and the atmosphere was serious as we went to bed early.

Our adventure would start in the morning.

The Taj Mahal: the most famous monument in India, a UNESCO World Heritage site, possibly one of the wonders of the world, depending on which list you consult. Everyone I talked to about where to go in India said, “And of course you have to see the Taj Mahal.”

With places like this, that are so well-known in popular culture and about which I’ve heard for so long, I always wonder if the real thing will live up to the image that I’ve created in my mind.

Before I went, I heard a lot from other travelers about Agra, the city where the Taj Mahal is located. They all concurred that the city was not a pleasant place to be, that it is a giant tourist trap, that people weren’t as friendly as in other places in India, etc. So I always asked them, should I just skip it? No way, they said.

It’s absolutely worth it, they assured me.

So I went, and I do think they were right

There are always so many people trying to visit the Taj Mahal on any given day that the recommendation is to wake up around 5am and get there before sunrise. Then you can be one of the first people in the gates, which allows you to see its magnificence in the early morning light and also to get a picture that doesn’t have a ton of other people in the background.

However, as previously noted, I am not a morning person and even though I had two mornings in Agra to try to get there by sunrise, I did not succeed. By the time we arrived at the ridiculously late hour of 6:30am, there were already tons of early birds who had swarmed in ahead of us. Good for them. It was still amazing, even with hundreds of other people sharing the experience.

In India, people say the Taj Mahal is one of the greatest symbols of love, because the ruling Shah had it built to in 1632 to honor his late wife, whom he loved dearly and who died giving birth to their 14th child. The monument is actually a mausoleum, where the remains of the Shah’s wife were entombed. And later, the Shah’s own tomb was added beside that of his wife.

It is a romantic image, I guess, to think of this heartbroken Shah deciding to put all his resources into building something beautiful for his wife’s memory.

And now it is one of the most-visited touristic sites in the world. As we walked past their tombs inside the building and people snapped photos (despite the numerous NO PHOTO signs), I wondered what the Shah would think of the spectacle that his monument has become now.

Up close, the best part is getting to see all the intricate details that make the Taj Mahal special. After seeing it, I understand why it took nine years to complete the decorations after the initial structure had been finished. There are lines and lines of beautiful Arabic calligraphy, which inscribe verses from the Qu’ran on the monument. And there is a lot of inlaid stone work, with decorative flowers and other designs. It’s gorgeous.

We accidentally fell into a tourist trap and ended up visiting a workshop where people are still doing the same painstaking stone inlay work that they did on the Taj Mahal. It was pretty cool to see, even though I was displeased that our tuk tuk driver had tricked us into going there. It is very detailed work, that they are still doing completely by hand.

Allegedly, almost everyone who does this kind of work in Agra is descended from one of the people who originally worked on the Taj Mahal.

It seems like something they just tell tourists because it makes them more likely to buy their goods. But then, there were 20,000 people who were originally employed in the 1600s to work on the construction, so hey, it’s possible. Now these alleged descendants use their skills to create tiles and plates and other things that tourists can buy and take a piece of India home with them. Honestly, it is a pretty nice souvenir and I thought about buying something for my family until I thought about having to carry these heavy items around for the next few months. And of course, they weren’t cheap.

The Agra Fort – has some similar stone work to the Taj Mahal

As for Agra as a city, I ended up agreeing with everyone else who told me there wasn’t much to recommend it. It’s like any place that has a huge tourist attraction; it has a ton of hotels, lots of buses going in and out with people who want to see the attraction, lots of kind of tacky restaurants for the people to eat at, and a bunch of local residents trying to earn some money by selling some cheap souvenirs to those people.

But it was a pretty cool experience, and a nice end to my India trip. After visiting there, it felt like a good ending point, though I would have loved to spend many more months in India. The morning after I saw the Taj Mahal, I went back to my hotel and somewhat impulsively booked a flight to Kathmandu for two days later. It just felt like time to say goodbye.

It’s so incredible. I spent less than two months in India, but it changed me as a person. I left a piece of my heart here. And I left so much unseen in this massive country. I’m not sure when it will be possible, but I know I will be back here at some point with more time to spend. I want to keep discovering the things that India can teach me about humanity and about myself.

There were two last things that I wanted to experience in India before moving on: New Delhi, the capital and home to 26 million people, and the Taj Mahal, India’s most famous monument, in the nearby city of Agra.

A good amount of people who visit India actually only visit these two places, plus the city of Jaipur, which was the pink/orange city I described a few posts ago. Together, they are called the Golden Triangle, and many blogs I read prior to coming to India suggested this route as a potential first India trip.

Personally, I can’t think of a more terrible introduction to India.

Had I only visited those places, I’m not sure I would want to return to this country.

My time in New Delhi was about 5-6 days in total, but broken up into several pieces as I stopped there on my way to and from a few different places.

The experiences I had were quite varied, but I came away at the end without any fondness for Delhi as a city.

Except for its metro system, which was incredible and I enjoyed immensely.

The metro was clean, efficient, and well-organized. Having experienced the New York metro at rush hour, I could not believe what I witnessed in New Delhi at rush hour. A train full of people pulled up to a platform that was also full of people at the transit hub, Rajiv Chowk. The doors opened. And there was no pushing or shoving as people tried to get on and off at the same time. The people who were on the train exited while the people who wanted to board waited on one side. Then, when people had finished disembarking, everyone entered the train. Amazing.

I also really enjoy that instead of dispensing disposable paper cards like we use in the US (which inevitably end up littering the ground outside the metro station) the metro here gives you a token as your ticket, which you then drop in a slot to be able to exit the system at your destination. The tokens are then re-used. So sensible and environmentally friendly!

Good things about my Delhi experience:

• I was graciously hosted by some young professionals who work in media in the Delhi suburbs. I met one of them at a hostel (because India is so big, one cool part about staying in hostels is that you meet lots of young Indians exploring their own country) and he invited me to stay with him and his roommates when I came to Delhi. That was an amazing experience – making friends and seeing how people like me live in another country (and actually their apartment was very similar to my friends’ apartments in Denver – see the view from their balcony below).
• My friend took me around to some of the places he likes to go in the city, including a shopping mall that made our American malls look pretty run-down and a hipster part of town where we went to a bar/restaurant that reminded me a lot of home.
• Did I mention the metro? It was lovely.
• The metro also has a car designated exclusively for women, of which I was a huge fan. See the section on men below to know why this is especially important, other than it being a bit roomier and better-smelling than the crowded other cars.

View from my friends’ apartment outside Delhi

Bad things about my Delhi experience:

• It was REALLY HOT when I was there. Over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and it’s even hotter now. As with most major cities, the pavement and big buildings seem to keep in the heat, and it’s a miserable place to be when it’s hot.
• There is SO MUCH TRAFFIC. That’s part of the reason the metro is so wonderful. You can go under the traffic. But then you have to walk in the heat from the metro stop to wherever you are going, which is sometimes far. So sometimes an air-conditioned Uber is a good option. But then you spend half the time you’ve paid for sitting in stop-and-go traffic.
• There is a LOT of air pollution and smog. (The World Health Organization named it the most polluted city in the world in 2014.) My throat, nose and lungs definitely felt the impact even after a short time.
• So many MEN. This is the only place in India where I experienced the harassment from men that I had read about from female bloggers prior to coming here. It was a strange dichotomy, because so much of the city is super-modern with super-modern people, like my friends who hosted me. They were absolutely lovely men who were aghast to hear that I had been harassed. But as they explained to me, there are also a lot of uneducated men who come from all over India to work in Delhi, and those people may not have views that are quite as modern about women.

Me trying to look happy at the Red Fort in Delhi

I was actually excited to visit New Delhi. I had heard so much about it, and even though other travelers generally said they disliked it, I wanted to experience it. I recently read a book by Ariel Levy, The Rules Do Not Apply. This quote, about her drive to travel, jumped out at me:

“I wanted to meet those mysteries, too. I wanted to feel the limitless Mongolian steppe spread out in front of me. I wanted to know what it smells like in Rajasthan in the morning.

Why? ‘I want to do it because I want to do it,” Amelia Earhart once wrote in a letter to her husband.”

That’s how I felt about Delhi. I wanted to know what life was like there. Just because it was a mystery that I wanted to know about.

Bahai Lotus Temple in Delhi

The first time I visited, it was a weekend and so my friend had time to take me around everywhere. It was nice to have my first introduction to the city be with a local person who knew the ropes. But his style of living is different than my style of traveling. As a backpacker, I’m used to doing everything the cheapest way. This is not how the middle class of India lives, because India has a huge spectrum of incomes and classes and each person lives according to his place on that spectrum.

So when we went sightseeing, it was an all-day affair where we hired an Uber for 7 hours and the driver drove us from place to place. I felt strange and elitist seeing the city in this way, but I admit the air-conditioning was a haven. Even with this method of transport, our photos from that day just got sweatier and more disheveled.

One of our last stops: sweaty and so tired

When I came back to Delhi the next time, it was during the week and my friends had to work, so I seized the opportunity to explore the city my way. I took the metro and I walked and I went some places that we had missed the time before.

And after doing it both ways, I have to admit that Delhi is a city that is best seen through the windows of an air-conditioned taxi. And I hate that.

(I also hate that this post is generally pretty negative – I usually like to focus on the positive things, but I also want to write honestly, and in this case, my honest experience was not that positive. So I will share that with you.)

The days that I explored by myself via public transit, I was constantly so HOT and exhausted that I couldn’t really focus on anything else. Those days, I just felt like I was doing everything wrong, which was a funny feeling to have at the end of my India trip when I generally felt like I was getting the hang of the country. Maybe part of it truly was just being there at the wrong time of the year. It would probably be significantly more pleasant in cooler weather.

It was just one of those times when everything felt wrong. I visited the mosque pictured above in the old part of the city. It is one of the icons of Old Delhi and the mosque complex is a huge enclosed square that is really beautiful. Of course at mosques you have to remove your shoes, and the pavement was so hot on my bare feet that I practically had to run from one side to the other. To make matters worse, because my shoulders were covered only by a shawl and not by a full shirt, when I bought my ticket to enter the complex, the gatekeepers made me wear this MASSIVE, seafoam green, smock-like garment. It covered every inch of my body, from my neck to my wrists and came down to my feet. It was quite embarrassing. And also VERY HOT. And as I was walking around, feet burning, sweating from every inch of my body inside this huge coat-like object, feeling ashamed for having been dressed too immodestly in the first place, I STILL got asked to take selfies with a handful of people. So funny.

Then there were the men.

Especially in Old Delhi, I felt like there were constantly men staring, leering, and making comments as I was passing. I was dressed conservatively, but that didn’t seem to help in this situation. There were a few who followed me, and a couple who ‘accidentally’ bumped into my chest or butt, but mostly it was just people staring with unfriendly eyes. (And yes, there is a difference between friendly and unfriendly staring, and yes you know it when it is directed at you.)

I paid 5 rupees to use the bathroom at the Red Fort (even though I had already paid the exorbitant tourist fee to enter the fort in the first place, not that I’m bitter about it), and as I was standing at the sink, brushing my sweaty hair, I saw a man standing outside the open door watching me in the mirror. OK, maybe his wife is in here and he’s waiting for her, I thought. I met his eyes, and he didn’t look away. I moved to the other side of the counter to get out of his eyesight and carried on. After a few minutes, all the other women who were in the bathroom exited and I followed them. The man was still there, still staring at me.

These are the kinds of things that made me feel so weird about the men in Delhi.

There were also men who spoke English and came up to me in all the various places I visited. Some of them were nice and some of them were creepy; one tried to hold my hand and put his arm around me which was not appreciated; some of them blatantly ignored the fact that I had headphones in and sunglasses on – obviously not wanting to talk. Of course these kinds of things also happen in other countries and in the US. But it was mostly just the volume in such a short time that I had never experienced before.

I can usually handle myself – in a city, around men, around foreign men – but as I sat in the women-only car on the metro heading back to my friends’ house that evening, I was so exhausted, and so grateful to be in a space safe from all those male eyes and male hands. And as I looked around at all the young Indian women in the car with me, I realized that this is what they have to deal with every day. Because my experience was not related to my being a foreigner – Indian women experience the same things, and much worse.

And that is a very heavy thought.

Women in the Delhi metro

All this said, I would give Delhi another chance, given the right circumstance to return. I know that there are lovely things about the city, I just couldn’t find them this time. We’ll see if life brings me here again and if the experience is different.

This post got too long – I’ll have to save the Taj Mahal for the next one (which I promise will be shorter and published soon)! If you read until the end, you are a champion. Thank you!