Is This Kind of Travel Worth It?

Leh, Ladakh

Current Photos of North India

The previous post begs a question. If it's so 'grueling' out here in India (or anywhere in the developing world) is the adventure worth the discomfort? Are the deprivations you might suffer here, but can say goodbye to when you return home, akin to going on a fast from eating just so you enjoy food that much more because you're starving? Not at all. Oddly enough, pain is supposed to be one of the most difficult memories to conjure in our heads. Even a few days after a bus ride like the one I mention below you can laugh easily at the distress.

No, being out here you have a good chance of living a day worth telling a story about. At home, while working (unless you're in an exceptional situation), one day, week or month can bleed into another with no more to talk about than having seen an good movie or the final, climactic episode of American Idol. (No disrepect, those kinds of things are only so inspiring to me.) Since we've been on the road, at least once a week or so we have some kind of epic day. We see or experience something I never would have expected to see.

In Shimla, a city I mentioned in an earlier post, we were sitting under a little gazebo overlooking the main part of town. A cloudburst turned into a hailstorm. This grew into the most serious hailstorm I'd ever seen. What made it extra special was the fact that all the roofs in Shimla are made of corrugated metal and the buildings are very tightly packed. The sound of that hail grew to such a crescendo that I could not hear myself yell at the top of my lungs. It actually scared the heck out of me but, as soon as it stopped, everyone under the gazebo laughed and cheered and high-fived because they knew they just saw and heard something rare and powerful.

In Rishikesh we had to trek across a bridge four times a day going to and from yoga. Every time we crossed, we had to contend with religious pilgrims, holy men, scooters, cows and aggressive monkeys who'd try to steal any bag that looked like it might have food in it. This, while traversing an eighty-year old cable suspension "foot bridge" a hundred feet above the River Ganges. That commute bore little resemblance to my daily walk from the parking garage to my office in SF.

Wallace Stegner, a writer who emigrated from the pastoral East of the US to the wide-open and vast West, said that a key difference between the two regions was the scale. A person raised in the East had no vocabulary or relative comparisons for the spaces and mountains, colors and textures of the West. To understand its majesty he once said, "You have to get over the color green. You have to quit associating beauty with gardens or lawns; you have to get used to an inhuman scale; you have to understand geological time."

In many ways, for a person raised in a small Mid-western farm town then anchored in the beautiful but admittedly provincial boutique city that is San Francisco, inching my way through the Hindu heartlands or the Buddhist valleys of the Himalayas presents a similar disjunction in my ability to frame my experiences.

When you walk a longer distance, as Tami and I did a few days ago between the small villages of Hunder and Disket in the Nubra Valley, you know how miles feel. You can walk for hours and you don't pass a mountain by, you just change your perspective on it. We did the outbound trip in a bus, but only when we walked did I realize that you could actually see each town's monastery from the other's. On the bus, things happen and scenery passes too quickly to make such connections. This is part of what I think Stegner meant by scale differences. My experience has little to compare to the vast silence of a huge, still Himalayan valley. A thousand years ago and more, kingdoms , with their own complete histories, rooted themselves in these valleys. The remains and people are still here for anyone curious enough to see.


Disket Monastery From a Distance




Part of Disket Monastery and the Nubra Valley









My words, at best, communicate a few, token details about what it's like to travel in the developing world. All five senses are assaulted or triggered in new ways in a place like India. At the time I wrote this, we were resting in late afternoon heat on sand dunes surrounded by mountains whose peaks have held snow for all human memory. Until I traveled there, I may never have known that a place of that particular beauty and majesty existed.

A friend in San Francisco, Shawn, sent a note that got me thinking about the worth of this kind of travel. Shawn is one of the sharpest people I know and lives a very full life back home so, when he poses a question, I take it to heart. In a recent e-mail he wondered to us and to himself:

"Yes, I really do think about you every day...about what you’re doing, what it means to you, to the people you meet, to us spectators. I imagine it’s something how Burn Night [edit. at BurningMan] used to be, with everybody wondering What Does It All Mean (if anything). What I do know is this: I can’t end my life NOT having had an adventure like that. This damn western cocoon is a little too comfortable."

In many ways, his words summarize the main part of my motivation for taking this journey. There are plenty of people in the Western world working their careers, having families and following the path of life that's been laid out for a long, long time. Again, I mean no disrespect to those on that path. I wouldn't be here is someone didn't choose to have me as part of their family. (Thanks, mom!) But, because I've been lucky enough to travel before, I am acutely aware that this is a vast and hugely varied planet. To not explore some of it and try to connect with those who live differently than I seems like a crippling limitation of what it means to live.

We are incredibly lucky to have been born in the US. The opportunities we can pursue might as well be magic to a majority of people in this world. By coming to a place like this and keeping an open heart, that magic becomes palpable to me in a way that simply is not possible at home.

No question, being out here is worth it.