Travel with nobody

Opinion: As a 20 year old, I left Dublin...

As a 20 year old, I left Dublin on a rainy, and emotional, night in February.

For six months.

Alone.

No one to hold my hand during take-off and no one to greet me at my destination; Mumbai.

I was liberated. And with liberation came terror. Who will I eat dinner with? What if I get irrevocably lost somewhere awful, or robbed or attacked? What if there’s something on my face and no one tells me?

I had left Ireland with one objective: Don’t have a plan. My sister pointed out to me that I had a tendency to do things just because they were scary or hard, in some sort of effort to prove myself. She was not wrong.

This was scary. This was going to be hard.

Goodbye Kansas. Hello chaos. My first impression of India was the smell. It was somewhere between a bonfire and slurry. Somewhere in the shadows squawking out phlegm, old men tried to enchant me into their overpriced rickshaws. I’d never felt that vulnerable. And yes there were cows. Everywhere.

India is a country of shocking contrast, between wealth and poverty; openness and hostility; opulence and filth. The only thing that gave me comfort and familiarity in my first day was that they drove on the same side of the road, albeit like tripped out madmen.

On every corner in India there are slack jawed dogs, dripping with heat. I was hassled by scrawny girls with skinny wrists, brothers and nephews mewling on their hips. I heard my first mantra stopped in a traffic jam: “ten rupee ten rupee ten rupee”. I looked away, this the first time of millions.

Most days I walked around like a lunar phenomenon, no one had seen skin so pale. I was on a quest to make friends. But in India, women don’t go out unaccompanied. In their eyes, I was a sight to behold. In the thousands of faces I was white and female, a genuine freak show, and no one had any qualms about having a gawk. I even solicited a gasp or two in some of the more rural areas.

After a while, the novelty of being a spectacle wears thin. There were days when I didn’t want to be stopped, or looked at. Days when I found myself exasperated by the endless curiosity and questions, of being discussed openly by men who were addressing whatever male traveller I found myself with. And there were days when I flat out lost my patience, culminating in a screaming match with a bloke trying to sell me postcards.

But these were the foils to some of the best experiences of my life; riding across the Himalayas on the back of an Enfield Bullet, staying on a houseboat in Kashmir and being screamed at by a tiny old man at 5.30 a.m. because I couldn’t do a handstand. I got confident and discerning; I learned to differentiate between when I wanted to talk to someone and when I just needed to talk to someone, and to choose wisely. I became assured that there is always tomorrow and it could easily be the best day of your life. I learned to laugh at the annoyances.

And it got easier, a few choice phrases in Hindi saved me hours of strife and the occasional whingey e-mail to mates and family gave me strength. Of course, meeting other travellers with the same complaints and praises helped too. Eventually I learned the culture, I came to understand the society and I found plenty of people to tell me when I had something on my face.

By: Katie O’ Mahony