It's been a long time since my last blogpost because it's been a long time since I had time to write one. I've been on the road and in places without much internet access for a long time now. I look at a map of India with some bemusement. I didn't intend to do this. I didn't intend to visit all these places. How did it happen? It happened because some nice people I met invited me to visit their native places, and I thought, ok. And then once I started, I perhaps found it hard to resist opportunities to continue, because there is something addictive about being the sweaty solo traveller in strange places, trying to communicate with Hindi, Marathi and now a little Bangla, none of which come out in an entirely usable form all the time. I have my suspicions about all these fat guidebooks you get which provide information about tourist attractions in every town in every state of India. I think maybe they're offtrack. You don't need such fat guidebooks, at least not for India. You only need four things: the ability to recognise touts and say nahi to them, a few words of the local language to back up your point, the willingness to ask every person on the street if they know the place you're going to and how to get there, and acceptance of the fact that you're going to be late. That's my theory anyway. And if you're going to ignore the local advice people repeatedly give about trains - which is "always book your seat a couple of weeks in advance" - then maybe you need one more thing: enough padding at the rear end to stand long bus journeys across hundreds of miles of potholes. My suspicion about these guidebooks is that they exist merely to enable a small number of travellers to continue travelling indefinitely - funded by the proceeds from the sales of the fat guidebooks they write.
It's been a lot of fun, these past weeks. But I'm now reaching a point where I'm tired of this way of being. I'm gathering no moss, and I miss the old mosses I've left behind. Maybe there's an irony in the fact that so many westerners come to India to lose their old moss, when the key lesson that Indian society might teach them is how important our moss is. I'm going back to find mine.
