I've written and rewritten this paragraph again and again, never quite hitting the right words, so I've come to the conclusion that I should just come out and say it, plainly and clearly: I like carrying my life on my back. To have all my clothes in a bruised up backpack with rain covers and water bottles and other items from any traveler's panoply of little treasures poking out of the side.
So, after my work at Deer Park waned to a close, and before I met up with my family in Delhi, I endeavored, on little more than a wing and a prayer, to see a part of India I hadn't seen before: the South. With not really a plan, and only a vague idea of how to get to the town my friends were in (Gokarna), I lit off for the South.
Much has been written about the benefits of backpacking; in fact, the lifestyle of traveling, almost like that of living in a van, has turned into this hip form of being indigent, a sort of chosen and thereby holy (or at least hedonistic) poverty. And while it's easy to disregard these portrayals cynically, it sort of turns out to be true. In my experience traveling, these things, almost out of commercials, just coalesce:
Oh look, I'm leaving in a shack directly on the beach for a dollar a day. Oh, that friendly Israeli I play matkot with is drinking lemon nana with me on the beach. Oh, my hostel has eight puppies who play with my shoes and scamper down to the water with me.
Pervading all of these things however, was both a sense of unreality as I lived through them, and a retrospective sense of unreality even in my recollection. As if these things were too sundrenched, too vibrant, to really have happened to me. But they did.
I've always prided myself on being an active person. Someone who would fall into discontent without things to do and work on and struggle with. The most surprising thing for me, about this whole ordeal, was just how content I was to stop everything and live in this hazy land, the commercial before the product is seen.
Regardless, there has been something slowing in my time traveling South, something steadying and consoling. That when I get caught up or slog through things, I can remember how little I'm happy with, and how much might be one backpack away from coalescing around me.
So, after my work at Deer Park waned to a close, and before I met up with my family in Delhi, I endeavored, on little more than a wing and a prayer, to see a part of India I hadn't seen before: the South. With not really a plan, and only a vague idea of how to get to the town my friends were in (Gokarna), I lit off for the South.
Much has been written about the benefits of backpacking; in fact, the lifestyle of traveling, almost like that of living in a van, has turned into this hip form of being indigent, a sort of chosen and thereby holy (or at least hedonistic) poverty. And while it's easy to disregard these portrayals cynically, it sort of turns out to be true. In my experience traveling, these things, almost out of commercials, just coalesce:
Oh look, I'm leaving in a shack directly on the beach for a dollar a day. Oh, that friendly Israeli I play matkot with is drinking lemon nana with me on the beach. Oh, my hostel has eight puppies who play with my shoes and scamper down to the water with me.
Pervading all of these things however, was both a sense of unreality as I lived through them, and a retrospective sense of unreality even in my recollection. As if these things were too sundrenched, too vibrant, to really have happened to me. But they did.
I've always prided myself on being an active person. Someone who would fall into discontent without things to do and work on and struggle with. The most surprising thing for me, about this whole ordeal, was just how content I was to stop everything and live in this hazy land, the commercial before the product is seen.
Regardless, there has been something slowing in my time traveling South, something steadying and consoling. That when I get caught up or slog through things, I can remember how little I'm happy with, and how much might be one backpack away from coalescing around me.