Follow the Journey

Considering the amount of time left in the trip, it is natural to begin the whole “reflect on your experience” mindset. So here’s one of my reflection branches on my big-trunked tree of an experience. About a year ago I made the decision to spend my fall of 2015 with Carpe Diem, traveling, seeing the world, and all that jazz; which was quite a monumental decision for a young girl living in St. Louis with only 17 years of life in their grasp. With this decision came all the glory and all the “Oo’s” and “Ahs” and the praise for this action of “doing something different”. My family, parents especially, loved to brag about their daughter being so terrifically brave and for being the black kitten amongst a litter of white ones. I must admit I too was easily infected with the boastful epidemic and shamelessly enjoyed pronouncing India loud and clear so it didn’t sound like Indiana State. How could I not? My head constantly dreamt of all the cool things I’d do and all the cool things I’d take pictures of and maybe every once in a while I thought about the emotional and mental affect it would possibly have, but the exotic and romantic materialistic idea of the trip was as addicting as sugar. It’s always a thrill to have something that no one else has, and for me that was India.
Arriving at Camp Angelos I was inevitably thrown into a mix of people who all had the exact same rare pair of pants as me and there was no longer a spark in the phrase “I’m going to India” because the response was now “yeah, so am I”. My personal back story about my big decision to go to India became like a small paragraph in a pamphlet filled with an array of other paragraphs of all the other students traveling the world with Carpe Diem as well. But what a blessing it was to take off my ego-filled sunglasses and read some of those other paragraphs.
The Siva group took off towards India almost three months ago now and all of our individual paragraphs became one big chapter. When people asked us why we were there and what we were doing, we could describe Carpe Diem in perfect unity and we received all the praise and glory once again, this time from a new audience. Before I continue I should point out that when you go to a country that is predominantly one race, you begin to pick out the foreigners pretty quickly and somehow it often seems we get shoved together like a big herd of sheep. It’s very likely that every town has that one really hip backpacker’s café with handmade bags and coffee that okay and is filled with travelers with man buns, giant cameras, and – as the Shiva group likes to call them – crotch pants, which are pants with an unreasonably low-seamed crotch and are not worn by a single Indian person, yet when I put them on for some strange reason I feel like I’m diving right into the culture. However, I do admit they are tremendously comfortable, but I digress.
Sometimes the herding of the sheep is more deliberate than hipster cafes. For example, when reaching the Golden Temple in Amritsar, a place where thousands of Sikhs come to worship and offers lodging for free, we were shuffled into the very special and mysterious Foreigner’s Room. With all the beds shoved together, I found myself staring into the eyes of a man from Ireland or a woman from Holland before I went to sleep each night. The mix of accents and languages in this “Foreigner’s Room” was not one of those dreams I cooked up in my head before I left, but rather an exhilarating and rather unexpected surprise. The thought of meeting other travelers in general had not popped into my racing brain even once, but now it is a memory I hold very close and I’ll tell you why.
One of the very first nights we stayed in Kolkatta, I ventured up an unknown number of stairs to the roof on our hostel to find a rather large group of fellow lodgers sitting in these old, plastic, leg-less, chairs on the ground in a circle. There was a lit handmade candle in a plastic container placed in the middle like they were about to begin some type of ritual. Upon my entrance, the group acknowledged my presence and a man, who I later learned was from New Zealand and with arms covered in tattoos and hair grown to an impressive length that fell down his back, greeted me with “Hello, would like some meat?” while he flicked the ash off his special black cigarette. He pointed to a scrappy looking table with a big fat sum of meat on top. Being vegetarian, I declined, but did, however, tend to a different type of hunger that night.
Next to the man from New Zealand was a bright couple from France and next to them; a young man from Chile, and next to him; a particularly funny guy from Australia. The list goes on with a traveler from the Czech Republic, another from the UK, and even a photographer from Portland, Oregon. I, along with many others from the group, promptly took a seat in a legless chair and joined the party. But it wasn’t just an ordinary house party but rather a collection of stories from people that came from all around the world. The guy from Chile left his home when he was 16 and traveled out into the world alone, the guy from Australia had been volunteering as a nurse at the Mother Theresa House for almost a year now, the old man from Portland had finally launched his photography profession, the tattooed man from New Zealand has been all over the world and stayed in the same hostel in India that he did in the 1980s, and the students from America had chosen Carpe Diem instead of college. Each legless chair held a chapter, and if you string each chapter together they create an awfully long and awfully interesting book. It didn’t start or stop on that roof in Kolkatta either, for there was a chapter I read in Bir about a girl of just 18 named Neema who left her home in Bulgaria to travel India by herself. And there was another chapter on a train from Darjeeling to Haridwar about this guy named Jacob from New York who served in the Israeli military.
Throughout this trip, I can’t seem to put that book down. Every new page is captivating and entrancing for its own special reason. And although each story is different, there is something similar behind them all that I can’t quite put my finger on. Somewhere in the manuscript of each person, the desire to travel came into play followed by the action. In this particular book, for there are thousands, traveling to India became its connecting theme. Maybe it’s something about India, or maybe it’s something unnamed, but somehow I ended up sitting around a candle dripping wax down its side with people so different, yet so similar to me. There’s something special in a traveler’s mind, and no it’s not something I have that no one else has, but that’s part of what makes it so cool.