I finished my placement with Gap Guru in mid August and chose to travel the north of India before leaving home just before going to university. At first this was a decision that I was little weary of making, traveling on my own and being nervous about trains, HUGE distances and not really knowing where to go and what to do. However, having arrived home yesterday, I can honestly say that the last thirty or so days have been some of the most exciting and memorable of my life.
Having left Bangalore on August 11th, I managed to clock in a healthy 150 ish hours enjoying the Indian railways, a further 30 hours on buses and I would estimate a couple of thousand miles worth of disorganised, sometimes impromptu and nearly always exhausting traveling to see India's incredible northern states and sites. My route was a fully unplanned journey from Bangalore to Chennai, Chennai to Delhi (a mild 33 hours,) to Varanasi, then on too Agra, from here back again to Delhi, I then went furthest North to Amritsar, back South to Jaipur, West to Jaisalmer, through the Thar Desert to Jodphur and preparing to return back to Bangalore at Udipur, (easier said than done: with a stop over in Mumbai, this took a total of three days . . .)
So with all this places on my India map, I was able to experience the most varied, diverse and constantly changing of countries I have ever visited.
India has it all in terms of landscape, people, languages, religions, food, heritage, architecture, life style and far more besides. In the last month I've ridden a camel and slept in a desert under a thunder storm, marveled at the Taj Mahal until asked to leave by it's wardens, taken a boat trip at Sun rise down the Ganges, survived Delhi's ridiculously busy streets, shops, markets and taken a safe haven in it's underground system, discussed Sikhism beside the Golden Temple and explored Rajasthan's impressive palaces and temples.
And now that I'm home, I faced dealing with the question "how was India?"
Something I'm never going to be able to properly answer. An honest response, however blunt, would be "go and find out," something I would persuade anyone to do. Having survived a full five and a half months away from home and achieved everything I have in this time, it's incredibly strange to be home again, but it's something that I'm pleased beyond words to have done, India has been amazing and I know I'll miss a land and people that gave me so much.