However, I was told by a man who knew the region well that as a woman traveller India might not be the best destination for my first solo venture. I took is advice, and went to Nepal instead.
There I met Ali who would become one of my closest friends, a brother really. Ali had just finished hiking the Pacific Crest Trail the previous summer, and during our treks in the Himalayas, his stories from his adventure on the trail sparked the dream in me.
The next five years, as has been documented on this blog, were spent saving and planning for the day when dreams of hiking the PCT and finally arriving in India would become a reality.
From the beginning, Adam and I have been told we would love India and hate India. It has been built up to be this
monolith of a country. We heard horror stories of getting a visa at the Bangkok embassy, where monks and Westerners alike shouted and pushed their way through lines fighting to obtain and submit the appropriate paperwork. We were told that one wrong answer on the rather lengthy visa application could have you automatically denied, even though you already paid the fee. We had heard stories of arriving and being grabbed and hassled and thrown into taxis that tell you your hotel has been burned to the ground and you must go to the hotel they take you to... The list goes on...
Our experience with India has been somewhat different, although it's still early.
While the visa process was daunting (more because of all of the horror stories we read), our experience at the embassy in Hanoi was smooth, if not entirely logical. We were both scolded for not putting our middle names on the application form (even though there was no place that asked for them, it counts as a given name), and we cowered like children apologizing for the oversight. We were then told that they were not issuing 6 month visas, only 3 month visas, which was fine with us. We left our passports at the embassy for a week, and when we returned to retrieve them, after a brief moment in which they thought they had lost them, we were handed our passports with our visas. I had been approved to stay in the country for 4 months, and Adam for 3 months. To the best of my knowledge, there is no such thing as a 4 month visa, but hey, that's India.
As our plane descended into Bangalore, Adam and I ran through our most chaotic airport experiences - in Haiti, Nepal and Ghana specifically - to mentally prepare ourselves for the chaos that would surely ensue.
But then we landed in Bangalore. And it was peaceful, and easy, and about as clean and orderly as any city I've seen. And I began to think, I'm not in India just yet.
Our first days in Bangalore were uneventful. I was sick, and got to know my room better than any part of the city.
When it was time to leave Bangalore, we needed to take an auto-rickshaw from our hotel to the bus station. Our driver, Kumar, kindly gave us our first taste of the India we were looking for. I won't give the whole play by play, but suffice it to say that the bus company we were supposed to go to based on what had been untidily scrawled on our ticket (SRA Travels) didn't actually exist which left poor Kumar in a state of stress and confusion about how to get us to the appropriate bus stand in the mass of chaos. He pulled over and got out of his rickshaw at least 10 times to get directions, and most people seemed to tell him it did exist but was just a very small company. Many people even pointed him in a direction, which is funny, since SRA Travels really doesn't exist. People would walk up to our rickshaw in traffic and offer help, make calls on their cell phones, etc. It seemed like the whole city was trying to help us find our way.
Luckily, we had a cell phone that we had just gotten earlier in the day to make traveling easier. (Although, getting a cell phone in India is, as might be expected, full of bureaucratic hoops. We had to provide passport and visa documents, be photographed, and we were supposed to have a "friend" in Bangalore to reference, but our salesman kindly agreed to be our "friend" since we have none). Anyway, Kumar took our phone, made several frantic calls and texts, and eventually learned that our travel company had been incorrectly written. He managed to get us to the bus station in plenty of time, but he looked like he had aged ten years in the process.
Now we're in India, we thought.