Setting Off, Off Setting?

“Too often travel, instead of broadening the mind, merely lengthens the conversation.” – Elizabeth Drew

Since first sliding my backpack onto my shoulders at Heathrow Terminal on the 5th of February 2006 I have been on 23 International flights, I was going to work out how many hours that was but started feeling queezey around the 100 mark.

Since that first flight I have become a trained Electrician, And rather than installing old ladies cookers on a daily basis my interests have gravitated towards renewable sources of energy. Now, I want to reassure you dear reader, that however it may come across I am not some new age hippie who backpacks around India, talking about renewable sources of energy, putting flowers in your hair, and weaving baskets out of hemp.

As much as saving the planet makes all of us feel warm and fuzzy inside, The financial gain is of most interest to me. Imagine getting to the end of the year and not having a whopping great big bill from the electricity company, Now if your imagination can even begin to comprehend such a statement – imagine lying on your doorstep, a cheque with your name on it from the electricity company for power that you generated at your house and sold back to them.

I’m slowly getting off topic here, this is a blog about India and traveling dammit! so how does this all tie together? My conscience unfortunately won’t allow me to pick and choose where I want to be sustainable. Looking into it my flight from London to Delhi totals 13,478 km and will pump out an astonishing 1.2 TONS of CO2 into the atmosphere per a person on that flight. A flight which will single handedly negate all the changes I have made to my lifestyle at home for a rather long time.

It’s a fair old way to cycle to Delhi to keep myself carbon neutral, and to be honest I just don’t have the time. So my other option is to offset my carbon emissions (No doubt you have heard all about this on TV) Generally this is done through a 3rd party, you pay someone to plant a bunch of trees (One of a whole host of options possible) and in turn those trees would then, over the course of their lifetime absorb 1.2 tons of CO2, In a round about way making your flight carbon neutral. For a moment I came up with a rather far fetched image of a Virgin Atlantic crewmen backing in a novelty size cork into the aeroplanes exhaust, thus stopping the fumes in their dirty, filthy tracks. Richard Branson, in full pilot gear then steps out of the cockpit and enthusiastically shakes my hand and thanks me for my contribution to our earth saving cork. I’m almost 100% sure that’s not how it works.

Offestting, On the other hand has been likened to giving money to the RSPCA and then going home and kicking your dog. I can see where their coming from, I’m taking the flight and putting the pollution into the atmosphere, that’s the bottom line.

So to offset or not to offset. I think what it comes down to is whether or not I would of flown anyway, and the answer is yes I would of. Even if offsetting carbon emissions is seen as some to be largely pointless, then just look at it as giving money to a good cause.

You Buff Enough?

“Traveling is like flirting with life. It’s like saying, ‘I would stay and love you, but I have to go; this is my station.’” – Lisa St. Aubin de Teran

I Wanted to share with you a nifty little item I found that I will be taking traveling with me for sure. The item in question is called a buff, basically it’s a thin tube of material and, well that’s it. The beauty of the item is that it stretches one way, but not the other. This allows for a range of different uses from a single, simple item.

Bit more on the technical side, A buff is a microfibrous fabric, the weaving method they employ leaves the tube without any seems making it really comfortable when its on your noggin (no pressure points). The fabric also wicks moisture away from your skin keeping you cool in hotter, more humid climates as well as insulates in colder climates. The reason I want to take one is drafts, I can sleep in most places but if I have a cool/cold draft around my neck/ears its like Chinese water torture – going on the basis that the class of trains I’ll be travelling in have no glass in the windows, I’m guessing I can guarantee at least a breeze.

Buff has had its products featured on the US show Survivor, and was worn by some personal heroes of mine Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman on their London to Cape Town odyssey Long Way Down.

I Decided to sit down and see how many different way I could wear my Buff (Somewhat for your enjoyment, mainly to stem my boredom) They range from the mundane (wrist band, Bandana) to freakin’ awesome (Pirate hat, ninja outfit!) But in the end I can take only one thing away from my impromptu photo shoot, I  really need a haircut before I go.

Choosing a backpack with Susan Heller in mind.

“When preparing to travel, lay out all your clothes and all your money. Then take half the clothes and twice the money.” – Susan Heller

Writer Susan Heller from the New York Times supplies today’s quote. It’s fun, light hearted quote – But speaking from my own experience, a more true word has never been spoken. On my initial trip (which lasted about 12 months in total) I took a backpack which was 70L, Rucksack sizes work in litres, as in the amount of litres it would take to fill the thing. It’s hard to imagine how much 70L is, for myself it is at least as I don’t generally measure much else in this manner, But its alot. Actually let’s have a look;

Boarding A Taxi In Fiji

That’s my well worn and much loved bag on the left, It would be an ongoing  love/hate relationship that we came to share with one another. They’re a joy to chuck on your back, straight out the airport without searching for a trolley adding to that sense of freedom. They’re a pain to navigate 5th avenue in Manhattan with, Which one poor lady can attest to after unfortunately stepping out unexpectedly in front of me. As I now weighed twice as much that’s twice as much mass moving forward, and twice as much to stop, poor lady never even saw me coming.

Now I imagine seasoned travelers may be snickering about my naivety the first time round. But hey, I thought I might have needed that winter coat in Fiji (See Photo Above!) I learn’t my lesson quick and by the end of the trip I had streamlined my gear to less than 50% of the stuff I started off with. The following year I spent going around Europe I actually got my supplies down to a small wheeled suitcase, the kind you see business men frantically pulling behind them at any airport in the world. The upside was that didn’t need to check the thing in. Although convenient it for me at least, lost some of it’s charm – love it or loath it the backpack is part and parcel of the adventure. When your away for long periods of time it becomes one of very few constants that you experience, something familiar to return to at the end of the day. A backpack becomes more than a piece of luggage.

So this time around the backpack is making its triumphant (and overdue) return!

Hurrah!

Although I still own my big backpack, taking it is not really an option (I think a family of four might have moved into it by now anyway, selling goods out the front pocket) I needed to go small, Much smaller. I would like to say I did some research, a few sums and came out with a figure of 35L for my new backpack, but I couldn’t do that – I would be lying to you all. My technical calculations went something like this – if I got rid of 50% of my stuff the first time round, than get a bag 50% of its size right? Good, glad the hard bit is out of the way. Slipping into a bag 35L at my local camping shop was reminiscent of putting on a school bag, the thing is small. Where on earth was I going to put my scarf and woolly hat just in-case India is struck by a sudden and freak blizzard leading into the summer? and although many thousands of miles from the ocean where were my snorkels and flippers going to fit?

Of course being a realist a 35L pack was ideal, small enough to have on my back without causing too much discomfort, I could take it with me into bathrooms stalls as this time around I would be traveling alone and would have nobody to watch my stuff. After a little hunting on the Internet I found this little bag by Karrimor (The makers of my first pack) for a bargain price £20, I’m chuffed.

Now lets see what goes into the thing! I got the half the clothes bit done Mrs Heller, Just the small problem of getting twice the money.

Lonely Planet, Why do you mock me

” Kilometers are shorter than miles. Save gas, take your next trip in kilometers.” – George Carlin

I would like to start off by saying I’m a big fan of lonely Planet guide books. Perhaps the best resource for a backpacker in my humble opinion. Started by Maureen and Tony Wheeler 1973, the Wheeler’s saw a gap in the market for people who wanted to travel independently and penned their first book – Across Asia on the Cheap. The name lonely Planet comes from the Joe Crocker song Space Captain (The Lyrics actually say Lovely planet) The BBC bought over 75% of Lonely Planet in 2007.

One running joke is that the only thing a Lonely Planet guide is good for, Is to let the reader in on where to avoid. Which is largely due to an influx of tourists to specific restaurants, landmarks, tours, etc. listed within the books.  I would go along with that to some extent, Certainly when it comes to accommodation a rule of thumb is to stay well away from anywhere Lonely Planet recommended. Too often once a hostel gets into a guidebook, especially one as widely circulated as lonely planet (6 Million books sold worldwide annually) They begin to rest on their laurels and that my friends, Is how you end up sleeping 2 metres from a fully operational freight train track with cockroaches on your face at 3am…but that’s a story for another blog. Once you start really looking though, your rewarded with these small, lovely, undiscovered places who don’t get the recognition they perhaps deserve, and these are the people who go out of their way to make your stay a pleasant one, and the ones I go out of my way to support and promote.

Lonely Planet’s guide to India was first published in 1981, we are now on the 12th Edition almost 30 years later. The first thing that strikes you upon seeing said guide is it’s size, it is, as far as guide books go clinically obese. I appreciate that all of the information in the guide is more than likely necessary and informative, But it’s a whopping 1235 pages! It literally weighs a kilo, that’s over 2lbs! In fact picking it up again now it’s laughably big, and whats worse none of the places I’m going to appear after page 427. What am I going to do with the other 800 odd pages?

The little maps and public transport guides I really do find indispensable. I guess I could cut the book in half and take only the half I need with me, But I’m unusually fond of my book collection – especially my travel section with tattered edges and notes scribbled in corners serving as a subtle reminder of adventures past, I’m not sure how half a pristine and half a battered copy of the same book would look on the shelf once I’m home. I also have this image if me vigorously wrapping the remaining half of the guide in sellotape as it falls apart on me mere hours into my trip. I think it’s safe to say that’s a ridiculous idea. I could buy a Rajasthan specific guide book but that come in at £15, add that to the guide I own already and its almost £35 on guide books! £35 and I’m not even off my sofa yet.

I’l report back once I figure something out.

Setting Forth.

“If you reject the food, ignore the customs, fear the religion and avoid the people, you might better stay at home.” – James Michener

Now things get fun, I can get the maps out, the guide books, scour the internet and get stuck in. Upon further research I discover India is a really big country, more so than I realised. Your modern map is actually rather distorted – the need to put a round surface (the earth) onto a flat one (your piece of paper) The outcome gives you this stretched perspective. This is what’s known as Mercator projection [1]. For an accurate and scaled view of the earth we use the lesser known and seen Gall-Peters projection [2].

There we go,

Noticed everything looks much more compact, but this is accurate and gives you an appreciation of how big Africa, Australia and South America is, and just how small Greenland, the US and us Brits are – we could fit our little island into the bottom fifth of India.

So with the map in front of me, and a rather (perhaps overly) comprehensive Lonely Planet guide. Where to go, where to go? Traveling differs from a summer holiday as traveling comes with this urge to move, moving through a country is certainly a fulfilling experience even at home. So with that in mind it would not be 3 weeks in Delhi.

So where would it be 3 weeks of? Waiting for my embrace, laid before me is Delhi’s Red Fort, The Taj Mahal, the mountainous region of the Darjeeling, the backwaters of Kerala, the desserts of Rajasthan, the Bollywood scene in Mumbai, The burning Ghats of Varanasi? This, I think you will agree, will take some careful consideration. I would need another lifetime to see all that India offers let alone less than a month. A month sounds like a long time, But it creates its own restrictions and Limitations. When your in a country 3.8 million Km2 (Compared to 130 000Km2 here in England) a journey between towns and cities, using my preferred methods of transport at least, can be one of days rather than hours. This means you can only get so far away from where you start. The journey, ideally has to follow a progression from my port of arrival, to as many places as I hope to see in the most efficient manner without criss-crossing the country, eventually bringing me back to where I started. Nice and easy then….

Now at this point it’s easy to wonder off to my local STA Travel, Hand over my money and get them to book me on a tour and be done with it. Let the planning be someone else’s problem! The planning is the daunting bit surely? They’ll make sure I see all the best stuff right? Book my hotel, book my transport, tell me where to eat, tell me who to talk to – or who not to talk to.  Quickly the idea becomes less appealing. I don’t knock the companies nor the people that use them. But STA, I shan’t be needing your services on this occasion.

That means every last detail will be up to me, Whilst daunting it’s also really liberating – Besides, The internet is a wonderful and amazing resource which makes the role of places like STA argubaly redundant. A website called Indiamike.com had been an absolute gem of a find and major resource which has helped me no end in finalising and fine tuning my plans, if you need help these guys are the experts. I also use TripAdvisor, Matador (For inspiration) and of course plain old Google mixed with a bit of curiosity.

The plan is to travel like your average middle class Indian citizen, using India’s public transport to get around the north of the country. This includes (As far as I can work out) Tuk Tuk’s, Buses, Private cars, airplanes, motorbikes, trains and, if I’m lucky – Camel. But this is all hearsay, no doubt India with throw me some curve balls. After much Deliberation I have come to the following decision*

1. Delhi (The nations busy capital)
2. Jaisalmer (Located to the far west, quite close to Pakistan actually – But we’ll ignore that for now)
3. Jodhpur (The Blue City, Temples, forts and palaces)
4. Udaipur (Mentioned in Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book And the setting for 007′s Octopussy)
5. Varanasi (The spiritual heart of India, and one of the oldest cities in the world)
6. Agra (Home of the Taj Mahal….and not much else apparently)
7. Delhi (This is the bit where I fly back)

*Itinerary subject to change, this is after all – India

My original plan was to go east, towards Varanasi, Darjeeling and perhaps Nepal. I abandoned this for a couple of reasons. Mainly I think I was going all that way because I’m a Wes Anderson fan and not much else.

I’m really pleased with what I’ve come up with, I’ll mainly be in the state of Rajasthan, The name comes from the Rajput warrior clan present in Rajasthan who, for more than 1000 years have controlled this corner of India.

I can’t really say much else about it at the moment, from talking to people and hearing their stories I have to keep my plans loose, go with the flow and be prepared to turn left when I thought I was going right. A thing to bear in mind where ever you go, Is that a foreign country is not there to make you feel comfortable, it exists to make it own people comfortable. If you can embrace that, even a little bit -You’ll be fine.

Namasté.

“I should like to spend the whole of my life in traveling abroad, if I could anywhere borrow another life to spend afterwards at home.” – William Hazlitt

Good little quote eh? Almost 200 years old but completely timeless. I’m not sure how it happened, but at some point traveling became a major past time for me (If you can call it that) constantly reading, researching, planning and looking ahead to the next ‘adventure’. I couldn’t tell you why I find traveling so appealing because I don’t know the answer myself. Abroad I get immense pleasure from the things I would find almost excruciatingly painful and boring at home, bus journeys, cheap food, idle conversation, walking everywhere – everywhere.

But I love it, and for quite awhile now I had been ignoring my itchy feet. The past couple of years I have been lucky enough to see my fair share of Europe, and even became quite fond of those Germans in the process. It’s good fun, excellent in fact. But it’s very safe isn’t it? Not once in weeks was I forced to at least try use another language, or wave my arms about rather wildly above my head, attracting a rather small and curious crowd, to indicate my intent on buying a bottle of water. No, I need to get my feet wet – the deep end, sink or swim (OK enough of the water based analogies)

So with my rather swanky ‘Times Atlas of the World’ on my lap I began to run my eyes over our wonderful little planet we call home. No part I would deem off limits, not a single country in fact – everywhere has there merits so I was looking with an open mind. I couldn’t help noticing this big gap east from to Sudan all the way to Singapore in south east Asia where I had never been. Surely something interesting would be in there for me?

Turning to page 88 of my atlas entitled Asia/Middle east I quickly realised exactly why I hadn’t been to this part of the world. It was a smorgasbord of places that your mother certainly, if not sternly, warned you about. Israel, Myanmar, Iraq, Iran and that’s before you get onto the ominous ‘-stans’, Pakistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan – the list goes on. It turns out I’m quite fond of my head being firmly affixed to my shoulders so I ruled those out. There was however one Country still glaring at me and quite obvious.

India.

As much as I love travel, and I love travel. India was a whole new can of worms, A can that I admit I was not 100% sure I wanted to open just yet. But I couldn’t fault it, at some point we’ve all been exposed to the culture of India and it did look colourful, loud and appealing, an unknown quantity.

Il share some quick facts about India with you now, Largely because of my love of facts;

• The number system we use today was invented in India
• India is the largest Democracy on Earth & sixth Largest country
• The game of Snakes & Ladders is of Indian origin as was previously known as Mokshapat dating back to the 13th  Century
• India has the most Post Offices in the world
• The Indian Railway is the largest employer in the world, over 1 million employees and growing.

Flight booked, India here I come.

So whats this you have stumbled on? Well its a log of my trip, but rather than starting it on day one – I’m starting before I leave. Not everyone gets the opportunity to travel, so hopefully they will be able to see what goes into a trip like this. Hopefully It’ll be fun, and no doubt hard – but overall a rewarding experience. I urge you to please leave a comment below, whether your a friend, family member or stranger – I defiantly want to involve you all in this as much as possible, plus well, I want to know at least 1 person is reading the bloody thing.

Image courtesy of Trey Ratcliff