In some ways, preparing for our next journey feels like many of the other steps we've taken over the last year. We have confirmed our travel arrangements, charted the hours we have left and decided how to spend them, bought some gifts and souvenirs to remind us of our experiences, and enjoyed last-minute explorations and observations. We've packed our bags and made ready for as-comfortable-as-possible travel.
The funny differences are in the length of travel - in our longest bit of travel yet, we leave for the airport at midnight, leave Delhi for Hong Kong at 3:30 AM, arrive in Portland 24 hours after we leave India - and in a sort of sense of finality. After 11 months of open-ended exploration, we are heading home to known places and people, and to obligations that await us.
Although those places are, in theory, familiar, we also know that, like so many other arrivals, there will be some period of adjustment to food, water, weather, and cultural practices. Especially because India has been the most challenging place we have traveled, and the most different from our home and culture. We're left with strong ambivalence: some things we love, and some things we can barely learn to even tolerate.
India has been an experience of sensory overload - visual, auditory, olfactory, and in terms of human contact. India is vibrant, often in ways that are beautiful and perhaps equally often in ways that are chaotic and disorienting, or painful and lodging heavy in the heart. Beauty is as common as filth, centuries old religious practice as present as modern-day suffering.
Our hearts and our understandings have stretched, as we have had daily exercise in balancing compassion and crossness. We've struggled to respond to the real need we see around us, while knowing that if we give money to the hungry child or the mother with tiny baby in front of us, in reality that money will likely go to her "keeper." Our sense of fairness and the value we place on honesty have been rankled when people ask us to pay prices we know are ridiculously inflated; but we know that this comes of an experience of need, and there are some real questions of both global and local economic justice. Almost every day, people have sought to take advantage of our foreignness ("stupid tourists") on scales large and small. Honking horns and shouting touts have made us feel stressed and crabby, but this is just part of the culture of this place, with which Indians live on a daily basis.
Traveling here as Western travelers with such huge (by comparison) resources has called on us to examine our backgrounds, assumptions and choices everyday. As Western tourists, we've also been targets for all sorts of attention, some positive and some pesky. Even the positive (laughter-inducing pictures at the Taj Mahal or the Jamma Masjid with 86 shy and eager Indian families who wanted to document meeting such odd birds as us) becomes tiring after a while.
After all of this, and the months of travel and newness before now, we both predict that home will seem somewhat unreal - how strange (and, frankly, wonderful) it will be to arrive in a place where the streets are quiet and orderly, and where people aren't constantly shouting at us "hello!" or "sir! rickshaw?" or "namaste, madam. Money?" Tap water will be safe to drink, and we can enjoy a salad without wondering if it will come back to haunt us later. We'll encounter fewer stares and questions about where we're from and what we're doing. Returning home, we will regain some privacy and some anonymity, even as we return to places we know and in which we are known.
A friend asked recently how we'd changed over the course of our travels - some? A little? A lot? The newness will take some time to be seen; as traveling in new places has thrown the old into relief, returning to familiar places will highlight the new. We are certainly more aware of the patterns of life in other places, and how "development" makes its creaky way toward something that is (sometimes dubiously) called "progress." Many of our convictions have been strengthened, and many of our assumptions challenged. We're fired up to work more on the issues we've encountered in these places far from home, understanding better the bonds between home and "out there."
As we've neared the end of this phase of our travels, we've both been reflecting on where we've been, people we've met, experiences we've had. And our thoughts have started to skip home ahead of us: Allen's grandmother died a few weeks ago, unexpectedly, and weren't able to be there for the service, so we have been grieving and remembering from afar; thoughts of professional and personal projects are not far from the surface; we're ready to come home and reshape our lives to include work, community, family and friends in a more immediate way than we can from afar. So we have been, in parts and pieces, in many places at once. And though we'll soon enough be rooted again at home, we'll be bringing with us the many ways we have been touched and changed by people and places we've encountered on the long road.
