Overall Thoughts on India

 I’m posting some overall commentary before putting up the location-specific posts for India, since some of it might provide context for a few of the decisions we made along the way and our thoughts on our experience.

I’ll start by saying that India was the country that I thought I was going to enjoy my time in the most and I wanted to love it so badly for so many reasons (my favorite cuisine, knowing so many amazing people from India, etc.). Unfortunately, that was not the case, but not for the reasons that many people assume.

India can definitely be overwhelming to the senses for westerners but overall this didn’t bother me (I just put headphones in when the horns got to me on the street) and I loved experiencing all of the new smells, sights, and sounds!

I also felt very safe the entire time we were there! 

I didn’t have any bad experiences with harassment/staring due to being a woman at all, aside from only one man in Delhi staring on the train, which is less than I experience in that time frame in the states. 

*It’s important to note that Tyler and I were attached at the hip for our entire stay in India (I won’t make conjectures on how my experience could have been different if I was by myself, but it might be good to know for context).

It’s also important to note that we only visited a small sliver of North India (not the right season and not enough time for South India), which is not representative of the huge and diverse country that India is. We spent time in both touristy and non-touristy areas and the quality of our experience definitely varied between those.

The main two aspects of our experience that reduced it’s quality in my opinion were:

1. Harassment from vendors
2. Ingenuine and rude interactions with locals

We experienced so much harassment from vendors and people on the street in the northern cities (the worst in Jaipur, Delhi, and Jodhpur, which are much more touristy). Some days we were harassed 200-300 times in a day, sometimes multiple times by the same person. This usually involved getting up in our faces, yelling at us to buy something or do something, sometimes touching us (not pickpocketing), and often following us for several blocks. We found that saying a firm “no” or just ignoring the person worked equally poorly, and both approaches were seen as an invitation to continue to harass.

We noticed that locals in these areas would also get harassed at times, but far less than us (we obviously stuck out like sore thumbs). While we eventually got more used to this, it definitely made our time less enjoyable and was very stressful. I didn’t eat more than a couple bites of food a day for the first six days because I was so stressed out :/

I do understand that in traveling to these areas, I am coming from a place of extreme privilege and relative wealth. I wholeheartedly support locals needing to make a living and trying to make a living from tourism (especially too considering the detrimental effects of tourism on the environment, culture, and local life). However, in my personal opinion there is a line between trying to make a living and harassment. This became clearer when we went to areas of Vietnam where locals were trying to sell us things, but in a far less aggressive manner. For example, holding out an item and yelling as we walked past but not getting up in our faces, touching us, or following us, and leaving us alone and not asking again after we had given a firm no. Other tourists in Vietnam were complaining about this, but we were so unbothered :)

It was also very difficult to avoid being scammed when trying to use rideshare apps like Uber/Ola. Drivers would demand more money than the agreed-upon price from the app, would charge extra for fees that the app had already included in the total price, and would often times not show up instead of cancelling the ride (so we had to eat the cancellation fee). It wasn’t that much money in the grand scheme of things, but just made the whole experience less enjoyable. We actually preferred public transit for this reason (what we usually take when traveling), even though it was pretty confusing, limited, and unreliable in some places. Chandigarh had an amazing bus system though and Jaipur had a small metro which was nice!

While we did have a few AMAZING interactions and experiences with incredibly kind locals (I’ll make sure to share these), unfortunately the majority of our interactions with locals weren’t super great. Interactions felt either highly ingenuine (people clearly faking niceties to try to sell us something) or rude. While cultural differences in ways of interacting are important to be open minded about, it did feel disappointing and unwelcoming to be met with so much yelling (ex. being yelled at because restaurant workers wanted me to order a more expensive item on a restaurant menu), and certainly didn’t feel representative of the country as a whole.

Although my time in India was a low point of my summer travel, it also contained my absolute FAVORITE travel experience from the entire summer (and probably ever). The Aastha Homestay is nestled deep in the mountains of Great Himalayan National Park in Himachal Pradesh, near Sainj Valley/Ropa. The Aastha Homestay hosts are some of the kindest people we’ve ever had the pleasure of meeting and created a wonderful experience for us! I will create a post all about our time there later, but just wanted to mention how lovely this experience was and how grateful we are for it! Our time here was very very different than the rest of our time in India, in all of the best ways. We talk about how much we miss it alllll the time and are hoping to go back within a few years! 

What I would recommend for a more enjoyable stay in India:

Go with a private guide or a small and authentic tour group

Avoid living a “backpacker lifestyle” and walking around for extended periods of time (increases exposure to harassment)

Try to have pre-arranged transport and avoid Uber/Ola or unreliable methods of public transport

Avoid hostels and go for middle of the road hotels

Try to avoid the touristy areas and venture into less-touristy areas

Go to a homestay!!! I can’t recommend Aastha Homestay enough!!

Despite our negative experiences, I would say that we got to have some very cool experiences and experience a lot more of local, authentic life than most tourists, or even upper class locals usually get to experience.

*We landed late at night in Mumbai and the next day we basically just rode the famous metro (super cool experience), got groceries, and visited Dobi Ghat, the world's largest outdoor laundry.