My Year of Living Draftily

Goodbye India. For now.

With only a few days left in India, I find myself a muddled mass of mixed emotions. On the one hand, my excitement has been slowly building over the last three weeks or so about the prospect of being home. Seeing friends and family is the big attraction, of course: while email, Facebook, Skype and even cellphone have all been fabulous tools to keep the traveler in touch with home base, the electronic world can't yet replace the energy and joy generated in a face-to-face gabfest. Especially if you add wine.

Reconnecting with my lovely little house also gives me butterflies. I've bought it lots of gifts that I can't wait to retreive from boxes that have floated halfway across the planet and await me at home. Not to mention all those I'm carrying with me. I foresee some strained conversations with airline staff in my near future.

My garden! I'm really really hoping something is blooming, though will settle for cherry blossoms on boulevard trees. I think digging my hands into the soil will be very satisfying. Unless it's a big mudbath right now - will have to check conditions before ticking this box.

As much as I'm looking forward to some key comfort foods of home - spinach salad with my own homemade dressing, brunch at Demitasse, Arlene's famous BBQ chicken, butter tarts - I think I'm looking forward even more to cooking. Not because I'm such an avid or even a good cook. I think it's more about regaining some control over what I'm putting in my body. Everything from portion size to intensity of spices to just knowing the standard of hygiene in the kitchen - none of that has been in my control for a year. I've fared remarkably, some say miraculously, well health-wise despite this (thank you, Ducoral - don't leave home without it!), but having access to a refrigerator and knowing the provenance of most everything in it will be a luxury.

But there's lots I will miss of India. To start with, the rock star treatment I get in India. I know it's not for the right reasons - skin colour, assumptions about wealth and status, men's obsession with sex and their assumptions about Western women, etc. - but it still feels damn good to know my mere passing is a screech-worthy event for children throughout the subcontinent, outside of major urban areas. By contrast I head home to a society where, as a short, forty-something female I'm virtually invisible; I sometimes think I'm at greater risk of being hit in traffic in Victoria than I am in India.

Udaipur Photo Tour

[October 31-November 4] Arriving in Udaipur, in southern Rajasthan, one morning early off an overnight train it felt like I'd woken up in a different India. It wasn't just that the streets were teeming with tourists - this was my first foray into Rajasthan and while I'd known there'd be more tourists, I hadn't quite realized the degree of contrast with much less touristy Gujarat, where I'd just come from.

And it wasn't just the profusion of onion domes and  scalloped archways and white and ocher washes that crowded into the skyline view from atop my guesthouse ("Highest rooftop restaurant in Udaipur!"), becoming almost a caricature of an 'exotic' Indian city, a caricature of itself. A city doesn't get to be a James Bond movie locale ("Octopussy") without being a little over the top.

As I wandered through the grand City Palace complex, comprising several different palaces now museums and restaurants and guesthouses and, yes, even a residential palace for the current Raja's family, I got this strange feeling that "I don't belong here." It was the first time I had felt this in India. It's not a feeling I get in many places, I'm a pretty comfortable tourist most everywhere I go. The one other place that produced this feeling in me, and so strongly, was many years ago in Monaco. It's ostentatious display of wealth - rows of designer boutiques, yachts in the harbour, fast sports cars careening around the twisty roads, and the beautiful people to go with it all - made me the Euro-backpacker feel distinctly out of place, tatty, unkempt, low-budget and unwanted for it.

On that first day's wander with Jez, a fellow-traveler from Britain I'd met in the train station that morning, I took in the well-maintained palaces, the manicured lawns, the tasteful terrace restaurants with uniformed waiters, the valets at the boat launch waiting to whisk the well-heeled tourists to their rooms in the Palace Hotel out in the middle of glistening Lake Pichola, and it felt like this wasn't a city that wanted to cater to a mere backpacker like me. I felt out of place.

But as we continued to poke about, Udaipur's multiple charms worked their magic on me, making itself irresistible. Each cityscape and intricate detail was more beautiful than the last, until it was all so sweetly pretty you thought your teeth were going to rot right out of your mouth. I was aided by the enthusiasm of Jez, who'd been struggling to like India in the short time he'd had to get to know it, and found in Udaipur a reason to like it and to want to come back to India.

I also did find Udaipur welcoming to the full range of travelers, once I got past the glossy sheen. My $5/night room in a lovely old building gave me dawn access to what really did seem to be the highest rooftop restaurant in the city.

And Octopussy showing every night, just for those of us who may have missed it in the James Bond pantheon (guilty!). What's not to love!

A short photo tour of Udaipur for a vicarious taste of the quintessential exotic India.