The Traveling Rollercoaster

No matter how many times I have thought about it myself, or talked with other travelers about the roller coaster of emotions when traveling, I have not been able to stop myself from going through highs and lows during my trip. I find that it is much more pronounced than during my normal day-to-day life back home. Perhaps this is part of the allure of travel. The down moments make the highlights extraordinary, and I always feel changed by the experience. Last week at this time, I was literally counting the days until my flight home. The amount of trips from city to city in the past two months has been exhausting, and I found myself longing for home. I spent the weekend (extended into this week) at home in Mahableshwar, and even took a trip to my family’s lake house on Lake Tapola for my uncle’s birthday. It was exactly what I needed to get back into the swing of things and I’m now counting the days until I’m forced to get on the plane, and leave India. After looking through pictures of the last year, I am slightly apprehensive about returning home to the life I was leading when I left. It seems so distant and far away now. Now that I’m fairly used to things over here, it almost seems like I wouldn’t fit in, at least in the same way. I’m sure that in reality, I’ll jump back into the swing of things right away, but I’ve been surprised at how different I feel, just in the last week. When I was in Brazil in 2006, I was there for twice as long, but the change in cultures, and my day-to-day life was not as different as it is over here. I think a lot of this is because my social life takes a large portion of my time in Seattle, and here it is largely non-existent outside of my family gatherings. In other news, I was in my first accident on the way back to Pune from Mahableshwar. When I arrived here, nearly every car that passed would raise my heart rate. I was not used to being missed by mere inches and continuing normally down the road. Once, while walking in Goa, I was knocked on the shoulder roughly, and turned around to discover the culprit was a bus. Since those first few weeks, very little phases me, and I’ve lost the fight or flight instinct when cars pass closely by. The day before yesterday, I was in the backseat of a car headed down to Pune, and dozed off while listening to my Ipod. I was awakened as the car braked sharply, but I found that even in the midst of the accident, I was quite calm. It wasn’t until I actually saw the two guys in front of us fly off the motorbike that I realized this was a real accident, not another close call. Thankfully, everyone was fairly alright, minus a few scrapes and bruises. A small price to pay for getting rear ended by a car when no one is wearing a helmet. The car actually fared worse, and started leaking radiator fluid, so we overheated and had to pull over again 20K down the road. We were stuck for a few hours but eventually I made it to Pune.