Road out of Rajasthan

All roads leading out had been severed. Trains had first been diverted, then canceled.

Gujjars, a caste in Rajasthan, were angrily protesting with knives, clubs and old hunting rifles, sitting on the railroad tracks and barricading the roads leading out of the province. In an ironic twist of history, the Gujjars were protesting that they were a lower caste and therefore deserved reservations (akin to affirmative action in the U.S.) in education and government jobs.

Because of the Gujjars' protest, the tourist mecca of Rajasthan was closed for business.

I had spent the past weeks traveling alone after the end of my semester in Hyderabad, India.

There is something both liberating and challenging alone. I enjoyed mooching a free meal and pretending to be spiritual with the Sikhs at the Golden Temple, trolling around lost in Chandigarh, and being bejeweled and bedazzled in Delhi. Alone, you have no one to keep your ill-thought out ideas in check. If you want to walk across a city because you are too gung-ho to take public transport, you can.

With the Gujjars' protest, I was stuck in Bundi, an entirely nice place. Rudyard Kipling stayed here. A medieval hilltop fort from the time of the Rajput warrior-kings and blue buildings give the town a romantic character. There are also two waterfalls in the region, one with a rather interesting cave-shrine to Shiva with a stalactite formation the shape of a cow's udder.

My time in Bundi was nearing an end. I had to catch a flight out of Delhi. A sickly one lane road to Jaipur skirting into the shrub desert, only traversable by private taxi, was the single way out. The driver refused to stop along the way due to brigands.

After arriving in Jaipur late, I took a bus to Delhi. The winter fog around Delhi is thick and ethereal, penetrated only by the sound of blaring truck horns. Usually, it makes the country seem eerily quiet. The cold is piercing, as well, in north India. It may sound incongruous in the hot land of curry and spice, but the cold mist grips you. Your toes remain frozen as you huddle on breezy trains through the night.

I had been in Delhi twice before, and as I had hours till my plane ride, I left the bus when it stopped in a traffic jam on the highway outside the city. A sign pointed to the domestic airport, 8 km away, so I started walking.

In a fashion characteristic to India, Delhi's domestic airport no longer handles most domestic flights. Rather, the international airport does. Multiple people I asked told me it was anywhere ranging up to 27 km. Again, I started walking.

I gave up and hitched a ride on a scooter. The parting words the scooter driver greeted me with as I entered the airport, and left North India, were: “Excuse me, sir. I just want to ask you a question: Is sex before marriage legal in America?”