FRidh's blog

Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought -- Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Final weeks in India

It's four weeks now that I am back in Sweden. June the 2nd I arrived back home in Gothenburg. It was quite a change, for sure! But it was definitely good. I really enjoyed my 4.5 months India experience, but after some time I was starting to feel like being home again. Let's give a short summary of the last month or so in India.

I spend almost a month in McLeodGanj, a town a liked and disliked. There are so many foreign tourists, that you don't have the feeling you're in India. And this is both a positive and negative thing I found. Anyway, during my stay there I met again several travelers from before which was very nice! It's good to see some familiar faces once in a while. After McLeodGanj - including a night at the Snowline Cafe - I headed to Srinagar, Kashmir. It was quite a long bus journey; first a 5 hour ride from Dharamsala to Jammu, and after that a night bus from Jammu to Srinagar. While the ride was supposed to take about 12 hours it took in fact 16 due to two punctures, and a driver deciding to sleep it off instead. Unfortunately for him the police didn't agree with him and put him to work. The ride turned out to be really nice, with amazing views and nice discussions.

In Srinagar I spend only a couple of days. Somehow the city didn't appeal to me. I think it was because it is way too touristic without offering me any reasons to stay. So, after Srinagar I took the amazing two-day bus ride to Leh, Ladakh! Amazing views, and nice dangerous small roads. Awesome road.

Ladakh is beautiful. Certain locations are simply stunning. It is a pity though that all the valleys are full of military bases. This does destroy some of the immersion. It's also unfortunate that Leh has been growing so much; big concrete hotels are appearing everywhere and they simply don't fit in. Since I had quite some work left on my thesis I wasn't able to explore much of Ladakh but I will definitely come back here for trekking, or maybe some teaching? We'll see!