Exploring India

Agra, home to the world-famous palace and burial site, the Taj Mahal. Here we met the first friend of our travels, Nate. A chef by trade, Nate told us of how he’s lived in Berlin for the last seven years after moving from Cambridge. He’d been solo travelling India for some time and was pretty seasoned in how to get around whilst fending off opportunists. Nate was a real travelling type with a calming demeanour and a warming aura, a spider-web tattoo in one ear, several facial piercings, further body tattoos and these wonderfully colourful headpieces. Up before the crack of dawn, Kea, Nate and I experienced one of the world’s wonders together. The sun rose at 7.00am with a gentle greeting to the day ahead and before long its musky yellow began to light the morning sky. By 7:30am the sun had transformed the white marble of the southeastern corner of the great mausoleum into gold. A breathtaking sight. The Taj Mahal, one of the seven wonders of the world We left by 9:00am, gladly...

As I sit on the train from Agra Fort to Jaipur on day three of our journey, we have already encountered what makes this giant country unique. And finally, a moment to be able to reflect and put proverbial pen to paper. Our flight from London Heathrow to New Delhi set the tone for what we were to expect for the first part of our trip. Up at the crack of dawn, we proceeded to catch the transfer bus to Heathrow Terminal 2. Like always, you really don’t need to be at the airport so early anymore but because everyone’s Dad insisted on getting to the airport four hours before a flight when you were a child, the tradition still seems to ring true no matter how old and autonomous you are. In fact, you know the times are changing when your mum offers you a plastic bag for your liquids three times before saying farewell but when you arrive at the airport they are no longer a thing (due to a new machine that can do something probably strange but ever so efficient when scanning your bags). Anyway,...