Back from India… For most of this month me and João Maia roamed the states of Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, a trip I’ve been postponing for years because, maybe I was afraid to get disappointed with it. I’ve heard lots of times that you either love or hate India, for the time I’ve been there I discovered that isn’t true, at least for me, you love it and hate it at the same time, and always intensely. You can be deeply in love with it while at the same time grow a kind of visceral hatred, the same sounds can hypnotize and disturb you, the same smells can lure you to an alley and make you run away from it. That’s the beauty of India: there’s no “average”, everything is intense and can affect you in so many ways. And that’s why it’s so exciting and that’s why I’ll be returning there sooner or later.

 

 

In then end I met great people, locals and other travelers, and returned with many great moments on my mind. Like the very last one, just before I returned to the hotel to grab my stuff and leave for the airport, where I spent half an hour at Panchganga Ghat chatting with Rohit, the 14-year old boy I met a couple of days before selling candles at Assi Ghat before going to school. The funniest character you’ll find at any of the many ghats of Varanasi, proud with his new (old) rowboat, with plans of becoming a guide and kept saying he was better than me: after all he lived by the Ganga. If you’re in Varanasi try to find him, and make sure you tell him I sent you.

Throughout the trip I’ve keeping a visual record of each day, I picked some for this post but you can check them all at the little corner for my snapshots. As for the real photos, I still have lots of older photos to work on, and I also want to wait some weeks before I start to look at my photos from India. Hopefully I’ll start to share them here soon.