End of the Trip: Return to Mussoorie

The past 2 weeks have been pretty uneventful. Somewhere along the line, after over 4 months, traveling in India ceased to be exciting, so I bought a ticket back to the States. However, I'm not going home. I still want to keep adventuring, I just want to do it in my own country. Honestly, traveling in India has made me realize how little I know about the United States and Canada (both, in their own way, where I come from), and I got the urge to explore them as I am exploring this country. I also just read a book by Bill Bryson called The Lost Continent, about re-discovering small-town America. I can certainly relate to that after my trail experiences. However, there's so much I haven't seen. Much of California is unknown to me - even though I grew up there, I never explored it as an adult. And so many other places - New Mexico, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, Oregon, Washington, and pretty much all the midwest.

Some of you know that I was planning on working on organic farms in Europe after India. But I suddenly found myself wanting to hike the Appalachian Trail again, and go to the Trail Days, and do trail magic. When I finished my hike last year, I thought I was done with heavy-duty hiking for a while. For maybe a year. I still wanted to do the Pacific Crest in 2010. I put down the backpack, and picked up a different one for traveling.

A well-documented phenomenon that occurs among thru-hikers is "Springer Fever" - referring to Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the Appalachian Trail in Georgia. I didn't think it would happen to me, but as soon as the season starts to roll around (as it is now), you get the itch to throw on your pack and start walking north again. It's the weirdest thing. I don't plan on hiking the entire trail again, just a quarter of it, the famous 500 mile section of Springer to Damascus. I'm excited to hike that section again, especially because it includes the Smokies. I'm aiming to be in Damascus around the middle of May, when the Trail Days festival begins in that town.

After Trail Days, I'm planning on hopping in the car with a Trail friend of mine, Bound, and making our way across the country to Montana. Then another friend of mine, Low, wants to do the 500 mile Colorado Trail, and I would very much like to join him.

I also just finished the book Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and now I really want to go to Alaska. It's almost amazing to me that I'm 25 and have never been there - like a whole country inside another country. Also - British Columbia in Canada, any many other places besides in that country. It's going to take me years to do all the adventuring I need to do.

Mussoorie is nice as ever, but it's lost a bit of the feeling it had when I was here last. I'm in the Internet cafe owned by my friend (and former neighbor) Balai, and he was like "last year was fun, wasn't it?" I'm telling you it was - it really was. All the good friends we had, our awesome house in Sister's Bazaar, the parties we would throw...

Now Sister's looks pretty deserted and all the westerners I knew have moved on. I'm staying with my friend Vikas, but he lives on Woodstock school-owned property and I'm not allowed to be there, and apparently suspicions are being aroused, so I asked Balai if I could crash at his place for a while. Most likely I will be able to, but they have a family friend visiting so he just has to make sure. I'm also visiting my friend Ravine at his house tonight and will probably try to shamelessly elicit an invite to sleep over from him.

So here's what my schedule looks like, I think:

1. March - Stay with Trail friends in Florida and Georgia
2. April - Hike from Springer to Damascus
3. May - Trail Days and road trip
   
4. June - Colorado Trail?
   
5. July - Back home in San Diego?

If anyone wants to do a road trip that might include Canada and Alaska, let me know.

Sister's Bazaar

Hampi

Pulled into Hampi yesterday. I always heard you have to allow like 2 weeks to absorb this place, but after a day I pretty much feel like I've done what Hampi offers. If I was still in climbing shape and had some friends here, I could spend a while bouldering. There's so much climbing here you could never do it all if you climbed every day for 2 years. And I've been in India too long to get excited about temples.

I think I'm getting traveler's burnout. I have a pretty strong desire to get back to the states and do a bit of the trail, then hopefully do a Canada roadtrip with some trail friends. We'll see what happens.

I may only have a couple weeks more left here, since my friend Rachna's parents, in Delhi, have my greencard which I need to get back to the United States, and they are leaving at the beginning of March.

Things that never bothered me before are starting to get to me. Hampi is a real tourist trap. I don't really like the tourists here, and I was talking to an exceptionally (as in being an exception) down to earth guy about that. It's comforting to know it's not just me, that a lot of these people are so annoying, you don't need to interact with them to be annoyed. Take this one guy who was just sitting near me in the common area outside this hotel. Out of nowhere, he puts down his book (Nietzsche, of course), and says, with an aire of impressiveness, "I'm a Leo." Then he just waits and scans the faces of the hotel patrons, apparently expecting an awed and reverent reaction. I looked up, startled by the stupidity of this, and just stared him right in the eyes with extreme interest, as if I was studying an animal I've never encountered before. I just can't take some of these people anymore.

And Hampi, as any good tourist trap, has the extremely persistent and aggressive rickshaw drivers and shop keepers I've come to expect, but I'm starting to get infuriated by this. After a month in India, you just become oblivious to it, like it is just background noise. People stand in your way and you don't divert your course, as if they are a ghost, semi-transparent, soundless, and without solid form that will prevent you from walking straight through them. But now, after 4 months here, I can't stand it any more. It's like Chinese water torture...and little by little I'm breaking down. I feel like if one more person asks me if I want a rickshaw, I will simply collapse on the street, alive but comatose, psychologically broken and unable to do anything except breathe and blink.

So yes...I will try and hit some spots in Kerala and Tamil Nadu before I go, but I think I'm thankful that the India trip is drawing to a close...

Moving on from Goa: Hampi

I accepted another offer to do a full music show last Sunday night, but that will be my last time. There's really not too much to tell about these shows. Basically I am in control for 4 hours, and I hope that as many musicians show up as possible, because if they don't, I am basically the owner's insurance policy that music will be played for the full 4 hours. Which is an incredibly long time to play. The first time I only had to play for about 45 minutes, then I let other people come up and I just get on periodically to play one or two songs. The last time I had to play for an hour and a half straight before my friends started to show up, which is quite a long time. But luckily, at the beginning, not many people are there and you can just repeat a lot of the songs that you've already done. For 3500 rupees, it's not much work.

Though I think the police that we bribe for going on later than 10:00pm actually make more by doing absolutely nothing. The police are pretty ridiculous in all of India. Now there is a new law in Goa saying you can't play music past ten o'clock at night. It used to be that you could play all night. Of course, some people do play music all night, but they must be very generous with their police bribes. Sometimes the police cancel shows for seemingly no reason at all. Sometimes they threaten the hotels. At Camp San Francisco, where I stay now, the police came up right before we were supposed to play and said "If you play music I will confiscate all this equipment and I will arrest the musicians." One or two thousand rupees later, he didn't seem to have a problem with it.


I've been talking about leaving Goa for a while, and now I'm finally going to do it. I'm leaving Wednesday night. An English couple I met here really wants to get drunk with me, since I've actually been abstaining from alcohol lately, so that'll probably be my big blowout tonight before I leave tomorrow.

I'm going to Hampi, most recognizable to me as the place where the famous climbing movie "Pilgrimage," starring Chris Sharma, was shot. Since the release of that movie, the place has gained some notoriety as a climbing area. I just ran into some German climbers, fortunately, who told me where to stay and that I could even rent shoes and crash pads there. Sounds awesome.


I am a little confused about what to do after India. I thought I was going to work on organic farms in Europe, but now I think I'd like to come back to the States, hike Springer to Damascus on the AT, do trail magic, then road trip across Canada or America with one or several of my good trail friends. I guess I'm just feeling like I've been away for a while, and might be wearying of traveling overseas, so that even a change of pace like WWOOFing in Europe might not pacify me...feel free to lend your thoughts, since I'm feeling sortof torn right now, especially since the desire to return to the States is so sudden.