For many years I had been wistfully day dreaming about going to India to complete my yoga teacher training. So finally doing that the very first direction into steering my life some other direction. Maybe it was straight off a cliff, but hey, people go bungee jumping for fun don't they?
Arriving in India certainly came with its set of preconceived ideas. Most of them weren't my own, in fact I had actually reached the point where I had become rude to people who seemed to think their idea on I shouldn’t go to India was more important to be shared than the reason I was going there.
I understand there are concerns about safety, but like it or not if you fear things enough it isn't safe to step out the front door in the morning. If you don't take a gamble you are going to end up boring, and a horrific old person who thinks their sugar sachet at the cafe is trying to spy on them. So I did it, I got on a plane and came to India on my own to do something I had wanted to do for many years.
My journey over here wasn't exactly a delightful one. In total it took 26 hours to get from Melbourne to Agonda Beach in Goa. Check in in Melbourne was delayed, nearly every plane I got on then sat on the tarmac waiting to take off for what felt like an eternity. I eventually became more or less delirious though lack of sleep.
Flying into Mumbai was certainly eye opening. I've seen plenty of footage, and watched some of The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel on the plane, but you really do need to see things to understand them properly. It wasn't necessarily the slums that I found so eye opening, it was the amount of half built buildings just sitting there, high rises with foundations that hadn’t even been completed, and people sitting on the edge of these precarious looking structures.
By the time I finally made it to Goa, I was again fascinated by looking around at my surroundings at Goa airport. Wild dogs just sitting there, people cruising about on scooters, and all stories and images of the traffic you have ever heard about India did not actually over exaggerate . This part of the world was yes, kind of ugly, but it was also kind of amazing to see. Life is pretty cruisey in Australia with our huge land mass and kind of tiny population by comparison.
The final leg of the journey was a taxi ride to Agonda. Its actually a decent drive, and to be honest it was kind of awful. I had been in transit for 26 hours. I was so dehydrated and tired I just felt sick! Sadly. As can often be the case in this world, my accomodation was not what it had seemed when I booked it (although I must stress this was not an end of the world situation, it's a reasonably common thing no matter what country you are in) but to be honest as long as I had some water, a shower and a bed I could not care less.
If this was the very first step of what would be a very long, hard, invigorating and amazing month, then it really didn't seem so bad. I didn't do this to stay in my comfort zone, and that would be the single greatest lesson I would be reminded of day in, day out.
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