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The Himalayas don't look like a mountain range. They look like a wall the earth built to remind you how small you are

I've stood at viewpoints in Shimla, in Manali, in Munsiyari — places where the mountains are supposed to be beautiful and picturesque and all the things travel photography promises you. And they are. But beautiful isn't the first thing you feel. The first thing you feel is small. Genuinely, uncomfortably, almost relievingly small.

There's something that happens when you see a range that size for the first time. Your brain tries to process the scale and just quietly gives up. The peaks aren't in the background — they're everywhere, filling the entire top half of your vision, and they're so far away and so massive that your depth perception stops working correctly. You keep thinking you could walk to that ridge in an hour. You could not. You could not walk to it in a day.

The Himalayas are old in a way that you feel in your body, not just understand with your mind. These aren't young, aggressive mountains with sharp edges and something to prove. They've been standing here through everything — every dynasty, every monsoon, every civilisation that decided it was the most important thing happening on the planet. The mountains were not paying attention.

What I keep noticing, every time I go up — and I keep going up — is how quickly the noise inside your head stops. Not immediately. The first day you're still carrying everything you brought with you: deadlines, conversations you're replaying, things you should have said. By the second morning, standing somewhere above 2,500 metres with cold air in your lungs and nothing but pine and silence and that wall of white above you, most of it is simply gone. The mountains didn't take it. You just stopped holding it so tight.

We take people into the Himalayas every season and I have yet to meet a single person who came back the same size they went up.

nobody tells you about the marigolds.

you read everything. you read the blogs and the guidebooks and the reddit threads from people who went last October and came back evangelical about it. you read about the traffic and the noise and the heat and how to dress and what not to drink and which areas to avoid at which hours. you think you are prepared. you think preparation is possible.

and then you land, and the airport doors open, and India walks into your lungs all at once.

it isn't what you expected to hit you first. you were ready for the chaos — the horns, the crowd, the sensory overload everyone warned you about. but what stops you, what actually makes you stand still on a pavement while people move around you like water around a stone, is the smell of marigolds. fresh ones. piled into garlands outside a temple you almost walked past. that specific sweetness, slightly green underneath, slightly earthy, nothing like a florist back home — and something in your body goes very quiet.

I've watched this happen to people. I've seen first-timers arrive expecting to be overwhelmed and instead be undone by something small. a flower. a colour. the way the evening light falls sideways through a banyan tree. the thing that breaks you open is never the thing on the list.

India doesn't reveal itself the way you expect it to. it doesn't lead with the things you braced for. it finds the gap in your armour and it gets in through there, through a smell, through a sound, through a small boy flying a kite from a rooftop at six in the morning and not looking down once.

there's a specific kind of silence on the Kerala backwaters that people aren't prepared for.

not the absence of sound — because there's always something. a kingfisher cutting across the water before you've fully woken up. the soft knock of the hull against a passing boat. coconut palms doing that slow, coastal lean in the wind. but underneath all of it is this stillness that most people have genuinely never encountered, and it does something to them that they don't have words for until a few days after they've left.

I've watched it happen. someone steps onto the houseboat deck on the first evening, phone in hand, looking for the angle, and by the second morning they're just sitting there. no angle. no phone. just sitting, watching a rice paddy go by at three kilometres an hour like it's the most riveting thing they've ever seen. and it is. that's the thing. it actually is.

the backwaters have a pace that your nervous system eventually gives in to. it doesn't happen immediately. the first few hours you feel slightly restless, slightly useless, like you should be doing something. then somewhere between the second cup of chai and the fifth egret standing motionless in the shallows, you stop waiting for something to happen and realise this is the thing that's happening.

people who have never been anywhere truly quiet don't know that quiet has texture. that it feels different in your chest than noise does. that you can be tired in a way that isn't exhaustion and rested in a way that isn't sleep.

Most cities let you pass through them anonymously. You arrive, you look around, you leave with photos and maybe a memory or two. Varanasi doesn't allow that. It registers your presence. Something about standing on those ghats — especially at dawn, when the mist is still sitting on the Ganga and the priests are already deep in prayer and the river looks like it belongs to a different century entirely — makes you feel impossibly seen. Like the city has been here long enough that it no longer needs to be impressed by visitors, but it notices them anyway.

The thing nobody really prepares you for is how alive it is alongside all the death. You turn one narrow lane and there are children playing cricket. You turn another and there's a funeral procession moving quietly, purposefully, toward the river. And somehow neither one interrupts the other. Both are just Varanasi being itself — ancient and loud and completely unbothered by the contradiction.

I've sent so many people there through White Pigeon Holidays and every single one comes back slightly altered. Not dramatically. Not in a way they can always explain. But altered. They'll say things like "I didn't expect to feel so calm" or "I didn't expect to feel so much." Both at once, usually.

The Ganga Aarti at Dashashwamedh Ghat in the evenings will fill your chest with something you don't have a name for. Go anyway. Stand in the middle of the crowd, not at the edge. Let the smoke from the lamps drift over you. Stop trying to photograph all of it.

I've never been on that specific train. I don't know its name or where it's going. But I've stood on that platform at that hour — the chai vendors packing up, the red-jacketed porters walking slower now, the PA system announcing destinations in a voice that sounds like it's reading out the names of places from a dream — and I've felt something I can't quite explain and haven't stopped trying to.

Delhi at midnight smells like diesel and marigolds and the particular dust of a city that never fully sleeps but does, around 1am, finally exhale. The trains leaving at that hour carry people going very far away. You can tell by the bags. You can tell by the faces. There's a man eating something from a tiffin before he boards, unhurried, like he's done this a hundred times. Maybe he has.

I think what I can't stop thinking about is the feeling of being in motion before you're technically moving. Standing near a train that's about to leave. The city still around you, the destination not yet real, the whole night ahead and all of it uncertain and somehow, somehow, that feeling is the best one there is.

I've planned so many trips since then — sent people to places I love, watched them come back different. But I keep returning to that platform in my head. Midnight. The announcement. The slow groan of the engine waking up.

some journeys live in you like that. long before you take them.

the light in Jaipur at 6am doesn't look real, and I've stopped trying to explain that to people who haven't seen it

it comes in sideways. pink first, then gold, then something in between that doesn't have a name. the old city walls catch it differently than the temples do, differently again than the chai wallah's stall on the corner where the steam from the cups rises in a straight line because the air isn't moving yet.

everything is slow in those first twenty minutes. the dogs are still sleeping. the pigeons aren't. a man sweeps the same square metre of stone he's probably swept every morning for thirty years and somehow that feels like the most correct thing in the world.

I've stood there cold in November and warm in March and the light does the same thing every time. like the city is showing you something it keeps for itself during the day.

I keep sending people to Jaipur and telling them to set an alarm they'll definitely ignore. some of them don't. those are always the ones who come back different.

The jodhpur to jaisalmer train leaves in the early hours of the morning and by the time you're properly awake, the thar desert is already outside the window.

i wasn't prepared for it. you're never quite prepared for it. one moment there are fields and low scrub and the pale outlines of villages, and then somewhere between sleeping and not sleeping the landscape just — opens. flat and enormous and a colour that isn't quite gold and isn't quite brown and changes every twenty minutes as the light shifts. i pressed my forehead against the glass like a child and watched for a long time without thinking about anything at all.

that's what indian trains do to you if you let them. they slow time down. there's no wifi to worry about, often no signal, the chai vendor comes through every hour or so and the sound of the wheels on the track becomes a rhythm you stop noticing and then notice again. you end up in conversation with the family across the aisle who insist you share their tiffin. you eat something wrapped in foil that you cannot identify and it is perfect.

and outside, india just keeps going. villages and fields and suddenly a camel standing at the edge of a dry riverbed like it's been placed there deliberately. children waving from a bridge. an egret absolutely motionless in a flooded paddy. the back of india — the everyday, unselfconscious version of it — slides past at exactly the right speed for you to actually see it.

i've recommended this route to more people than i can count. not because jaisalmer isn't worth it, it absolutely is. but because the train itself is the thing. it's eight hours of india being completely, uncomplicatedly itself, and you just happen to be there watching.

Ask someone who has been to india what they remember most, and watch what happens.

there's always a pause. a small one, but you can see it — the moment they skip past the obvious answers and land on something else entirely. not the taj mahal. not the palace they photographed. something smaller. something they almost didn't mention because they weren't sure it would make sense to anyone who wasn't there.

a woman once told me she thinks about a specific doorway in varanasi. just a doorway — old wood, peeling blue paint, a brass latch shaped like a fish. she passed it every morning for four days on her way to the ghats and on the last day it was open and she could see a courtyard inside with a single marigold plant and an old man reading a newspaper. that's it. that's the whole memory. she said she still thinks about it.

i've heard versions of this so many times. the autorickshaw driver in jaipur who had a small ganesh statue on his dashboard with a tiny garland of fresh flowers around it, replaced every single morning. the sound of a school letting out in a narrow lane in pondicherry — that specific sound of two hundred children all leaving at once. the way the light falls on the ghee lamps at a temple at dusk, not golden exactly, more amber, warmer than that.

india does something to the senses that most places don't. it overloads you first, and then somewhere in the middle of that overload, one small thing cuts through with extraordinary clarity. and that's the thing that stays.

Kerala in june is not the kerala they put on the poster.

the poster version is blue skies, still backwaters, a houseboat drifting through golden hour. that kerala exists. but the one i keep coming back to — the one that actually got under my skin — is the monsoon version. grey-green and dripping and outrageously alive.

the rice paddies turn a colour i don't have a word for. somewhere between emerald and something deeper, something almost aggressive in how saturated it is. the coconut palms bend slightly in the wind and the whole landscape moves like it's breathing. and the rain doesn't fall so much as arrive — in walls, in curtains, in sudden silences before it starts again.

i was in alleppey during the first week of july once, on a small boat on the backwaters, and the rain came down so hard we had to pull under a low bridge and wait. the boatman made tea on a small burner. neither of us spoke. the water around us was pocked with thousands of tiny circles all at once and the smell — wet mud and rain on warm water and something green and earthy underneath — is one of those smells i would recognize anywhere for the rest of my life.

people ask if monsoon is a bad time to go. i never know how to answer that properly. it depends what you're going for. if you want the postcard, wait until december. if you want to see a place actually being itself — unglamorous and lush and real — go in july. go when the tourists have stayed home. go when the land is doing what it does for its own reasons and not for yours.

Nobody warned me that the most memorable moment of my first trip to Kerala wouldn't be the backwaters.

it was sitting on a plastic chair outside a tea shop in Fort Kochi at 7am, watching a man fold banana leaves into something i still can't identify, while a dog slept in a patch of early light like it had been there forever. i had a glass of chai that cost eight rupees. nobody spoke to me. i didn't take a photograph. i just sat there and felt, very quietly, like i had been let into something real.

that's the thing about travel that the itinerary can't plan for. the moment that actually reaches you is never the monument. it's almost never the thing you came for.

it's the morning a stranger on a train shares his lunch with you and you eat something you can't name and it's the best thing you've had all trip. it's stumbling into a temple festival that isn't in any guidebook because it only happens once a year and you happened to be there. it's watching a fishing village come alive at 5am when the boats come in and you're the only tourist and nobody is performing anything for you — they're just living, and you got to see it.

these are the moments people come home talking about. not the taj mahal at sunrise with four hundred other people (though yes, it's worth it, it's always worth it). not the cable car or the heritage hotel lobby. the unplanned, unoptimised, genuinely accidental moments.

i think about this a lot when people ask me how to plan a trip. the best thing i can do isn't fill every hour. it's leave enough space for something to happen.

/white-pigeon-tumblr Why Slow Travel Creates Better Memories in India

there's a version of India that most people miss entirely.

it flickers past the window of a fast-moving itinerary — a chai stall at a junction that looked like it had a story, a narrow lane in an old city you turned away from because you had three more things to see that afternoon, a conversation with a man on a train platform that got cut short because your stop arrived too soon.

i've watched it happen to people, and i've done it myself. you come to india with a list. jaipur, jodhpur, jaisalmer, agra, varanasi — six cities in ten days, and you check every one of them. you have photographs and a stamped passport and a pleasant sense of having done it. and then you come home and six months later you can barely remember what jodhpur smelled like, or what you actually felt standing at the ghats, or whether there was a single unscripted moment in the whole trip.

india doesn't reward speed. it punishes it, actually.

because the thing about india is that it doesn't reveal itself immediately. it takes a beat. a day and a half in a place before the pace of it settles into your body. before you stop navigating and start noticing. before someone at the next table talks to you. before you find the gali behind the gali, the morning ritual nobody put in the guidebook, the version of the city that exists at 6am when the light is soft and the tourists are still asleep.

i've seen people spend four days in one small town in rajasthan and leave knowing it better than people who spent four days checking off four cities. and the ones who stayed? those are the memories that hold. the specific ones. the ones with texture and detail and the weight of actually having been somewhere.

There is no single answer to the question of what food in India tastes like, because India does not have a cuisine. it has fifty cuisines, stacked on top of each other, separated by rivers and mountain ranges and language and memory.

a day of eating across this country is not a meal. it is a series of small revelations.

it starts before sunrise in Varanasi — a clay cup of chai so thick with ginger it almost stings, handed to you by a man who has been standing at the same corner since before you were born. you drink it in three sips because that's how it's meant to be drunk, warm and fast and slightly too sweet, and then you place the cup on the ground and it shatters and dissolves back into the earth the way everything in Varanasi eventually does.

by midmorning you might be in Amritsar, where someone puts a steel plate of langar in front of you — dal, roti, a spoonful of something warm and simple — and the kindness of the gesture is almost too much to absorb. the Golden Temple feeds tens of thousands of people every single day, regardless of who you are or where you come from. i have sat in that hall many times and i still cannot fully explain what it does to you.

lunch in coastal Karnataka is a different language entirely. fish curry on a banana leaf, rice that absorbs everything, a sourness from kokum that you'll spend years trying to find again in other food and never quite will.

by evening you're somewhere in Rajasthan and there is dal baati churma on a terracotta plate and the desert air has gotten cool and the fire is close and you understand, finally, why people talk about food as memory. because it is. it always has been.

india doesn't ask you to choose a favourite. it just keeps feeding you until you stop trying to rank things and start paying attention.

There is a version of Rajasthan that most people never find. Not because it's hidden exactly — it's right there on the map — but because the itinerary says Jaipur on day one and Udaipur on day five and there's simply no space left to wonder what's in between.

I've been going to Rajasthan for years, and the places that stayed with me longest are the ones I almost didn't stop for.

Bundi, for instance. A town that feels like someone pressed pause somewhere in the 1970s and forgot to come back. The stepwell there — the Raniji ki Baori — catches the morning light in a way I still don't have words for. You descend into it and the city disappears completely. It's just you and several hundred years of geometric stonework and the sound of your own footsteps.

Or Shekhawati, which is an entire region that people treat as a detour and should be treating as a destination. The havelis there are covered floor-to-ceiling in frescoes — camels and maharajas and European trains painted by artists who had never seen a European train but painted them anyway, beautifully, from descriptions alone. I find that detail devastating in the best possible way.

And Baran. And Jhalawar. And the road between Chittorgarh and Kota at dusk when the light goes completely gold and you realise you haven't seen another tourist in two hours.

This is a Place Insight Post — five festivals, told as lived experience, flowing and emotional. Here it is:

there's something that happens to you at an Indian festival that doesn't happen anywhere else on earth. it's not just the colour or the crowd or the noise — it's the specific feeling of being inside something ancient and alive at the same time. like the celebration has been going on for centuries and you've just found a door into it.

Holi in Mathura is the one people talk about but never quite describe right. it's not the Instagram version. it's being drenched in colour by a stranger who is laughing so hard they can barely stand, in a lane so narrow your shoulders touch both walls, with marigold petals in your mouth and the smell of gulaal in your hair for days after. you don't observe it. it swallows you whole.

Pushkar's Camel Fair in November is a different kind of impossible. fifty thousand camels and the desert light turning everything amber by four in the afternoon. the noise, the dust, the fires at night. I've never felt more awake anywhere.

Dussehra in Mysore is what happens when an entire city decides to become a painting. the palace lit up, the elephants in gold, the procession moving slow enough that you actually see it — every face, every lamp. it has weight in a way that most spectacle doesn't.

Pongal in Tamil Nadu in January made me understand something about gratitude that I don't think I could have understood anywhere else. the kolam patterns in the early morning, the smell of the sweet rice cooking, the quiet joy of it. it doesn't ask anything of you except to be present.

and Gangaur in Jaipur — celebrated by women for women, for love and devotion and something older than both — might be the most quietly beautiful thing I've ever witnessed. you have to slow down to see it properly.

I keep sending people to these. and they all come back a little different.

Watching Sunrise from the Ghats of Varanasi: A Morning You Never Forget

There are places you visit for their landmarks.

Then there are places you remember because of how they made you feel.

Varanasi belongs to the second kind.

The sunrise here is not just another beautiful view. It is the moment when one of the world's oldest living cities quietly begins a new day.

Before the First Light

The streets were still wrapped in darkness as I walked toward the river.

The narrow lanes smelled of fresh chai, incense, and flowers waiting to become temple offerings.

A few shopkeepers arranged their stalls.

Priests walked purposefully toward the ghats.

Some pilgrims had already started their morning prayers.

The city was awake long before the sun.

Stepping onto the River

I climbed into a small wooden boat.

The river was calm, almost mirror-like, reflecting the faint blue sky above.

The only sounds were the gentle splash of oars, distant temple bells, and the occasional call from another boat drifting through the morning mist.

Nobody felt the need to fill the silence.

It was enough just to be there.

When the Sun Finally Appears

The eastern horizon slowly changed from deep blue to purple, then soft shades of orange.

Without warning, the first rays of sunlight reached the temples.

Then the stone ghats.

Finally, the Ganges itself.

The water shimmered like liquid gold.

It was not a dramatic moment.

It was quiet.

Patient.

Almost sacred.

The City Wakes Up

As daylight spread across the river, life unfolded in every direction.

People stepped into the water for their morning prayers.

A priest offered flowers to the river.

Children laughed while playing near the steps.

Students hurried past with backpacks.

An elderly man sat peacefully reading from an old prayer book.

Every ghat told a different story, yet somehow they all belonged together.

More Than Just a Beautiful View

Many famous sunrises impress you with dramatic landscapes.

Varanasi does something different.

The beauty comes from watching everyday life continue in a place where traditions have remained part of daily living for centuries.

Faith.

Routine.

History.

Community.

Everything exists together without trying to impress anyone.

That quiet authenticity is what makes the experience unforgettable.

Small Moments I Still Remember

Some memories stay surprisingly clear.

The steam rising from a cup of chai.

Birds circling above the river.

The reflection of colorful saris against the golden water.

The boat captain smiling without saying much.

The sound of temple bells echoing across the Ganges.

None of these moments were extraordinary on their own.

Together, they became something I still think about.

Why I Put My Camera Down

I started the morning ready to photograph everything.

Within minutes, I stopped reaching for my camera.

Not because there was nothing worth capturing.

Because some moments felt better lived than documented.

Every time I looked through the lens, I realized I was missing what was happening around me.

Sometimes the best souvenir is simply remembering how a place made you feel.

If You Ever Visit Varanasi

Wake up earlier than you think you should.

Take the first boat you can find.

Bring a light jacket if you are visiting during the cooler months.

Leave your schedule behind for a couple of hours.

Do not worry about getting the perfect photograph.

Just sit quietly and watch the city greet another day.

That is where the real experience begins.

A Morning That Stays With You

Long after leaving Varanasi, I still remember that first beam of sunlight stretching across the Ganges.

I remember the calm before the crowds arrived.

I remember the feeling that time had slowed down, even if only for an hour.

Some destinations give you photographs.

Some give you stories.

Varanasi gives you a morning that quietly stays with you long after the journey ends.