Dust & Spices: Rajasthan, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh & Delhi

We entered Punjab via Amritsar near the Pakistani border, heading south from mountainous Himachal Pradesh. We’d just spent almost a month exploring areas near Ladakh in the Jammu and Kashmir state and ten days meditating in a vipassana. By now we thought we had a handle on travelling through India, but Punjab, Rajasthan and the New Delhi region felt like a different country. Gone were the windswept mountain tops, lush foothills and buddhist monasteries. Here everything was dustier, spicier, flatter, louder and more colorful. It reminded me that India is more of a subcontinent than a country and the variety of its regions is astounding.