Laurens Traveling – Contemplations of Diving into the Unknown

South to North

Haha, we’re in the air again.

I feel quite different from “normal”.
Having spent a week in the Isha Yoga center, with daily meditations & yoga, hours of it at times, embracing mysticism and a more humble side of life … Something happened.
Even if I don’t know what. Nor could I explain it. So I’m not going to try. But maybe I kind of will.

A 34m high statue of Adiyogi, the first yogi.
A tribute to the first human to seek and achieve enlightenment through looking inward.

I thought I used to be interested in knowing. Gathering knowledge. Learning more.
Now I understand that learning more does in fact not mean gathering knowledge.
Everything I’ve ever learned in some form has been an experience.
And my experience is all I know and will ever know.

My new commitment as of now is to un-know everything that I still know/believe.
Because isn’t knowing and believing the same thing?
The conviction that a thought is true?
And do I need to believe anything that I experience?
For me, it’s a clear no. My experience in fact is all I know.

Yes, I definitely recommend being open to yoga and meditation to everyone.
At the very least, it opens up the possibility for new perspectives, which is fun, interesting, useful, and who knows, maybe even transformational!

But enough of this dwelling on my weekly meditation, yoga & introspection retreat,
Although before I conclude these thoughts on them, I want to share a poem I wrote:

Struck by nothing I could understand
Eyes of Shiva fire love with relentless power
I was gazed upon
In pure ecstacy and joy
my being was shaken
time froze
nothing mattered
a connection beyond words

I was touched beyond skin and bone
Forced to face a reality I cannot grasp
I am small

And also this experience
with the last one
will fade
to a memory
desecrating the aliveness of experience.

I choose to not know
I choose to seek
I choose to be open
Because it seems the unexplored world
beyond body and mind
has messaged me.

Whew, that was serious. Here’s my friend Danish instead, kaleidoscopified.

As far as Indian travels are concerned, we’re having the expected daily change of plans.

While we were peacefully being confused in conversations with locals, enjoying the beautiful local scenery and culture, haggling for tuktuk fares and opening our eyes wider than we thought was possible in every waking moment, a sudden event struck us like lightning from the sky:

A message from our friend Danish.

This sounded a little concerning, so I called him as soon as I saw the message…

What happened? Are you ok?
– Yeah, yeah, no problem whatsoever, the thing is, there’s this Indian wedding going on. And since it is usually a huge and crazy event, you guys are totally invited.

Oh wow! Cool, thanks! Where is it?
– In Delhi!

Aah, just 2000km from here. Let’s go!

And so, a few days later, at the time of this writing, we’re in the air again.
In the flight we’ve booked on a whim, to North India!
A continent we were now pulled to, expectedly unexpected!

As a great mind once said: With great change of plans come great possibilities.

A wedding. Taj Mahal. Krishna’s birthplace. Varanasi?

Our 3 week trip is turning into an action packed adventure with a blend and taste of much that India has to offer! Let’s go!

How to move to places and stuff

My brain is fried.

It’s early evening and I’m writing from a hotel room in Mysore at the end of day 3 in this Indian adventure.

How come my brain is so fried, you might ask?
This story answers exactly this question, as it takes us back in time.. Back to the days of like, 24 hours ago.

The bus trip

Yesterday we were awake until 2am,
only to wake up at 4am
to catch a bus at 5:30am from Bangalore to Mysore.

Yes, the whole city of Bangalore keeps moving and dancing 24/7!
Buses and trains depart from every hour of the clock, every day of the week. India does not sleep.

After 4 uber drivers had canceled our ride to the bus stop, and we started to get worried to make it in time, the 5th uber driver confirmed he was on his way.

In the car ride towards the bus station, I called the bus driver a few times, to find out where the bus would actually be stopping.
Because apparently it doesn’t really stop “at the bus stop” but it more like stops at “it totally depends”.

After about 10 seconds of conversation, that familiar moment happened where I realized I would not make any sense of whatever this person was saying.

So I wisely passed the phone to the taxi driver, who tried to convince us in his best English (of a very similar low adequacy level) that he was dropping us off at the right place.

And there we were, at 5am, in the middle of Bangalore, hoping to stand at the right spot and hoping that the right bus will arrive at the right time.

…

And it did!

So you’d think after a miserable 2 hours of sleeping and 1 hour of semi-napping in a wobbly bus, arriving at the beautiful city of Mysore, we’d take some time to rest right?

Wrong! Because we’re on a MISSION.

And that mission is: Buying a tain ticket.

The mission

Yes, you read that right.
Some of the most difficult things in life, such as finding healthy, cheap, fast AND tasty food, are ridiculously simple and common in India.

And some of the simplest things in life, such as buying a train ticket, match these amounts of ridiculousness. Only this time in difficulty.

The night before, I had been forging plan after plan with my dear Indian friend Danish, to enable us to buy train tickets for ourselves.

From dodgy government websites that don’t work, to outdated information about websites that no longer exist, to installing the 5 different apps that suppose to allow us to book a train ticket, none of the plans worked.

Either I could not create an account, or I could not prove I’m of Indian nationality (to be fair, I’m not), or the dreaded “Something went wrong” message appeared – the most functional part of any Indian government website.
If you want a crash course in technical difficulties, just try and buy a train ticket in India as a foreigner.

There was one immediate solution remaining: To buy the tickets at the train station itself…

The train station

I immediately had some flashbacks from my previous visit in India.
Flashbacks of hour long queues, chaotic overcrowded train stations, bureaucratic nightmares and scammer faces.

Coming out of the nightly Bangalore to Mysore bus, we started walking a bit towards the train station and took a break in an absolutely adorable tea shop where we had about 3 cups of chai each.

The shop wasn’t bigger than 3 by 2 meters, and the host made up for it with deliciousness of chai and hospitality.
We naturally had some conversation with the host and 4 local people who were there. We lightly talked about culture and religion, and when one guy started to give his opinions on Muslims, we decided to move on to the train station.

To our surprise, the first queue was quite empty.
We got to speak to a person really fast, and got disillusioned about the smoothness of the situation when she sent us to the correct queue straight away. This queue was longer but it still wasn’t anything like the queue from my flashbacks. First relief.

My hawk eyes had spotted that every person in the room was holding a piece of paper, and I asked what’s up.
Aha! There was a pile of empty forms, waiting for innocent suckers to walk into the room to fill them in.
This means we didn’t wait in a queue for 30 minutes to figure out we needed to fill in a form and then had to re-queue. Second relief!

We filled in the form.
And we re-queued.
And to my amazement, we got our train tickets without any issue and with barely any waiting! Third relief!
Parvati was with us today.

So here we are, in Mysore. With train tickets to our next destination.

Ahh, the 11.5 hour train journey in sleeper class tomorrow promises to be quite the experience.

7 years later, in an airplane to Bangalore

It’s been too long.

I feel exactly the same, yet everything is different.
Here I am again, 10660 meters above ground, in an airplane fulfilling its purpose of taking us all to Bangalore.

The last time I was floating here, it was 2016.
And I can’t believe I’m typing these words in the year humans call 2023.
The most lovely love of a woman in the seat next to me.
7 years since I’ve seen my dear friend Danish, and 1 day to seeing him.

In the airport we already got a sneak peak of the Indian chaos.
The boarding line was long,
and moved from one side
to another,
and back to the first side,
and back to the second.

Yet here we are, floating, in a clear direction, and it truly feels like going home again.

So much has happened, yet I see the world through the same eyes.
Albeit with more experiences, more memories, more lessons learned and a different perspective on today and tomorrow.

I am so excited to bathe in lush Indian craziness again.
To be thrown in the beautiful, colorful chaos.
The richness of the vibe in the air,
the adventure movie superhero embodiment feeling,
the spirituality which is everywhere yet unnameable.

Although these are expectations, and they are based on the past.
On a distant memory of the land that left a permanent impression on me.

Time to let that go, and experience it all today.
Eyes open, brakes loose. Let’s go!