Manali Magic

One of the best things about being a solo woman traveler in India is the contact you can make with the women. Even without a common language, women will make an effort to communicate. Language deepens the connection, and laughter seals it!
I spent a season or two living in a village house with a family in Manali area. The three women of the house are my dearest friends and the community women ended up accepting me when they saw I was willing to work alongside them in the fields, picking apples and doing farm stuff.
All women in Himachal Pradesh can weave, and every house has a loom. They are the most accomplished women I have ever met. They love to work in the fields, take pride in their work and are paid for it. They also knit and weave and spin their own wool, dance like birds and are incredibly gracious and shy all at once.
So Manali women hold a special place in my heart. The resident goddess of this place is Hidemba, a powerful protector of the women there, they claim.  Here are a few pictures of one of the families in a nearby village I also hung out with for a while.

Being Single, White and Female in India

An A to B guide to being a single white female in India 

Touching Feet is a sign of respect

BLONDES
Blondes in India definitely have more fun.
BREASTS AND HOW TO MANAGE THEM
Please refer to cleavage below. Scarves draw the male eyeball away from the chest area, which should in any case be covered. Scarves also are good for wiping faces, hiding faces and carrying shopping.
BIKES AND HOW TO RIDE THEM PILLION

Indian motorbikes are built for the entire family so there is easily enough room for three adults on a motorbike. For your first menage a trios on a motorbike, try not to sit in the middle.
Remember that every sudden move on the road in India is a move towards life.If you are a woman and find yourself in a pillion situation with a male, please remember there is room for three on the bike.
There are many reasons why Indian women sit sidesaddle on a motorbike. One might immediately assume that the reason lies with the sari, which is partially true, but the real reason lies with breasts, babies and cell phones.
Sitting sidesaddle on a motorbike, the average Indian women can hold baby on her lap, a cell phone in the other hand. In between tending to the baby and talking to her mother on the phone, she is also able to step neatly from the bike should it loose its precarious balance. While her husband is skidding along the highway, the woman and baby can step to safety without creating so much as a pause in her conversation.
Do not wrap your arms or your thighs around the driver.
Place your hands around the rear of the seat where you will find a handy little grip. Keep a hold on this in preparation for the Sudden Braking Technique. The SBT is the real reason Indian women ride sidesaddle. The SBT (please also refer to Camels) has an added benefit of sliding the female pillion passenger towards the driver with the point of contact being breasts and back.
BEAUTY PARLOURS
Beauty is big in India and the beauty brings its own rewards. Women are rewarded for looking dewdrop beautiful; beauty parlors are where women go instead of the barbers.
CLEAVAGE
Cleavage is a No. Please refer to Staring, Eve Teasing and Breast Bumping.
EVE TEASING
A term to refer to sexual abuse or attack, detailed below.
BREAST BUMPING
This is a ritual beginning to take hold in cities and crowded foot paths all over India whereby men will suddenly veer out of the crowd and turn his body into a heat seeking missile aimed straight at a breast located in the teeming crowd. In a seeming random and accidental movement the Eve Teaser will bring his upper body into contact with the breast he has selected. Please refer to Cleavage and breasts and how to manage them. When walking in a city street, keep one arm across your breasts and the other slightly bent to cover your groin. You are permitted to push the man to help him back on his correct path.
CROTCH BRUSHING
As in Breast Bumping but from a lower type of man and aimed lower on the body.
HAND HOLDING
You may hold hands with other women. You may not hold hands with your husband or boyfriend or any male over the age of eight.
MEN AND MIXING IT UP WITH THE LOCALS.
The centre of the family is the male child. The male child is the Kohinoor Diamond of the Indian family. The Indians did not take kindly to the British stealing their jewels and they will not be dancing in the street if you try the same.
Then consider how many centuries the caste system has existed in India. Unaccompanied Foreign women do not rate in the caste system.  Everything that makes you special in your world makes you terribly unsuitable in his.
Finally, marriage is not an individual act of love in India but something your family arranges for you after all they are the ones that have to live with your wife.
MEN AND MANNERS
Boundaries like rules are not meant to be broken. If you walk in the street wearing a gypsy skirt and your hair flowing free, do not stop a man and ask him if he has a light for your cigarette. He will think you are a prostitute.

SALWAAR KAMEEZ
Indians like to see foreign women wearing their clothes. For beginners, there is the salwaar kameez. This is the Indian tracksuit that can go from bedroom to boardroom. All salwaar Kameez follow a standard pattern, variations exist in cloth and cut as well as color. The pants (salwaar) are roomy enough for two. Worn as a three piece with pants, dress top (kameez) and dupatta or scarf.

                                                                                     Glamour Salwaar

                                                                                        Practical Traveler Salwaar


SARIIf you want to meet women in India then ask the guy at your guest house to help you put a sari on or do it yourself and then go out into the market.
Indian women will cross the street to tell you that your pleats are a mess and swiftly retie the sari for you. In the process you can make a little conversation. Remember to thank her nicely and ask if you can come around in the morning so she can dress you properly.

STARING
Some people see Western women only on television and so will approach you in the same vein. They do not expect a response and will happily discuss you as if you were appearing on an untranslated episode of Sex in the City. If you are a single female, check that you are wearing a bra. Sunglasses and ladies waiting rooms exist for a reason.

TOUCHING
Is not encouraged except in the case of feet. Men and women do not touch in public, men touch men in public and women touch children. Hugging and kissing in public is considered scandalous and slightly titillating. If you hug a man then you have broken a boundary and further incursions will inevitably follow.
WOMEN
Indian women are generally found inside the house.  Men make decisions about who will win the local elections and what to do about terrorism. Women make decisions about what to eat, what to spend, when to do a ritual, what school to send the children to and who to marry them to. Men usually "take advice" from their wives when they arrive home in the evening.
WIDOWS
It is considered inauspicious to outlive one's husband.


A little teaser from my ebook India for Idiots now available on the Smashwords website.

Conscious Tourism

I came across the term Conscious Tourism on the internet the other day as I was fishing in the great sea of communication that flows across continents and consciousness.

With the corporate office where I came to share my talents with a company who promotes themselves as one which offers cultural insights as it’s unique selling point in the background, I skim read the blog and wondered at the vagaries of life. 

My recent experience of this kind of Five Star “Stick Your Telescopic Lens in the Face of a Villager”, who has been paid to entertain you with the charming aspect of their desperately simple lifestyles” approach to tourism was perhaps the best example of Unconscious Tourism, a kind of tourism that smacked of voyuerism is something that I despise. I have had moments of sheer disappointment that the bridge between worlds and cultures had been corrupted into tourism of this superficial nature. While I understand that for most tourists, even these brief glimpses of a sanitized reality will give them a lifetime of memories, what happens back on ground zero once the water bottles of have been recycled and their footprints swept over in the usual village traffic? What do they think of that, what memories live in their minds of this contact with another culture? 

As a long time solo traveler, I have been blessed to find myself in the homes and at the hearth and heart of many a home in small villages, temples across the land. As a solo traveler one is somewhat more aware of one’s impact on the environment and on the culture but most of all within the hearts and minds of the people they interact with. I have witnessed the paparazzi pornography of tour groups and been embarrassed by their behavior by which all foreigners will be judged and shied away from group travel as a result.

Maori woman culture teaches that as a traveler one must adhere to the correct practice of the people of the land where you visit, and that to make demands or to consider oneself as superior to the respected host was an insult that could be passed down for generations,. So my mode of travel has always been marked by the idea that my impact could reverberate down generations. My behavior was being recording by the moving hand of time and having writ, the story had better be a good one lest if reflect on the next Maori or member of my family to stumble along the same path in the future.

This was borne out by the absolute delight of my Indian friends when I bought my grandson along to visit India. For all of us, it was a continuation of the story, a new chapter in the tale of how our lives had intersected an added depth to our relationships. They remembered when the boy was born, so to meet him in the flesh was for them a story come true and for me the first time a member of my family had visited my life in India.

The boy was spoiled and adored, he gained a unique insight into India, but I was surprised and delighted to see that he never saw a point of difference between himself and the locals, except for one day remarking how well the local kids spoke Hindi! Otherwise he saw them at the level of his heart which is as open and intelligent as the sky.

But I digress, and in my digression I have come to understand that there can be no conscious tourism since tourism implies a lack of time and it takes time to earn the love and trust and respect of people. What there is is Conscious Travel, which is the slower route through life. Travel that brings the wanderer to mountain villages, to fires in the desert and the and within the circle of the festival. 

So were do the two meet?

Conscious tourism is where the conscious traveler meets time restricted tourists, takes them by the hand and says “Come and meet my friends," and together you walk that rickety bamboo bridge of connection across oceans.

Boobs without Borders, a solo woman on the road in Rajasthan

I was reminded of the joys of  solo travel recently when I busted a move on some friends I had been exploring rural Rajasthan with.

A water crisis in the early morning after a sleepless night necessitated me to move from the crummy noisy guesthouse to a more salubrious location in the noisy polluted town of Bikaner. There I luxuriated in my first hot shower and soft bed for months and slept like a flower.

The next day I caught a local bus (we had been traveling by car until then) and got myself back in the Groove so to speak.
It was early morning and the bus heading for the six-hour journey to Ajmer was full. I move to make room for a woman who sits beside me and we smile at each other. As the day warms and the journey begins, we warm to each other and begin to talk. She tells me about her life and I am struck by her resemblance to my grand daughters other nanny who, like Madhu, is also a teacher. An hour and a half between women and all information about our lives and hopes and dreams are shared in rickety local bus rattling along the desert plains.
A thousand days of rough travel dissolves instantly with someone like Madhu who sweetens the morning air with her first shy hesitant hello.
We will never see each other again but I will think of her again and every time I do, there will be only good wishes for that woman. I think the same also will happen in reverse and this is the reason why I love solo travel.

After Madhu came these Gujurati women on their way to the Ajmer Dagarh. By this stage I am pretending not to know Hindi to save myself being questioned for the next four hours of the journey. They talk amongst themselves about me and I understand enough to know they are being lovely and generous and curious. I love the face of one of the women, it is so open and clear and her eyes are kind.

Eventually we begin to share smiles and food and a circular conversation of the type I was avoiding begins.
The people in the bus start wanting information about me my country and family, they shout the question to the person in front who then relays the question to me. In broken English and fractured Hindi, I manage to establish a few facts.

Then they want to look at photos of my family, then they want me to take their photos, I promise to send them to their home address, the bus passengers scurry for a pen and paper, we try to write in Hindi then English, the woman crowd around me and start asking me for something. I can’t understand why she is pointing to my breasts.
She leans closer and whispers in my ear
“BRA”
“You want to see my bra?”
“No, I want you to send me a bra From Foreign.”
It’s the first time anyone but my daughter has asked me to buy them a bra and I am a little astounded.
“Well, why not?” I say. I wish someone would send me some bras from foreign too. Indian bras are designed for nuns and there is nothing very sexy about them. Plain serviceable and unimaginative is the nicest thing I can say about Indian Bras.
“Promise?”
I hate it when people make me promise to do something when the likelihood of me honoring that promise is slim, but the whole weight of Gujurati sisterhood is bearing down on me.
I imagine for one minute what it would be like to be a village woman receiving a parcel "From Foreign". I imagine the excitement it would cause and the hilarity of sending her a sexy black bra all lace and froth and bedecked with red ribbons. For some reason I think of the red petticoat of Mammy in the movie Gone With The Wind.

"O god, alright I promise!”
This is not enough. Now she tells me I may as well send something From Foreign for the baby in her daughter in laws womb in the same parcel.
Luckily my stop appears and I leap to freedom, the women wave to me from the bus and I stand by the roadside choking on dust and promises and pollution.

But if there is anyone out there who wants to send a sexy lacy red-ribboned size 36C bra to this woman in Gujurat, contact me for her address. Consider it as a random act of sisterhood.

Solo Travel Safety

From the distance and experience of 18 years On the Road, most of it spent in a lot of "Off the Beaten Track" kind of places, I ask myself what kind of tips and tricks I can share with others who set off to explore the world in a rapidly changing world environment.
So for the purposes of this little sermon from the foothills, I will stick to what I know best which is India and Nepal, places I have intimate knowledge of. Let's just call it Grandma's little rule of SOS.
SOLO is not a word that is likely to bring up images of wild exhilarating freedom in this part of the world as it is in ours. In fact to be alone in India and Nepal is to be vulnerable, a fact often borne out by the kind of sympathy people give you when they discover you are travelling alone. While most people will befriend you in order to save you from what is seen as the loneliest experience of all - the individual- others will just as likely try to exploit it.

OBSERVATION is a two way street. Take a read of Paul Thoreaux's book The Elephanta Suite to see what I mean. His point in a lot of the stories rang very true for me, the fact that no matter how well we think we are blending in with the local surrounds we actually stick out like veritable dogs balls. Looking, as they say in India, is free, and looking at foreigners is a favourite sport here. I know because after some time here I also gape and gawk at foreigners! Crime in India is less often confrontational and more often subversive. People are watched outside of banks and followed home where they are robbed, poison can be offered in food shared with fellow 'passengers' on a bus or train and sneak thefts are more common than muggings.
It's up to you to keep a very sharp eye out for potential trouble makers, without being neurotic about it. After all you must do it every day at home when you walk a city street or are out after dark. You have these skills already because you use them at home, so just remember to put them at the very top of your list.

SPEAKING Be aware of who you are speaking to. If you need advice or directions look for a well dressed person rather than addressing people randomly on the street. Do not get into inane conversations with men you meet randomly in any situation, especially do not tell them your travel plans or mode of transport. Always invent friends who are waiting for you at your destination, imply that they are well connected local people. Carry a cell phone at all times and never let it run too low on credit, pretend to be in contact with people at the other end of you're the trip.
Then relax and trust your instincts.

Hello World

This blog will feature posts from a few of my other blogs, articles and published works of fiction and non fiction on the life of a solo woman traveler in India.
If you have landed here and wonder why the shop looks shut, its because I am busy tarting up the place and getting it ready for you!!
In the meantime, please keep yourself occupied by visiting my other blogs at
http://blog.diannesharmawinter.com/
http://wanderlustandlipstick.com/blogs/heartofindia/
If you are thinking of travel to India then you may like to receive a free copy of my book,

India for Idiots  is a guide to the cultural norms of India. Please leave a comment here with your contact details and I will send you a code to unlock the secrets of mystical India!
Thanks for dropping by, come back soon ya hear!!!