Is Travelling in INDIA even WORTH it??😅

Hi, it’s Aakanksha 👋

I want to tell you about a night I spent on top of a frozen valley, sitting around a fire I built with my own hands, singing Antakshari with two men who grew up in a family of headhunters.

I know. I KNOW. That’s a sentence 😭

But stay with me, because this is the story I think about every time someone asks me why I love travel. And today of all days, it feels like the right one to tell.

Because it’s Independence Day 🇮🇳

And here’s the thing. I travel the whole world now. But India is where ALL of it started. India is the reason I’m a traveler at all.

So today I want to honor that. Let me take you back 👇🏽

Before I ever left India, I’d already lived a dozen different lives inside it.

My dad’s in the army. So growing up, we moved every two, three years. Eight, nine, ten different schools. Over THIRTY houses. I lost count somewhere along the way 😅

And every single move felt like landing in a new country.

The food on the streets changed. The language changed. The way people spoke to each other, celebrated, argued, welcomed you in, all of it changed. One posting I’m eating one thing, next posting it’s a whole different world on my plate.

I didn’t grow up in a city. I grew up in a HUNDRED versions of India.

So when I tell you that traveling within India feels like traveling across different countries, I’m not saying it to sound poetic. I’m saying it because I lived it before I even had a passport.

And that’s the thing I owe India. It gave me my curiosity. It made me the traveler I am now, LONG before I ever boarded a flight somewhere far 🩷

But there’s one night that holds all of this for me. One story that, if you asked me to explain what travel in India actually FEELS like, I’d just tell you this instead.

A few years ago, for my 23rd birthday, I went to Nagaland to trek Dzukou Valley.

If you don’t know Dzukou, let me paint it for you.

In the monsoons, it’s rolling green hills that look SO unreal you’d swear AI generated them. In the winter, the entire valley freezes over, different shades of white and green, icicles everywhere, the whole thing glittering. Two completely different worlds depending on when you go 🏔️

I went in for the frozen version.

The trek itself isn’t brutal, four, five, six hours uphill and you’re there. But what made it special wasn’t the climb. It was my guide, Vikho.

He was from the Northeast, and we spent the whole way up just TALKING. He told me about his culture, his life, the way things work up there. And somewhere on that trail, it stopped feeling like a guide and a tourist. It just felt like two people becoming friends.

How two people from completely different lives can just collide for a day and share something real. It would never happen if we both stayed inside our little comfort zones 😌

And then we reached the top. Early, actually. With time to spare.

So I did what any normal person would do.

I decided to learn how to chop wood 😛

There were a few people up top running a little hut, chopping wood because the nights get brutally cold. So I asked if they’d teach me.

And they just… said yes.

They pulled me in, handed me the axe, and taught me how to chop wood and build a fire from scratch. My first few swings were TERRIBLE 😂 But I got there. Eventually I had a proper little pile ready for the night.

And I want you to sit with this for a second.

This is the kind of thing that only happens in India!!!

Almost anywhere else, there’d be a safety regulation, a liability form, a “sorry, you can’t come back here.” People wouldn’t open up their tiny space, their livelihood, their corner of the world, to a random stranger who wandered up.

But in India? People welcome you with open arms. They’re EXCITED to teach you. They let you in, literally and completely 🩷

And that openness is the whole reason the magic happens. Because when people let you in, that’s when the unexpected can actually find you.

As the sun dropped, it got colder and colder.

So we huddled around the fire we’d built. Me, Vikho, the two guys running the hut, and another girl who was also doing the trek solo. Everyone else camping up there was outside in their tents, split into their own groups. It was just us around that fire.

And that’s when the night TRULY began.

We started playing Antakshari. We sang songs. One of the guys was a genuinely horrible singer but he did NOT care, he just kept going, cracking jokes the whole time 😂 If you know people from the Northeast, you know their sense of humor is unmatched. We drank rice wine to stay warm, feeding the same fire we’d made with the same wood I’d learned to chop that afternoon.

And somewhere in the middle of it, it hit me.

I was sitting with two men who live on top of this valley almost all year round. No phone signal half the time. They have to walk hours to the nearest village just to get a bar of connection. They come from a lineage of headhunters.

And here they were. Singing Antakshari with me. Making a fire. Laughing at the same jokes.

Where does this cross-pollination happen otherwise??

Two completely different worlds, from completely different lives, that would have NEVER collided anywhere else. But India put us around the same fire 🔥

Everywhere else in the world, you kind of know what you’re going to get. You go to the place. You rent the bike. You hike the mountain. It’s beautiful, truly. But you know the script.

In India, there’s no script.

Someone will invite you into their home and feed you a feast. Someone will say “come, let me show you my favorite sunset spot” and next thing you know you’re meeting all their friends. The most unexpected, ridiculous, beautiful things find you here, as long as you go with the flow and let them.

You don’t travel to a place in India. Things happen TO you. And that only works because the people let you in 🩷

Because it wasn’t all fire and songs and warmth.

When it was finally time to sleep, there was no “room.” You just lie down on a mattress on top of a stone slab. And around me? Spider webs. Things moving in the dark. Honestly one of the most unhygienic places I’ve ever slept in my life 😭

I barely slept. I spent most of the night convinced a spider was going to crawl into my mouth. You know the myth. I KNOW you know the myth. We’re all scared of the same one 😂

But here’s the thing.

That’s also travel in India.

The magic and the mess come in the same package. You don’t get to pick one. The same night that gave me the fire and the songs also gave me the spiders and the stone slab. And somehow, looking back, I wouldn’t trade a single part of it.

Because stepping WAY out of your comfort zone is the whole point. That’s where the story lives 😌

I woke up early the next morning, running on almost no sleep, and hiked down into the valley.

And GUYSSS.

The whole thing was frozen over. Glittering. Icicles everywhere, snow particles catching the light, this vast, silent, unreal stretch of white and green going on forever. Genuinely one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life 🤍

Standing there, taking it in, I realized the view wasn’t actually the thing I was feeling.

What I was feeling was everything that led up to it. The trek with Vikho. Learning to chop wood. The fire. The songs. The horrible singer. The rice wine. The spiders. The sleepless night. ALL of it was sitting inside that one moment, and THAT is what made it so grand.

The valley was just the last line of a story India had been writing all night.

And that’s the thing I keep coming back to, especially today.

I’ve now seen so much of the world. Incredible places, bucket-list places. But almost none of them have given me a NIGHT like that. Because most places give you a view. India gives you a whole story you didn’t see coming.

The destination was never the point.

It never is in India 🩷

That’s the curiosity I owe this country. The reason I fell in love with travel in the first place. And on Independence Day, with everything India has given me, that feels like the thing most worth saying out loud 🇮🇳

Happy Independence Day. Go let something happen to you 🤍

That’s it for this week’s Unpacked… see you next Wednesday with something new to unpack 👋🏽

Lots of love & sunshine,

Aakanksha