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Backpacking alone through India:
some thoughts, recommendations and personal experiences
by Serena Davies
Seasoned traveller Serena Davies shares her tips for an Indian adventure filled with new experiences and magic - for the solo traveller.
I was having the time of my life. Things had never felt better as a single girl away on adventure. I was hurtling along the gloriously bumpy roads of the utopian valleys of Northern India, perched on the roof of a bus, and enjoying an elaborate, although linguistically challenged, flirtation with not one but two Germans we had picked up at the last village. I did not particularly like the look of the rather shifty looking friend to whom they appeared to be attached, but I thought nothing of it at the time. This was heaven. I was free as a bird, quite overwhelmed by the beauty of nature, India and my imminent romantic conquests. Gripping the hand of my latest travelling companion, a Dutch hippy by the name of Sunny, with a penchant for Rastafarians and stripping off her clothes at the slightest opportunity, we screamed and laughed into the sunlight.
Only hours later, I was plunged, mid-plot, into a thoroughly sinister Agatha Christie novel. We weren't in the verdent, rainbow-drenched valleys anymore, we were in the old English summer capital, Simla - an eccentric town which boasts the most peculiar, precise rendition of an Anglican church, soaring out of the usual Indian cacophany of tea shops and tumbledown buildings with quite terrifying architectural schizophrenia. I was walking alone up Simla's main street, towards the anomalous church when a well-dressed Indian man approached me. "You are with two western boys? And a man who says he's from Butan?" The German boys' companion from the bus was indeed still with us and claimed to be from Butan, (that strange little kingdom that nestles between India and Nepal). I said I was. "Don't trust him," said the man, "Please don't trust him. Get away. I beg you." And with a bow, he bid me farewell.
Suffice it to say that instinct told me to act on the advice and I learned, many months later, that we had been travelling with a criminal wanted by the Indian government.
India is somewhere you can have the time of your life - as I did - but you have to throw yourself into it. I tell you this story not to put you off, but because, as a girl, you must be aware you are taking a risk. I would not want to recommend that you shut yourself in air-conditioned taxis and spectate on the natives from the smartest hotels - you will never that way learn what it is like to be in the most intense, diverse and brilliant country on earth. But, you must keep your wits about you at all times. Stick to your instinct, let us even call it feminine intuition, and you will taste the country's pleasures but also hear when the alarm bells ring.
Follow the advice you are given - don't wear shorts or sleeveless tops, it really does offend people; wrap your money belt under your breasts, it's safest there; cut your hair short if you can bear it. And always take the advice of complete strangers in smart suits.
I have been all over India, and Northern India is much the best place to go if you are a girl travelling alone, or at least, independently. You're on the travellers' circuit there: people are going to similar places, in a similar order, around the same times. This means, yes, you do tend to bump into the same old naive kids on their gap years, but, in general, individuals off backpacking somewhere like India are extremely interesting, and the camaraderie that springs up when you are on the other side of the planet from your home is well worth cultivating. Travelling alone doesn't mean you don't need companions, it just means you can move on just as soon as they get irritating. It's the best of both worlds.
With a month to cover my favourite places, I'd suggest a mountain trip, with a bit of city-life to start off. Fly to Delhi. Stay in Paharganj for a week, the city's hurly burly tourist street, and get used to the heat. Don't do as I did and go to the main bus station on the day you arrive and contrive to faint in the middle of it, flinging your purse and all other worldly belongings to the right and left in the process, (I may add, a beggar, whose life it would have transformed, quietly placed my purse back in my unconscious hand). Buy yourself some silver jewellery otherwise you'll be lusting after it the whole time you're on the road - the more pearly-white the silver, the purer it is - and the Paharganj silver shops offer far better deals than anything you'll get out of the city. Hang out, drink loads of lassis, the delicious yoghurt drinks available everywhere (but no ice, remember), make a few friends, and book yourself a flight up to Leh, the capital of Ladakh.
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