Tag Archives: monuments

Mumbai & Ellora

by jose

Ladina put down her whip, took off her hat and wiped the sweat off her brow. We had just escaped a deadly arrow trap followed by swinging axes when we had stumbled upon a long gallery. Astonished by our discovery, we slowly made our way along the walls, using our torch to bring light to ancient, crumbling bas-reliefs depicting what seemed to be forgotten gods in scenes of daily life: battling demons, wrenching entrails out of an agonizing enemy, or sometimes simply lifting mountains above their heads.

“I think we would better appreciate all of this if we had some historical context, or better still, theological explanations.”

“Let me get the Lonely Planet out”

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Rajasthan

by jose

Although it is seldom mentioned in Western education, India has a millenary-old history going back to the earliest stages of Antiquity, full of the drama of warring kingdoms and crumbling empires, mighty Maharajas and decadent peoples. In particular, almost the whole subcontinent of India was united under the banner of the great Mughal empire from the 16th to the 18th century, after years of conquest and military supremacy of the Muslim armies. The Mughal emperors would leave a lasting trace of their glory in History, with Shah Jahan having erected the Taj Mahal, and the mighty Akbar being still today revered as both a skillful general and a wise ruler.

It is thus unsurprising that so much of their passage could remain visible today, all across the state of Rajasthan. Immense (as well as impregnable!) forts dot the countryside, while majestic and luxurious palaces sometimes emerge at the most unexpected locations.

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The Taj Mahal

by jose

This picture has no originality whatsoever, since it is arguably the most famous sight of the whole India: the Taj Mahal, the mausoleum Shah Jahan built to mourn the death of his beloved (third) wife Mumtaz Mahal, is a wonder. There is no other word.

But I felt no shame in taking it, a few million times after the first photographer entered the Taj grounds, and I feel no shame in publishing it here either. Firstly, because its staggering beauty, even clouded in the mist of a wintry morning, is well worth taking my hat off to the Mughal emperor Shah Jahan and the architects who designed such a marvel, by rendering it as they envisionned. And, secondly, well, because no photograph can give the Taj Mahal justice anyway.

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Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

by jose

I love CouchSurfing. I have probably already said it, but I love CouchSurfing. For everything it brought to my trip – locals’ recommendations, discovering cultures from the inside, meeting great people, sharing joys and, most importantly, making amazing friends – I am eternally grateful, and in debt to all the CouchSurfers around the world. They will be most welcome at my place, when – or rather every time – I will be settled down somewhere.

Nevertheless, despite all the qualities of the CouchSurfing project, it does have one major drawback. It needs the Internet.

I am not talking about the problem of accessing the Internet, though. Travelers can find, nowadays, an access to the Internet – may it be a Wi-Fi hot-spot or a cybercafe – relatively easily (thank you McDonald’s and Burger King, aka Hungry Jack’s for our Australian friends); as for the hosts, it is obvious that CouchSurfing cannot expand to the regions of the world that are not reached by this powerful medium. This is something that will improve with time; and after all, on the other hand, it is sometimes a relief to find that you can be impossible to reach in some parts of this world. Yes. It is.

I am, actually, talking about the fact that CouchSurfing needs messages between the host and the surfer if they are to organize the latter’s stay. Such a conversation, obviously necessary, takes at least a week, if not several. Which means the traveler needs to know a week in advance where he is going. CouchSurfing is an amazing project, but it restrains the sheer freedom of travelers, especially those, like me, who are always on the move, always on the road, and only following the wind.

This is what I realized, the night before I reached Sydney, after a phone call to Kevin, a CouchSurfer that I thought would be able to host me when I would arrive there. In the silence of Newcastle’s train station, the fact that CouchSurfing was, after all, also a social act, implying social rules and roles, became all but too obvious to me.

After all, one of the reasons why I am traveling is to escape the constant demands of the society.

Maybe such a thing is impossible.

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Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India

by jose

Everyone told me ‘You have to go to the Taj Mahal – it is the most beautiful building on Earth… It is perfection. You won’t believe it. You have to go.’ But I was like, you know, okay, I’ll give it a look while I’m in India.

And then I saw it… Like you saw it! And I couldn’t believe how beautiful it is. I still cannot believe it. It is perfection.
(Saskia, traveler)

I had seen pictures of the Taj Mahal too. I knew what it looked like. I knew it was a major monument of India. But nothing, no, nothing in this world could have prepared me to what I felt in front of it. No description, no picture, no poem or prose, no story can replace the direct, brutal and intense experience of seeing the Taj Mahal with your own eyes.

That was the third time my mind was blown away in India. When I saw the Taj Mahal. Every time I saw it, actually. Every time I found a new spot, a new point of view, a new angle, a new detail, outside, from a field, on the other side of the Yamuna river, from a rooftop restaurant, from the Agra Fort, or, even more, inside the Taj grounds, a few dozens of meters away or close enough to touch its milky-white marble walls.

And the monument in the first picture is not the Taj Mahal, no – actually it is just here to decorate and give balance to the Taj Mahal complex, even though it would be a major monument if it were standing alone in another city – but do not worry, you will have plenty of it in the following, to saturation. Even though no photograph will ever give you the same, powerful and timeless feeling that grasps anyone who sees it for real. No one will take your breath away every single time you look at it, as it does in reality. No one will make you fall on your knees, overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotions pulsing from the tomb.

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Udaipur, Rajasthan, India

by jose

General laugh in the bus. I turn to Sajjad (Qatar) and stare at him inquiringly. He calms down, catches his breath and finally translates.

She just said: ‘You’re young, why are you wearing shoes?’

Er well… I come from a country where kids wear shoes. Parents buy small shoes to their children – and they need new ones after every few months, obviously – so that their feet are always protected from the clean floor of the developed countries, and that they never are wounded, never feel the ground, never learn to get stronger. So that when they become adults, they still are unable to walk without that piece of equipment, even only on a flat ground, because they still have babies’ feet and soft skins.

Yeah, well, I have no idea why either, Isu.

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Luxor, Upper Egypt

by jose

There is a reason if I travel. Or, I should say, there is a reason if we travel. Once I arrived in Egypt, I found I was not the only one who wanted to see things before I would die.

— What do you want?
— I wanna see beautiful places in Egypt before leaving it… I mean, I’m on a round-the-world trip. I can’t stay for too long in Sharm. I need to move.
— Yeah… Me too.

And so it was decided. Yes, it is the curse of the traveler to part from people they love, to put an end to beautiful things they just built up, to leave when everything in the world tell them to stay. Maybe not everything, actually.

Our passion for discovering the world and its wonders, our passion to jump into the unknown so that we can live our life to the fullest. Perhaps our fear of getting trapped in constraining bonds too. But, most of all, our dream of expressing both our freedom and our joy of living in this so, so beautiful world.

These are the reasons why we kept moving. And why I keep moving. Moving forward, without ever forgetting, but moving forward still.

Always forward, and never stopping, Inshallah.

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Jerusalem, Israel

by jose

— Crap, they dropped us in the middle of nowhere – we’re on the highway!
— I love it. This is freedom, Ant!

Freedom. This is the intense feeling that grasped me a few seconds after I jumped out of the minibus with my backpack between my arms, following the Donkeys that had just woken me up. I took a look around us, and yes, we were in the middle of nowhere, on the side of a highway, with no clue about where to head. We only knew we were in Jordan, somewhere not that far from the Dead Sea – we only had to find it.

Getting lost in a country you had not even thought you were going to, getting lost with your backpack on your back, getting lost with friends you basically just met but already know you are going to keep for your whole lifetime. Getting lost and decide to walk in the general direction you want to go to, with all the equipment you need, which means you never have to look back or go back to wherever you came from – simply walking in this breathtaking landscape, in this unknown territory, just because you heard that a place you need to see is somewhere ahead of you.

Welcome, freedom, this feeling I had never experienced before. Take a seat somewhere in my heart; I will keep it for you forever, so that you can come back and chill out here whenever you wish.

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Petra, Jordan

by jose

I used to hate taking pictures of people, and even more of myself. After all, if I am traveling, the purpose is mainly to discover places – not show my face with a changing background behind, as if to yell to the world “I have been there and not you, and look at me, I am smiling, I am happy.” Holy crap I hate tourists. No, what I prefer is to show my friends incredible landscapes and places. “C’mon guys, check this out, you have to come here and have fun with me, it is so awesome – travel more, it is worth it!”

It is worth it.

I used to hate taking pictures of people, until I met these guys, our travel group formed in Cairo and Dahab. Until I found that the ultimate happiness in traveling was the human adventure, the sharing, the joy of simply being with friends, doing things together, and sometimes facing hard times together. Let me thus introduce our happy Middle East party: the Donkeys.

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Pyramids

by jose

People tell you that you haven’t succeeded in life, because you don’t have a wife, a house, a car, a successful career… “But man, have you ever seen the Pyramids?”
John Y., 61 years old, traveler

Now I have. Thank you John for being the first person I ever met to have exactly the same philosophy than me. The one in which I do not want to spend my whole life working to only have a few weeks of real life every year just because everyone else does like that, in which I refuse to spoil my short stay on Earth by following everyone on the path of “work to get money – consume to spend money – work more to consume more”, in which I would rather prefer to discover what is on this planet with my own eyes instead of seeing misery at the daily TV journal and tell myself that my house is safe and that the best choice is to stay in it until I die.

Thank you John. I am not alone anymore.

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