It is nice to occasionally (randomly) get an email or a message from a friend or family whom I haven’t heard from in a while, asking where am I and how’s the trip going etc. Most of the correspondences usually end along the lines of “You are so lucky” “I am so jealous of your photos” and “I wish I was there having fun with you!” However all you see in my albums are not the whole of it.

So here’s what you DON’T see in my facebook albums –

• The time I spend pouring over maps and guidebooks, choosing my travel path. Then spending further time at information booths, ticket counters and permit authorities. The booking, the purchasing, the waiting. Sometimes I have an entire journey planned only to realize it’s a public holiday the next day!
• The gorgeous food I get to eat. Notice how I hardly put up photos of food? Yeah. 1. This is not a food blog. 2. I’m usually too busy ravishing the food to think about taking pictures!
• The number of times I have been bogged down with traveler’s diarrhea. It is a horrible, horrible frame of time to be in. You don’t see the numerous days I have just stayed in bed balled up with stomach cramps.
• The distance I go to just to get to the next destination. Think lugging your bags in pouring rain trying to find the right bus at a busy city station in India and nobody speaks Hindi! Or going through a thorough body frisking check at the airport before boarding a flight to Kashmir or doing 4 train connection changes with 30kilos of luggage in Switzerland.
• The head splitting bouts of dehydration when I don’t drink enough liquids for the fear that I won’t find proper toilets.
• When I share a laugh with strangers at a joke without even speaking their language!
• The terrible, terrible ache of my feet and how am I usually hobbling by 2.00p.m on most days.
• The number of times, I have said, “Just look at the blessing in that…”
• The beds I have slept in.
• The sights I see that blow my mind away and no matter how hard I try can never capture it in a photo afterwards.
• The missed photo shots of meee with a significant something behind because there was no one to take the photo!!
• The time my pants got ripped while getting in a rickshaw and how the story of it spread like fire from the rickshaw driver all the way to the owner of the houseboat I was staying in via the boat guy, the bellboy and the cook. True story.
• The effort it takes to write up a blog post and put it up!

That’s some of the things you don’t get to see but they all link up to finish at the awesome places that you do get to see in my photos. They make up the background fragments of this trip. The ones that will remain with me long after the photos have faded.