After the Plane Ride Home

Hi, folks! It’s your international correspondent here…except I’m not so international anymore. My big trip is over and I’m back in my own North American urban life.

More or less, anyway. Travel changes the traveler. I’m not quite the same person I was when I left, and that means my sense of home isn’t quite the same, either. Everything’s just slightly off-kilter.

For example, I no longer take for granted:

• electricity that works all the time — in Kerala, India, power outages were common, and in Kathmandu, Nepal, the power was turned off for eight hours a day
• sidewalks and sane traffic — throughout Asia, sidewalks were sketchy and traffic operated by no natural laws that I was familiar with
• equality of women — on a more serious note, in a lot of India we saw very few women driving vehicles, working with the public, or walking around after dark

On the other hand, I know a lot more about the world than I did before. I was surprised by:

• Westernization in India — we think of India as a place of poverty, which is true, but mindsets are changing, Western-style malls are going up, and the young people we met were surprisingly easy to talk to
• Malaysia in general — I didn’t know anything about the country before we went, and now I know it’s a tri-cultural industrialized nation with high oil revenues and some beautiful natural areas
• hustling for tourists — after laid-back Malaysia, the feel we got in Thailand of desperate scrabbling after tourist dollars came as a shock, and the aggressive hustling and haggling in India even more so…but considering how rich we are in comparison, we shouldn’t have expected anything less

And, of course, I’ve fallen in love with a few places and experiences. I’d love to go back to:

• the Cameron Highlands in Malaysia, with its rare jungle plants and cool, misty weather
• the island of Koh Samui in Thailand, with its palm trees and warm ocean waves
• the city of Udaipur in India, with its romantic architecture on the shores of a quiet lake
• the Annapurna Range in Nepal, with its snowy Himalayan peaks and varied hilly landscape

For more about how travel has changed the way I look at my life at home, see Coming Home with Fresh Eyes over on my author blog.

I’d love to hear your travel stories…