Sudha Mahalingam - The Travel Gods Must Be Crazy: Wacky Encounters in Exotic Lands

Putting ones foot into ones mouth might seem like an impossible feat of contortion requiring complex manoeuvring skills. How and when I acquired and honed these enviable skills is of less interest than the fact that I have managed to deploy them time and time again, during my peregrinations through sixty-five countries in the past quarter of a century. And the consequences have ranged from the embarrassing to the confounding, the costly to the inconvenient, and occasionally, to the downright dangerous.

But how did I turn into that unwonted specimena middle-aged, middle-class mother of two from a conservative Tambrahm background travelling solo, long before solo travel became fashionable among Indian women?

It all started with my dear husband (now, of forty years) refusing to foray out of his comfort zonehome and officewhatever the seductions of the beyond, whereas I happened to have just the opposite inclination. On those rare work trips abroad on which I accompanied him, he would invariably assign a local chaperone to show me around all the touristy places. I felt hopelessly shackled and unjustly denied. Soon I developed an irrational disdain for planned trips. From the gloomy depths of a quotidian existence, I secretly longed for the thrills of impromptu forays, the imagined surprises of unpredictability, the pleasures of recklessness. I developed a persistent itch to explore the exciting, exquisite and extraordinary world, which in my sights, was waiting out there. The itch would soon scale up to a full-blown eczema. It could no longer be left untreated.

That was more than two decades ago. I set about looking for legitimate reasons to venture out of my discomfort zone. I ditched my stable but boring job in mainstream print journalism to foray into terra incognita, one that would, hopefully, open the doors to my imagined world of wonder.

Serendipity led me in the direction of energy research, a sari-clad woman bumbling her way through seminar rooms full of smart pinstripes and black ties, poring over zigzagging charts and incomprehensible bar diagrams of NYMEX and Brent. My lexicon was filling up with mumbo jumboAPI index, sour crude, crackers, etc. Before I knew it, I was processing from one conference to the next, having morphed rather quickly into an energy expert.

Soon, invitations began to pour in not just from Kochi or Kolkata, but also from organizers of road rallies and transnational motoring expeditions through petroleum-laden landsIran and Azerbaijan where gas wells are still worshipped in fire temples, through the Siberian wastelands where oil gurgles just beneath the ice, through Central Asian steppes once roamed by Genghis Khans golden horde, now criss-crossed by a welter of metal tubes. Driving in a motorcade of twenty cars ferrying four nationalities through four countries, I was shown wondrous pipelines through which ingenious Chinese engineers had coaxed Burmese oil and gas all the way from Sittwe to distant Yunnan.

My perceived expertise on energy matters even bestowed on me the membership of the prestigious National Security Advisory Board, ostensibly to advise the Indian prime minister on energy-related issues. I also became full-time regulator of Indias petroleum industry. I was now on a hurtling gravy train that dropped me off at exotic destinations with dependable frequency. There was a year when I was invited tohold your breatheighteen international conferences.

Being always in a hurrythere were PowerPoint presentations to be prepared, leave to be secured, family arrangements to be overseenI had little time left to do serious homework on the destinations I was headed to. Dog-eared Lonely Planet guides of yesteryears were my only beacons, often blinking or blanking out altogether, with outdated information on shut-down pensions or eateries. Eventually, the Internet came along, promising a modicum of assurance, but its reliability levels were as yet untested. Which is why I landed up in the Czech Republic without a valid visa and was caught without yellow fever vaccination at Nairobi airport.

It never occurred to me to simply go on holidays depicted on glossy brochuresto leisurely bask in the sun on golden beaches or sip pina coladas under picnic umbrellas. Virtually always on a shoestring budget, rushed for time, and with the destination determined by conference invites, my trips are eclectic and eccentric. With my penchant for the uncharted and unexplored, I even slid off the map whenever I could, and, more than once, slid off a plane to add some excitement when the terrain got too barren or dived into the ocean when the coast seemed predictable. Occasionally, I blundered into dangerous locationsand had a close escape with my life or freedom and, on occasion, my dignity.

But, over time, my passion for travel has only gotten worse. It continues to singe and sear and is now imbued with a sense of urgency. Not only is there so much to see and do when I am not getting any younger, the hydra-headed monster called tourism is literally carpet-bombing every square inch of our cowering planetthreatening to reduce me to being a tourist rather than a traveller.

Predictably, friends who insisted on tagging along with me on my journeys often shunned me like the plague afterwards. The boat journey up the Mekong River through four countries entailed considerable hardship and yielded no bragging rights, so to speak. As four of us friends sweated it out through sultry, smelly, crowded Vietnamese or Laotian villages and towns, decades-long friendships frayed and fell apart. The trek through the unforgiving jungles of Indonesian Borneo, ostensibly in search of the elusive orangutan, alienated my travel buddies forever thanks to the horrors it entailed.