Packing for India

I got my typhoid and flu vaccines yesterdaay.

Visa should be ready tomorrow. I hope.

I've got the hae bi (dried shrimp) and the toilet paper to take to my buddy with whom I'll be staying with in Delhi.

Wait.

Toilet paper?

Yup, he specifically asked for toilet paper.

Apparently toilet paper is a luxury good in India, coveted by many but afforded by few.

It's also apparently not a mass cultural norm to use toilet paper during you-know-when occasions.

Well I'll find out for sure on this trip whether this is really true, but in any case, I'm definitely bringing some of it myself, lest I be caught in an awkward situation.

I'm really looking forward to this trip, not least because it'll be an adventure in a uniquely different country, I'll be attending a true blue Indian wedding (hopefully there'll be elephants!) plus I'll be a single Asian female travelling by myself.

Oh the tales of locals grabbing your boobs as you walk by, being accosted and molested in every possible public situation and various other stories have assailed my ears by loads of people who've heard about my solitary travel plans.

I've tended to dismiss them as over-exaggerated travellers' tales so far, although at the back of my head there's a little niggly feeling of unease. Then I opened the guidebook and read the snippet about female travellers and almost fell off my chair.

It confirmed a good majority of all these travellers' tales. The guidebook attributed it to the latent repressed sexuality in India.

I didn't know whether to laugh out loud or crease my brows in worry.

On top of defending my modesty, I also have to figure out how to feed myself safely. Practically everyone I know who's been to India has been attacked by food poisoning during their trip, even with the most careful precautions.

My dad is freaked out to say the least. Especially with the Mumbai bomb attacks in 2008 and the security threats in Delhi leading up to and during the Commonwealth Games a couple of months back.

But as a friend said, if you don't live on the edge sometimes, you'll always regret it.

And it's not like I'm going to be hanging off a cliff or anything like that.

I'm actually staying in a fairly fancy hotel in Kolkata while attending my college friend's traditional Indian wedding. Plus, a simple search on tripadvisor turns up enough horror stories about accomodation to make me want to pay that bit more for extra comfort.

Some other friends eventually got onto the bandwagon and will be flying in as well. So I won't actually be alone by myself all the time.

But then I'll be heading over to Delhi on my own on a domestic Indian airline. At the back of my head, I've got this image of riding pillon on a motorcycle to the airport, battling crazy Kolkata traffic, only to be turned away because I wasn't there 2 hours earlier. Or getting my luggage lost in the middle of my trip.

And then there's the going to Agra to see the Taj and the Fort on my own. Besides the fact it was quite the undertaking to find a safe and decent way to get there, and that I had to fork out a small fortune to get a guide and a driver to take me, since I was not about to spend 4 hours on the local train with the risk of getting squashed like a sardine, molested and harrassed out of my wits and possibly not getting there in one piece.

Or not getting there at all.

Especially since I have little time on this trip, time is of the essence.

Then it occurred to me that for all the safety precautions, the driver or the guide could simply just whisk me off anywhere after they picked me up and there would be practically no way anyone could find me. I'd be in the middle of nowhere, for goodness sake.

But, hey, having an overactive imagination does nobody any good when travelling. Plus, the whole point about travelling to Incredible India (as their tourism slogan proclaims) is to learn and be immersed into a whole new culture, isn't it?

I'm psyched (once I get past the toilet paper apprehensions)!