Sometimes, the only way to move forward is to accept that you will tremble the entire way. A chaotic starting point; fear like an electric shock running down your spine. Crying in the shower before heading out, your stomach tightened into a knot that won’t let you breathe. That is how I felt the day I decided to travel solo through India.
A dread that often turned into panic, and other times into a blind faith toward something I couldn’t quite define. That’s how I spent nearly three months, wandering through a continent that wasn’t mine. Praying to something I didn’t know well. Some anonymous God. Some belief I imported from another life. A certainty that wouldn’t stop whispering that everything was going to be okay. And the fear, crawling up my back like a putrid shadow, tucking itself into my backpack. A duality that split me in half for two and a half months: the contradiction of solo female travel in India and the constant pulse between blind faith and fear.
The Fear: Navigating solo female travel in India
Many people ask me if it is dangerous to travel this way. The honest answer isn’t a yes or a no; it’s a sensation. I felt fear. All the time. But not because of what was happening around me, but because of what was happening inside me. The noise of India was merely a trigger for everything exploding within my mind. Like a bomb buried in some long-forgotten war, about to detonate.
Navigating this country alone means living with constant noise—not just from the streets, but from your own prejudices. It’s the fear of not understanding the “invisible order” of a place that seems to be perpetually on the edge; the fear of radical solitude and the gaze of others that you cannot decipher. The sounds, the smells, the words—the collision of thousands of realities exploding around you. People asking for photos, your friends back in Argentina saying: “How can you go to India alone?”. The air was burning, and with it, my need for control burned too.
I quickly understood that the possibility of controlling what happened was a utopia in a country that collapsed and was resurrected every minute. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t foresee even what would happen in an hour. I didn’t know where I was going to sleep, or where I was going to eat. How I was going to get there, what I was going to do. But over time, it started to be okay. It began to make sense. It became part of the charm of India—a country built on the idea of a permanent “now.”
Blind Faith
However, in the moments when fear seemed to win it all, blind faith would appear. I’m not talking about religious faith, but an absolute surrender to uncertainty. A certain absurd, naive surrender that surfaced every time I was dying of fear. Every time I felt a chill down my spine, when a voice told me to go back home, that the discomfort was too much. “You’re crazy,” they’d tell me while I tried to book train tickets in a system I didn’t fully understand. But I stopped listening to everything—the honking, the barking of street dogs.
Because I knew everything was going to be okay. I don’t know if it was intuition, confidence, or stupidity. But that was what allowed me to board a train without knowing exactly where to get off. That blind faith—intense, explosive, and foolish—was what pulled me out of my comfort zone in Croatia and led me to take that bus to the airport. In Sri Lanka, I began the journey full of doubts; in India, I ended it understanding that blind faith isn’t believing everything will go well, but knowing you’ll be capable of managing it if everything goes wrong. That there is a being inside you that is larger, more unpredictable, eclectic, mystical, sacred, and chaotic than India itself: you. Yourself.
Managing Contradiction in Chaos
The hardest part of solo female travel in India wasn’t the physical exhaustion, but managing emotions like frustration in a totally chaotic context. A permanent noise that transfers to the spirit, one you don’t stop hearing even while lying in silence in your bed. It was there, listening to the noise of the nightly silence, that I understood the secret isn’t trying to eliminate fear so that faith can appear. On the contrary: fear and blind faith need each other. Two sides of the same coin, two extremes that touch and collide. Fear kept me alert, conscious, and present. Blind faith allowed me to keep walking despite it all.
The Silent Fire
Today, in the polar silence, I feel the trip is only just beginning to settle. India is a country that burns; it is immense and indefinable. Unfathomable, eclectic, mystical, sacred, dirty, contradictory. A collision of palaces, death, poverty, and reincarnation all on the same street. Faith, cows, cities, mountains, temples, street food.
India is the country I loved most because it is a process of combustion. Everything explodes, and you are no exception. It is a country that demolishes you just to see what you are capable of building with the pieces. And here I am, in the middle of the ice, looking at my remains and understanding that only when you are in pieces can you choose which parts of you deserve to be rescued, and which ones stay back there, burning forever in that air that was on fire.
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