I arrived in India on a Sunday morning after spending a month in Sri Lanka, getting to know myself and registering each and every one of my limitations. With a backpack full of doubts, I was hyper-aware of all my fears and how much I would have to grow if I wanted to travel to India alone for the first time. It wasn’t just about ignoring the warning words people had thrown at me: “Don’t go, it’s dangerous.” “You’re a girl, Nadia.” “You’re going to get killed there.” It was also about facing the unknown, the uncomfortable, the chaotic, and the unpredictable on my own.
It was about deciphering that invisible code that governs the chaos of the country. Those threads that hold together an entire system that always seems on the verge of collapsing. How the transportation worked. What to eat, where, and how. Where to stay, how much to pay. Where the limit was, what I could do, where I could go. All these questions erupted silently when I made the choice to travel to India alone and landed at Kochi airport with less than ten kilos on my back.
My first hours in India: The glass box at Kochi airport
In silence, with the weight of loneliness clinging to my back like a parasite, I kept repeating to myself the steps to follow: “Get a SIM card.” “Withdraw cash.” “Find the safest means of transportation,” the voices told me, while I watched the travelers who had arrived on the same plane. But they had no fear, no doubts. They had already been here. The clothes they wore, the way their feet moved without a single worry let me know that the challenge of travel to India alone was something new only to me.
While looking for the hostel’s address with trembling fingers, I sat in one of the chairs facing the outside of the airport. As if trapped in a glass box I didn’t dare to leave, I tried to glimpse the reality awaiting me outside. “Taxi drivers will try to convince you that your hostel is closed to take you somewhere else.” “They’re going to rip you off,” I had been told more than once.
But I couldn’t just stay there, at the Kochi airport, hugging my backpack until the fear went away. A fear that had begun to erupt like boiling lava. Sooner or later, I had to step out and face that reality with open arms. To confront whatever happened. That’s why I had gone all that way, and I had to be enough for myself.
The ultimate culture shock in India
And when I finally got into the taxi, the entire reality of what India was supposed to be shattered against the windshield. But it wasn’t what I expected. That chaotic jumble I was anticipating never appeared. The shot I thought I could foresee never hit me. Simply, nothing happened. There was only the falling of my own thoughts, crashing down like hail.
Because I realized that I understood nothing.
India was not the chaos I had been warned about. But it wasn’t peace either.
I knew what India wasn’t. It escaped any absolute definition, refusing to be synonymous with poverty or wealth. It belonged neither to the past, the present, nor the future; it was far more than just culture or historical heritage. I understood, with something close to desperation, that India could not be captured by a single adjective.
The day I arrived, as I walked through Kochi, I realized that the only thing I could affirm about India was that it was a massive land that escaped any kind of definition or categorization. Worse still: India had no interest in being defined under any Western conception either. I, my experiences as a traveler, my ideas, my history—everything was utterly miniscule compared to that country that had swallowed me as if I were inside the jaws of a dragon.
It was the first time I felt completely insignificant within a system I could neither read nor comprehend, an environment that could devour me if I didn’t have the capacity to adapt and decipher those codes that slipped through my fingers. Arriving in India meant becoming aware of the space that existed between my present self and the woman I had to become to travel from south to north.
Learning to move through the chaos
Two days passed in Kochi until I felt the need to move, but I didn’t know how. Logistics in India felt like an invisible, deceptive spiderweb. The train system stretches across the country like a backbone. The long-distance buses seemed to have no beginning and no end. How to buy a ticket, and which one? What was safe and what wasn’t? All these questions paralyzed me on the hostel couch as I endlessly read blogs on how to travel through India alone
“I’m going to Munnar by bus, you can come if you want,” an Italian guy at the hostel told me when he saw my bewilderment. Without many options, I said yes, asking him to also explain the trains, the buses, and that entire system that seemed infinitely complex to me.
But it wasn’t. It wasn’t, if you just let yourself go and allowed people to help you.
To travel in India alone is to be swept away by a current
I don’t know how many buses we took that day. At least three. I don’t know because we reached Munnar as if swept away by a current that couldn’t be stopped. People told us to get on, to get off, promising they would let us know when to change buses. “Where are you from?” the driver would ask, while the rest of the locals stared with a certain curiosity. The windows were down, the music blended with the noise of the street, and the smell of earth clung to the walls like paint.
The same current that took me to Munnar dragged me to Varkala, but this time by train. I was no longer with the Italian guy, but with Addy, a girl from the United States who had already been there. We traveled for three hours by train alongside the locals, who did nothing but help us. When we arrived, we were greeted by a horizon of palm trees and clean water that had absolutely nothing to do with what you usually see on social media.
Traveling to India alone: shattering prejudices
The fear began to fade, and something resembling confidence took a tighter hold. I still didn’t understand many things. But I knew exactly what it was that I didn’t comprehend yet.
I had only been in Kerala, and I had learned to move there. But I knew that the other states in India were completely different. Every journey, every change of scenery, would bring a new adaptation. New rules. Different food, different codes. And so, with the absolute certainty of my own ignorance, I went to an Ashram, then to Goa, Rishikesh, Delhi, Varanasi, and Rajasthan.
Each new state was a different hard reset that sometimes consumed my energy voraciously. What I had experienced in Kerala had nothing to do with what I lived through in Rajasthan. But I knew it: that moving from one place to another was also a small reincarnation.
Rajasthan was a poetic, intense, flammable chaos that had nothing to do with Goa or Rishikesh. The people were different, the language, the architecture, the food, the coming and going, what I could wear and what I couldn’t, how I could travel. It was a brand-new code to decipher. But there was no longer any fear or doubt.
Embracing the Ignorance
I had embraced my ignorance and turned it into my fire. Questions became certainties, and that void of not knowing was no longer a blank space. It was like a tightrope I walked over the abyss.
By the end of my trip through India, I had abandoned the clumsy Western habit of naming and pigeonholing. Today, a couple of months after returning from that land on fire that we reduce to a mere name, I realize that the decision to travel to India alone forced me to look into the greatest semantic void I have ever seen in my life.
Its beauty doesn’t lie in one specific thing. It’s not the landscapes, nor the people, nor the food. It is that explosion of contradictions that we must learn to look at as if it were a hurricane. Without controlling it. Without defining it. Simply appreciating those tensions on the verge of exploding, frozen in a second that feels infinite.
If you are interested in India, you can check out my other articles:
Varanasi: death in the city that breaths fire
Solo travel in India