India

India was the kind of trip that kept pulling me somewhere new every few hours. From the Rajasthan heat bouncing off pink sandstone in Jaipur to the cool stone corridors of Hampi's ruins, nothing quite sits still here. There's a scale to everything — the palaces, the temples, the statues — that makes you feel small in the best way, like you're standing inside a story that started a thousand years before you arrived.

The south was different from what I expected. Mysore at night, with the palace wrapped in a hundred thousand lights, looked almost unreal — like a film set, except the air smelled of jasmine and the whole city had come out to sit on the lawns in front of it. Hampi was the one that got under my skin most, though. Walking through those red boulder-strewn ruins in the dry heat, carved columns going on and on in every direction, it was hard to believe the whole place was just out in the open under an ordinary afternoon sky.

The Nilgiris hills were the exhale at the end of it all — red dirt roads, eucalyptus everywhere, the air suddenly cold, and a fresh coconut handed through a jeep window somewhere along the way. I went into India expecting noise and colour, which I got, but I didn't expect just how much of it would feel this quiet when I was standing right inside it.