I always knew I wanted to travel for work while contributing to the places I visited. While applying for college, I heard that nursing could be that profession. I figured I’d try nursing school; if I hated it, I could back out. I clicked a box on my college applications for “School of Nursing.” I didn’t… Read More >>
2 September 2017: Three days before the flight When I was a child. As the daughter of Indian immigrant parents. Is that how this starts? Going to India every year since I was twelve. Is that how this starts? I’m on my way to India again, but this time it’s a little different. In a… Read More >>
Last year, a series of emails between me — a queer brown woman of Indian descent — and my buddy — a white dude who dates dudes — led to us bicycling across India together. We’d never spent more than a cumulative month in the same place but had maintained a friendship through emails and… Read More >>
For many women, people of color, LGBTQ folks, safety is the first thing on our minds when we think about travel. It’s daunting to go to a place you’ve never been, especially if you don’t anticipate there will be anyone who looks like you. It might feel safer to travel in cities or to stay… Read More >>
At the end of 2017, I biked more than 3,000 miles from the Himalayas to the southern tip of Tamil Nadu. Over four months, my bike tour of India took me through 12 states, and I passed Buddhist monasteries with prayer flags waving on mountaintops, Sikh gurudwaras serving free communal meals, towering minarets of mosques,… Read More >>
Sam and Shirley rolled up in a silver minivan. The 80-year-old couple inched out of the car and waved us over. The opened their trunk, loaded our bicycles and gear, and drove us up a thousand-foot mountain on a windy gravel road while joking that Sam, who was driving, was legally blind. That night, they… Read More >>
It was when I was lying on the floor at yoga class and the instructor said, set an intention, that I put my boyfriend and our impending distance aside because that’s not an intention. I put the stress and fear of an upcoming adventure aside; stress and fear are not intentions. I put my body… Read More >>
Last November, in a red state surrounded by people who voted for Trump, I silently grieved for my country. My body was brown, deflated, minimized, isolated, invisible, hypervisible, and hiding from what cannot be changed. I felt like a fire dumped with water, unable to fathom what was happening, or if the future I’d imagined… Read More >>
Three years ago, I didn’t even own a tent. But when I decided to go on a cross-country bike trip, I found out camping was the easiest and cheapest option for where to sleep. In the past few years, I’ve camped in the backcountry, on solo trips, out of a car, and with a group,… Read More >>
I unload my green backpack onto the airport security’s conveyor belt and remember the knife and the mace. The weapons given by strangers while hitchhiking across the country alone as an eighteen-year-old brown girl. The six-inch boot knife from a thirty-something white trucker who knew I’d have no idea how to use it, but thought… Read More >>