As our final few days in Delhi came to an end, we spent much of our time and energy looking forward to home. On Thursday, we took a walk in the morning and became so tired of the hassles after a couple of hours that we came back to our hotel room and spent the rest of the day watching CNN and reading. Neither one of us even mentioned the possibility of going out and doing anything ... we discussed sending a final e-mail to summarize our feelings about the trip, but talking about it grew boring and we returned to our books. It was becoming clear that we were done with Southeast Asia for the time being, and two days after our return home Doug sent this final e-mail to the people on Gail's mailing list ...

Friends:

We're both back safely in the U.S., getting back into the grind of work and enjoying the clean food, hot showers, and honest people.

I was going to send another update from Delhi, but that never quite happened as expected, and now it's Monday on a life-as-usual work week and I can hardly remember what we did last week. I remember a few things in no particular order, like a wild ride on the back of a motor-scooter to a kurta pajama shop in Karol Bagh, several rikshaw drivers who needed "firm handling" (to use the euphemism often used with unruly dogs), a spectacular meal at Dumpukht that ended with some nauseating "Indian ice cream" which contained nothing resembling ice nor cream, and a pleasant couple of hours at an orphanage for little girls on our final afternoon in Delhi, where we saw a level of unmitigated joy, camaraderie, and acceptance of strangers unlike anything else we experienced in India. That was a good way to end, and we went straight from that orphanage to the Delhi airport, where we didn't mind being four hours early for the flight home.

Girls from the Udayan Care orphanage pose with pictures of Doug's dogs Mia and Trouble.
Doug told them stories of Malamutes playing in the snow, which their teacher/caretaker Karin translated into Hindi for them.

For now, I've posted a few photographs of the trip at this URL:

www.mahugh.com/asia99

We'll be posting more there in the future, but it will be a while until I can get caught up on other things and put some time into that. I hope to have a set of typical photographs from each place we visited up on Mia's site by May, but we'll see how that goes.

Thanks to everyone who was reading along with us ... I know that the tone of the emails slowly changed from "waxing rhapsodic about scenic grandeur" to "whining about confrontations with petty people," but that's a pretty accurate reflection of how we felt and what we spent our time thinking about as the trip went on. I thought this trip would make me more like Gandhi, but instead I think it made me more like Sam Kinnison, the late comic who would scream "GO WHERE THE FOOD IS!" to starving Ethiopians. India deserves India, in my opinion right now. In any case, it was nice to feel like we were still in touch with everyone, even if it was only one-way communication. And thanks to Gail for forwarding all the messages and (especially) typing in the faxes we sent from places where e-mail wasn't available.

We'll be canceling the dougandmom@yahoo.com e-mail account this week, so don't send any further messages there. Our "real" e-mail addresses, where we're both now back on-line, are as follows:

Lavonne: lavonne@mahugh.com
Doug: doug@mahugh.com

We were going to try to sum up some conclusions about Cambodia, Nepal, and India in this final e-mail, but we discussed it a bit and it seems like that's too hard to do right now. We both feel like we can unconditionally recommend Angkor Wat, Royal Chitwan, and Amritsar, but after that it gets too hard to say anything general and too tedious to get into all the specifics. Maybe the photos on the web site will eventually characterize our trip better than words would have. In that spirit, here's a quote from "Area of Darkness" by V.S. Naipaul (which we both read on this trip), regarding a letter he wrote to a friend immediately after his first trip to India ... "I forget now what I wrote. It was violent and incoherent; but like everything I wrote about India, it exorcized nothing."

We're glad we went, and it's good to be back.

- Doug & Mom

3/2/99: Siem Reap, Cambodia	4/2/99: New Delhi, India

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