When me and Sona left for our Mexican cooking honeymoon in Puebla, I had no idea it would be quite so much fun. While I would have been perfectly content with cooking mole, roaming through the colorful streets of Puebla, eating spicy corn, and drinking horchata, Sona decided to amp it up. We were wandering through a tiny little side-street and picked up a flier with the names of random luchadors. I knew this word because I’d just watched Nacho Libre last month, and considered myself an expert on all things lucha related.
Sona Burning a Tortilla in Mexico (AKA: the Usual)
When Sona first told me she’d booked a week long cooking honeymoon to Puebla, Mexico, I thought it was going to be a bit dull. But it was so much fun. After getting to Mexico City, we took a bus to Puebla, navigated the subway system to the airport on the way back, and even took a quick trip to El Popo, an active volcano. We stayed at a boutique hotel called Mesones Sacristia, with a dark blue exterior, large archways, and gorgeously designed rooms.
Sona’s Take: Deciding to Go
Just a little over three years ago, I was chained to my desk at People magazine, working sixty-plus hour weeks. Yeah, I got to interview celebs and blah blah blah, but to me it was all just a day job. I was too wimpy to quit to pursue my real dream, filmmaking. And then I met Navdeep. A hardcore traveler who’d lived in China and backpacked overland through Tibet into India. An adventurer who scoffed at the idea of staying in one of the fancy pant palaces converted into hotels in Rajasthan (as my sister and I did on our trip there). He thought nothing of sleeping alone in a tent in the middle of God-knows-where in Mongolia. I didn’t know it then, but his free spirit (and indie travel bug) were about to rub off on me, big time. Now, at 30, I’m a fulltime freelance writer with all the instability that implies. Journalism, unfinished novels, screenplays gathering dust in a pile on my bookshelf.
I’m not sure exactly when the idea of a three-month long honeymoon jaunt in India started to percolate between us, but for the longest time I didn’t take it seriously. We both had strong roots in the country, but for me, a trip to India simply meant being shuffled from one relative’s house to the next in Delhi. Besides, who really quits their dayjob to pursue something as amorphous and unstable as writing fulltime—let alone pursuing the fantasy of filmmaking? Even with the clips from those glossy magazines everyone picks up at the newsstand, the decision was impractical at best. Besides, shouldn’t we be thinking about serious married-people things like health insurance and 401Ks?
But the idea just wouldn’t die.
Navdeep’s Take: Deciding to Go
Much like asking Sona to marry me when I didn’t have a job, or any remote interest in the possiblity of attaining one – I was in the middle of an MFA in creative writing program while living with my parents in Fresno (and she still said yes!)- the decision to drop everything and go backpacking through India wasn’t a difficult one. When I asked Sona to get married, all I knew was that it felt right. And that is how I feel about this adventure, despite Sona’s tendencies to overcomplicate everything, from simple recipes, to packing, I knew it would be an adventure that I couldn’t pass up. Sona has great work ethic, which is not a good trait in a traveler. So, when she suggested the act of vagabonding for a couple of months before settling back into reality, I knew I couldn’t pass up my one opportunity to infect her with the travel bug.
We had the whole world at our disposal, but we ultimately decided on India because, well, it’s India. There is no country in the world quite like it and we both think we can speak the North Indian languages of Hindi and Punjabi, relatively well (numbers higher than 10 are a bit tricky though).It is a land of contradictions with its breathtaking beauty, vast areas of ugliness in the sheer level of visible pollution, majestic architecture, squalid tin-roofed make-shift neighborhoods, perilous roads, home to some of the world’s most exciting and dangerous places.
For Sona, it is also about embracing a country that she has never properly explored as an insider. She’s always been on the outside with sheltered 2 week family trips involving lots of shopping, and being shuttled from one relative’s house to the next. The first time I went on my own was when I was 20, as a reward for myself for failing all of my classes at community college. Yes, community college. That trip really made me focus on my studies, perhaps not exactly for the right reasons: I wanted to be done, so I could go travel some more!
The second I graduated with my Bachelors degree, I went gallavanting off to China, and ended up living there for 2 years. I eventually made it back to the United States, but not before backpacking from China into India via Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, Tibet, and Nepal. I took the scenic route.
Our Big Fat Desi Wedding!
For our first official post, we thought what better way to start things off than with a photo from our Big, Fat, Desi wedding! We’d like to tell you the significance of what we’re doing in this photo, but the truth is none of us know. It’s such a fun photo though, especially Sona’s dad off on the side, smiling away. I assumed Sona’s family understood what was happening during the Hindu ceremony, but it turns out, the whole thing was in Gujarati, a language nobody in attendance spoke!
