Taking Stock as a Passage to India Ends

I wake up with one nerve, and India is on it. The thought of spending another day in this country causes me to hyperventilate. Time to lace up our wandering shoes, I tell Andrea. She offers no resistance. We’re packed in five minutes, on our way to Nepal.

But before we get there, time for a progress report on our journey thus far:

Luggage: Lug it here, lug it there; now we know why it’s called luggage. Poor packing forced us to depart with two bags too many. San Diego friends John and Lauren Bruhn flew to our rescue in New Zealand, carrying home one of the extra suitcases after we all hiked the celebrated Milford Track.

We’re now down to one piece of luggage besides our backpacks, but it’s the size of a body bag. The pathetic part is that it doesn’t contain a thing we can’t buy along the way. The heaviest items--our year’s supply of guidebooks--are available at every other corner shop. Likewise the extra shampoo, deodorant, sunscreen and flashlight batteries we’re carting around the world.

Whoever said to pack half as much stuff and take twice as much money had it right. I dumped a dozen spiral notebooks several hotel rooms ago when I realized countries other than the U.S. made paper.

Funds: We’re way over our original budget of $75 a day, thanks mainly to New Zealand. That country is such a bargain, it’s easy to get seduced into a higher class of travel. In Queenstown, for example, we passed on comfortable $30 motel rooms in favor of a three-story lake-view townhouse we rented for a week at $65 a night.

If we were ever traveling on a shoestring, it belonged to a knee-high boot. Our food, lodging and transportation choices are now guided by what Andrea calls “good value.” As she rightly points out, we don’t ride Greyhound at home, so why take chicken buses in the Third World? Some days, a few dollars spells the difference between enjoying a place and merely tolerating it. Yet no amount of money could buy us a decent night’s rest in India, where the mattresses are as thin as my patience.

Clothes: If I have one strength as a world traveler, it is my minimalist approach to fashion. I’m down to four pairs of boxers, and I’m contemplating cutting that number in half. Andrea won’t divulge how many pairs of underpants she’s carrying, but her pack looks like the sale bin at a Nordstrom Rack. She gets on me for wearing the same shirt 11 days in a row, suggesting I mix things up for her benefit. I counter that I don’t want to have both my shirts dirty at once.

I now admit that the inflatable clothes hanger I chided Andrea for packing is a brilliant device. Most hotel rooms we occupy lack closets or even a chair to drape clothes over. Many days I jealously observe one of Andrea’s hand-washed articles airing on the plastic blowup hanger while my laundry dries on a filthy windowsill.

Spirits: It can’t be fun for Andrea to watch a 42-year-old man prancing in his underwear, singing songs from the rockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap,” but she never complains about my morning routine. Being together 24/7 would be tough at home, let alone while roaming from hotel to hotel, country to country. But we’ve yet to exchange a harsh word. Apart from being well matched, I think we both know that the minute we turn on each other, the journey gets poisoned.

There are days like today when we would rather be elsewhere--St. Andrews, Scotland, say, or Telluride, Colo.--but there are none when we regret taking this year off. We sometimes fret that the trip has yet to be defined. We are in transition--no longer tourists but not quite travelers. Nothing feels easy. Then again, we’re seeing the world. How hard can that be?

We are lucky, and we know it. We occasionally go to bed stressed, but we always wake up grateful. Well, almost always.

Because of our annual “Sourcebook” directory issue next Sunday, the Wander Year will take a week off, returning April 23.