This is a text Marie-Do wrote while the car made its way through the brilliant and desolate landscapes of the Gujarat. I have translated it into English.



Listening to the Counting Crows, those Californians who whine and twine pretty darned well. The road goes on, and dead animals roll by. Carrion is much more than something wrecked by the side of the road, it makes its presence known all around it and marks its boundaries by the smell which spreads with power on the wings of the wind.

It is good to travel, even when everything is displeasing. The filth, which is not only due to poverty. The negation of our private life, the brutal selfishness of other drivers, the inefficiency and I-don’t-give-a-damn of the workers, the aggressiveness of the children who enjoy screaming into the ears of foreigners; women and children kill themselves working, clearing thorn forests, breaking rocks by the side of the road, carrying kilos of bricks to work sites.

It is good to see the diversity of this world and to see how people manage to survive.

One of the things I appreciate is meeting other travellers. Even if we’re only talking about the French, they are a treasure of lives we would have had precious little chance in coming across if we would have stayed at home. Precious little chance to meet a donut seller, a toll collector, insect lovers, a Dutch riot policeman, an eternal traveller who made his fortune in Japan, an American ethnologist who was born in Palestine before the birth of Israel…if we would not have left home for a while.

And how lucky we are!

Some things we learn by experience, through fatigue and in the dust, others we learn through painless common sense. Each of us try to sharpen his own interior goal. Sometimes this happens through exterior dispersion, like the trip itself.

The road of our donut seller rode through several daily large and well made joints. She made her way through life as surely as a caterpillar towards its transformation.

The aversion of Inguebergue and Mery for India and the Indians (INDIA! I’ll Never Do It Again!) did not prove that their trip was a waste of time.

Each one has his quest, his route and his progression and it is good to have been a witness to this as to everything else. It is good to have seen the landscapes, the cities and the people; the plants, animals and the norias; the huge garbage dumps, the strange diseases…that which we understand and that which we do not understand.

Marie-Do