The world doesn’t pay enough attention to India – even though it is a remarkable place, and a country that will certainly play a pivotal role in the coming chapters of our world’s history.  India’s “Tryst with destiny”, as Jawahar Nehru, the country’s first prime minister put it, begins with it’s people – and there are currently 1.1 billion of them.  India is home to the largest Hindu population in the world, and third largest Muslim population (after Pakistan and Indonesia), plus millions more Sikhs and Buddhists, and myriad localized tribal groups that are impossible to count. Though it's second in population to China, estimated growth rates project that India's population will overtake China as the world’s largest country by 2040.  And here’s the amazing part: it’s a democracy. This is not to say that the Indian government doesn’t have its share of problems, but it is a functioning republic. Certainly the answers to some of the thorniest questions of our times are hidden in this diverse, sentimental, flamboyant culture. 

Not that any of this was really on my mind when our plane landed at Gandhi International Airport in India’s capital city of Delhi on a simmering August evening. At the start of an expedition, I am always hyper-focused on one goal: getting to basecamp. Often, this can be the crux of the entire trip. Though we had planned to sleep for the night and catch a bus to the city of Manali, the jumping off point to the mountains of the Himachal Pradesh, we quickly found that our taxi driver was open to negotiation.  So, we immediately left Delhi on what eventually became a twenty hour, go for broke, Indian road trip.  Our driver, a charismatic Sikh who went by the anglicized nickname of “Happy” needed to pull over several times to nap, but he kept us supplied with tasty local food and beer, and would pull over when we had to piss – what more could you ask for?