FReak Travellers

India attracts all kinds of travellers. Tourists who come to see the temples and the Taj Mahal, backpackers in search for a great time on the beach in Goa and travellers in search for pieces of history, culture or religion.

There are also the searchers or freak travellers as we call them, searching for their better inner soul. Not happy in their own country and thinking of finding themselves in India. We think they loose themselves in India. These are the travellers that stay in India for months and months and try to extend their stay as long as possible.

Freak travellers can be found all over India and you can recognise them by a few things. Extremely weird clothing they will never wear at home (we hope), dreadlocks, boys with long hair and beards and excessive local jewellery in the form of piercings and eastern looking tattoos. We even see men wearing skirts or just have a cloth or towel wrapped around their waist. Walking like that on the street, can you imagine??!… They probably think they are well integrated with local society but they don’t see that they are wearing stuff that the locals don’t even think of to wear. We wonder what it is all about.

We have been looking for the latest fashion trends among these weird travellers. We found out that it is very ‘trendy’ to wear a woollen blanket. Okay, locals sometimes wear these blankets, we have to admit. But they do wear it only when it is very cold in wintertime. But seeing travellers wearing the same thick blankets at 25 degrees during the day, we wonder if it really ads to ‘the experience’. In the small village we are now, just at the beginning of the Indian Himalaya, everyone seems to wear such a blanket. And they do it all. People from Scandinavia, Israël an even South America.

‘We have to keep on moving, Michel’. We don’t want to end up making peace signs the whole time and wearing a blanket. We think it’s the same as a Japanese tourist in Amsterdam wearing clocks.