India

India doesn't ease you in.

It arrives all at once - heat, colour, sound, the smell of jasmine and incense and diesel, the crowds and marigolds simultaneously. The first instinct is to organise it. The better instinct is to stop trying.

Rajasthan opens in the most magnificent way  - forts rising from desert rock, palaces above still lakes, Jodhpur in blue and Jaipur in pink. In a haveli in Jodhpur, a family has been welcoming guests for generations. That kind of hospitality - personal, genuinely warm, entirely without performance  - is what Rajasthan does better than almost anywhere. Further east, Varanasi doesn't soften anything. Life and death at the river, together, exactly as they have always been. The ceremonies are not for visitors  - they simply continue, as they have for centuries, and you are permitted to witness.

In Rishikesh the Ganges runs fast and clear from the mountains and the devotion feels direct, unmediated. South India moves at a completely different pace  - ancient temples alive with daily ritual, backwaters threading through coconut groves, healers practicing Ayurveda with a precision that comes from thousands of years of accumulated knowledge. The knowledge is in their hands before it is anywhere else.