Chicken & Eggs

One of our favorite things to do in the Subcontinent is to get a car and head out into the wonderful vast world of village life. Villages, just like cuisines, vary tremendously from region to region, from country to country. The architecture is different, the agriculture is different, the feel of a village can be night-and-day different even from the nearest neighboring village But for years we spent very little time in villages when we traveled here. As young travelers on a tight budget, we traveled on buses and, of course, on trains—fifty-four hours by train from Kolkata (Calcutta) to Chennai (Madras), three days by bus from Kathmandu to Delhi, long overnights from Peshawar to Lahore. We’d stare out the windows and watch as villages came and went, almost like blinks of an eye. But we’d almost never set foot in a village except when we were trekking. We could jump off the bus at a little local stop, but more than likely there’d be no hotel, no restaurant, and we wouldn’t know exactly how and when to catch another bus to travel on our way, so we never did.