India: A rich opportunity and a great challenge for travellers

India is a country that defies neat description. It epitomises diversity. For a traveller it presents a rich opportunity, and also a great challenge.

Fionn Davenport has never been there, but he did not let that or the aforementioned diversity stop him discussing the place in this week’s Travel Show podcast.

Michael McDermott from Le Cool magazine has been there, and he joined Fionn in studio to help out. “The experience throughout the whole holiday was an overwhelming sense of activity noise beauty, colour, it really is a sort of sensational tsunami” he says. But is this a good thing?

Also in studio is Marc-Ivan O’Gorman, a filmmaker who leads the Irish Film Festival of India. He suggests that India may not be the best destination if you have never visited India before. “I know people who have, but I wouldn’t generally recommend it, because it is sort of like Asia Extreme”.

“For me the defining aspect of India is the irreconcilability of everything. You go to India and it’s everything all the time. You’ll step out in the road with a bullock and cart, like it’s the 10th century, and then a Lamborghini will pull in front of him. Everything happens all the time” says Marc-Ivan.

The three discussed the beautiful Taj Mahal, peaceful Kerala, Rajistan, Delhi and Varanasi, the spiritual home of Hinduism on the Ganges where people go to die. “It was overwhelming, slightly unnerving” said Michael of seeing cremations take place on piers along the river.

Fionn wondered whether there is an ethical issue with observing what to us would be a private moment, but Marc-Ivan says not. “Just because you’re a foreigner and you don’t know what’s going on, doesn’t mean that you don’t belong there. India isn’t about that. Their feeling is, it’s all good”.

To listen to their discussion, log on to The Travel Show’s soundcloud page, or subscribe for free via iTunes.