India

There aren’t many countries that stimulate the senses, the intellect, and the emotions like India. Here, 2,000-year-old customs vie for your attention with pulsating expressions of modernity. Here, try to wrap your head around an incredible cross-section of humanity in the form of better than two thousand different ethnic groups. Here, you’ll struggle to reconcile systemic poverty of disturbing scale with royal glamor and 21st-century wealth. And here, you’ll marvel at unforgettable glimpses of primal wildness—a tiger’s hiss, a langur’s treetop leap, the glint of sunrise on a Himalayan glacier—holding on amid a human population of incredible size (more than 1.2 billion!) and density.

Sure, the Taj Mahal is one of the great architectural masterpieces of the world, but some of India’s most stirring monuments are houses of worship. Given the country’s religious diversity and intense spirituality, it’s an incomparable destination for surveying the beautifully varied traditions with which humanity perceives and celebrates the divine. The Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar, holiest of all Sikh gurdwaras; the Mahabodhi Temple in Bodh Gaya, marking the tree of the Buddha’s enlightenment; the Ganges temples of the holy city of Varanasi; the mighty Delhi mosque of Jama Masjid—these are only some of the most prominent sites.

And speaking of the sacred, Indian cuisine—much of it vegetarian—is revered the world over. Like the country’s spiritual character, native cookery is anything but homogenous: From the Tandoori chicken of Punjab to the banana-leaf-wrapped Sadhya meals of Kerala celebrations, India has an enormous share of culinary traditions.

Whether you’re touring shrines and sanctuaries or seeking out flatbreads and lentils, India’s urban-to-rural spectrum is astonishing. The great cities—Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore, Kolkata, and many others beyond a million people—can be completely overwhelming, from their labyrinthine slums to their seemingly lawless traffic. Ultimately, surrendering yourself to the chaos—and going with the flow—is the best way to navigate their immersive experience. Worlds away, the deep countryside of India—increasingly laced with high-speed roads and rails—includes farmers, pastoralists, nomads, storytellers, craftspeople, ascetics, and others engaged in traditional livelihoods that, on the surface anyhow, seem little changed across the centuries.

And for the ecologically inclined, the subcontinent comes rich in treasures: snow leopards and mountain sheep in the Himalayas, rhinos and elephants in the Indo-Gangetic Plain grasslands, Asia’s last lions in the Gir Forest, the Bengal tigers of Ranthambore, the wolves and blackbuck of Velavadar, and the Arabian Sea coral reefs off Goa (a place also legendary for its beaches).

There’s no point in generalizing much about such a populous and diverse nation, aside from marveling at the depths of experience any traveler can be privy to here in the heart of South Asia.