Chai Pilgrimage

After several months of reorganizing our lives around the trip, preparations were finally complete. They had to be. We bought cheap, non-refundable airline tickets, told our clients that we were leaving, and our house renters were moving in the next day. We carefully packed a pile of necessities that had accumulated in the middle of the living room into our backpacks.
“Water filter.”
“Check.”
“Flip flops.”
“Check.”
“Toothbrushes.”
“Got ‘em.”
And so on.
Then, on a full-moon winter night, we took off for the other side of the world.

We set our intention to spend the next four months thoroughly steeping ourselves in chai culture. Our mission: to connect with people and document our experiences with chai drinkers (which in Nepal and Northern India is just about everyone), tea farmers, tea leaf pluckers, fellow chai wallahs (makers of chai), tea cup potters, spice merchants, dudh wallahs (milkmen) and the cows too. We realized this was much more than a creative research project. It was a personal pilgrimage to the land where chai was born and continues to flow in every home and at chai stands on every street.

Although we enjoyed one the most memorable times in our lives, it was not easy. For a foreigner, a full India experience includes a certain degree of discomfort. Inevitably, you get sick, either from amoebas in the water, a chronic cough from the thick pollution, or any number of obscure viral illnesses. Often, frustrations are brought on by cultural gaps and attachments to what we perceive as ‘normal’. Litter, noise, spicy food and extreme smells overload the senses. At the same time, the lack of a Western standard of personal space amongst a billion people, and the sometimes-frightening, heightened awareness that we are living in the mystery and anything could happen, became endearing. We oscillated between ecstasy in the present moment and longing for home and our own bed. We prayed continuously, laughed a lot and were constantly reminded of how blessed we are. This is what made our chai pilgrimage a spiritual journey.

Chai : the word for tea in the Indian subcontinent; in the West, it generally refers to a beverage made with black tea, spices, milk and sugar (called masala chai in India).
Pilgrimage : a long, often difficult, spiritual journey to a sacred place to fill the soul with faith and love for the Divine.

Chai Pilgrimage : a spiritual pilgrimage fueled by chai where we constantly stumbled over the feet of God; a multi-media book and website inspired by the human connectedness that occurs each time we share a cup of tea.