Free A House in the Sky by Amanda Lindhout

illustrate how great it all was. “Tomorrow,” I wrote to my parents from an Internet café in Agra, “I am going to a different city called Jodhpur. It is a city in the desert, called the Blue City, as all the buildings are painted blue! I am having the BEST TIME EVER!”
    And I was. I was meeting people from all over the world—some nurses from Australia, a couple of Israeli teenagers on leave from the army—traveling with them for a few days or a week before parachuting off again on my own. Riding the bus one day in Calcutta, I struck up a conversation with a fellow Canadian—a blond guy in his early thirties with arresting blue surfer-boy eyes—and ended up having a several-month mini–love affair with him. His name was Jonathan. He carried a black canvas backpack and a guitar.
    I was a sucker for guitar strummers. Since my breakup with Jamie, I’d been guarded around men, unwilling to jump into the ongoing carnival of traveler romances. Sex on the road seemed, for a lot oflong-haul travelers, like a given. The pints of beer in warm air, the months passed without a haircut or a good shave, the boastful chitchat and dazed hours spent at bus windows all lent themselves to a certain sexual ease. The options were almost too exotic to be ignored. I’d seen Chileans wander off with Danes, old men and young women, older women with younger men, men with men, and women with women, and every once in a while a boozy international threesome tiptoeing back through the tamarinds to somebody’s room.
    I wasn’t against any of it. I had just never been all that self-assured. If I got involved with a man, even briefly, I usually ended up feeling overattached and extra-vulnerable. I wanted to be more like other girls my age, able to have fun and move on, but it didn’t happen easily. With Jonathan, who was extroverted and not serious about anything, I did learn to lighten up a bit. I had fun and never once asked myself if I was falling in love. We were both so devoted to solo travel that we saw each other only every few weeks, arranging by e-mail to meet up for a few days in one city or another before moving on alone.
    People would say to me all the time, “It must be so hard to travel by yourself as a woman.” But I was finding that it was easier. I was sure about it. If you smiled, if you showed people that you were happy to be there, you were met most often with warmth. The swindlers backed off easily. The tuk-tuk drivers and beggars eased up and became more human, maybe even a bit protective.
    Nothing slowed me down. I took a train to Varanasi, a holy city for Hindus, thought to be a direct portal to heaven. There, pilgrims sat half-sunk in the gray-green water of the Ganges, washing their bodies, washing laundry and dishes, washing cows, while dead bodies burned on the ghats above. I went to Delhi, Mysore, Pushkar. I learned to sleep on trains, to not think twice while using the toilet holes that emptied directly onto the tracks rushing below. I tried the southern beaches of Kerala, where the lip of the Indian Ocean foamed over long stretches of white sand.
    Here is the rule of proximity: You get to one place, and it becomes impossible, basically, not to start looking at whatever else is nearby. Climb to the top of one mountain, and you see the whole range. If youmake it as far as Cambodia, what’s keeping you from Malaysia? From Malaysia, it’s just a little hop to Indonesia, and onward from there. For a while, the world for me was like a set of monkey bars. I swung from one place to the next, sometimes backward, sometimes forward, capitalizing on my own momentum, knowing that at some point my arms—or, more accurately, my quivering bank balance, accessed through foreign ATMs—would give out, and I’d fall to the ground.
    Pakistan was next to India. Unignorably so.
    There were plenty of reasons to avoid Pakistan. If you read the news or listened to people sermonizing about the state of the world, Pakistan was a big