Sarah Macdonald as a traveler

After saying she would never go to India again, Sarah MacDonald, eleven years later, has to return to this place because of love. Her boyfriend Jonathan was the Australian Broadcasting Company’s South Asia correspondent based in New Delhi. She was going to move here with him because they could not live apart. This is where the adventure of the novel begins and when Sara Macdonald starts to transform from a tourist to a traveler without noticing.

                Sarah Macdonald starts recognizing that by moving to this place she is just not travelling to this different place but starting a new life in a new country. It is a big change and transformation what she is going to go through. She starts to see thing s differently from the first time she had gone to India because know she must learn about the place where she is going to live and this new culture. Now she is paying more attention to details and her surroundings. She talks about the food, how people drive, the importance of the cow known as the holy cow, and about their religion.  The author is a lot more open now to this new culture and learns a lot about it because she has to live in it. We can clearly see an example of this when the author says: “It’s again time to abandon shyness, personal space and privacy and to become spectacle as well as spectator. Eleven years ago, as an awkward postadolescent, this annoyed me intensely, but now I see it’s a fair exchange for my voyeurism.”

                This whole new attitude Sarah Macdonald has to India this time that we can see that she wants to learn and experience different things in India this time, transforms her into a traveler or shows us that she wants to be a traveler now. Now she also has a purpose that she wants to accomplish throughout this new journey in her life. The author expresses this when she states: “Leaving my wonderful job was the hardest thing I’ve ever done but perhaps I didn’t do it just for love. A part of me wanted to reclaim myself, to redefine my identity, to grow up professionally, to embrace anonymity and to get rid of the stalker.”   This lets us see that this time she is in India in search for something, with a mission she wishes to accomplish and as a traveler who wishes to gain something out of this journey. In a way she is in search of a change, which she is not sure what it will be but she hopes to find as a traveler by learning and being open minded about everything that will happen throughout this journey.

Sarah Macdonald as a tourist

                In her novel Holy Cow, Sarah Macdonald starts by narrating a trip she had for her twenty first birthday which her parents gave her the plane ticket as a present. It was a middle class rite passage and had become a family tradition. Her mother wanted all of her children to experience the joy of travel before they settled in their jobs.  The narrator does not tell much details of her trip but she does make it clear she did not enjoy her two month tour in India and throughout the novel she explains little bits or reasons of things that she did not like from India or situations that happened to her that were really bad. After this trip she says she hates India and that she will never go back.

                This trip that Sarah Macdonald did at her twenty first years was only for the experience of travelling and to enjoy the trip. It was a tradition in her family and something that she was expected to do just because she had to.   This was not a trip for a specific purpose but more to have a good time and to enjoy herself before entering the laboring world.  In my opinion this first trip that Sarah MacDonald has is more a tourist’s trip than a traveler’s trip because even though it was one year she was on this trip, it did not seem she had any other purpose in the trip other than just having the experience of a trip.

                Even though we are not given too much detailed information about this trip, Sarah Macdonald can be considered more as a tourist than a traveler in this trip. We can see this because she did not go on the trip searching for a purpose to be fulfilled but more as an experience she had to live. Also we can see this because she does not have a lot to say about the trip and barely remembers it. She tells us more about the place that she did not like and did not want to go to again, India, than the other places where she went.  She does not narrate a lot of experiences she had or things she learned. By these brief things we know about this trip, we can assume she was more in the position of a tourist than a traveler.