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.