VINCENT DIXON IN INDIA

We arrived in India late in the evening from Lumbini, Nepal where we had visited the site where Siddhartha Gautama Buddha, founder of Buddhism was born. The border was a jam of trucks, cars, motorbikes and just about every other vehicle you can imagine, everyone honking their horns and squeezing together in a vain effort to stop the traffic altogether. 

There are about ten different classes of Indian trains - the long haul buses are pretty much the same - and there are wikipedia articles to help you work out what is what.  For the trains, if you have air conditioning then 1st or 2nd class is just a question of comfort.  We were traveling non-ac on our first trip.  As I said, the seats were filthy when we got on the train, the toilets were unspeakable, and it was a 14-hour trip. I loved it.

One of my wife Ainlay's biggest fears before this trip was that I wouldn't be able to deal with roughing it after years of traveling for business.  She had a point.  I like my comforts as much as the next, but nothing happens in business class just as nothing happens in the AC trains.  Everyone reads their papers and plays with their smart phones. Here we were a world away from that, everyone was interested in us, we were exotic and they were exotic to us.  They loved to be photographed, to see themselves on the small screen on the back of my camera. I took a lot of photos on that journey. Here are some of them.

And we continued on, having started last night in the foothills of the Himalayas. By dawn we moved through the countryside and smaller towns, soon we were close to the urban sprawl that is Delhi.
India is incredible, just the concept of 1.2 billion people boggles the mind. As a photographer it is exhausting. There are people to shoot everywhere; it takes time to digest the noise, the heat, and more people than you can imagine. Everywhere.

Vincent