With apologies to Douglas Adams: India is big. Really big.

You can study it all you want on a map. You can make plans to catch a train to Cochin, to Madras, to Udaipur. But it isn’t until you try and book that first train ticket that the enormity of the country hits you. “34 hours? To Gorkaphur?”

It doesn’t seem possible. Roughly the distance from Miami to Boston, a hop of 1,830 kilometers gets you a mere third of the way across the country, from the Gateway of India to the gateway to Nepal.

But nothing can prepare you for India. Nothing. No stacks of facts and figures, no tall tales from well-meaning, well-traveled friends, no movies, no books. It's a travel experience that has to be lived to be believed.