What It's Really Like to Work and Travel in India for 6 Weeks

A monkey landed on Paul McCrodden's balcony while he was working.

He was on the balcony in Rishikesh, laptop open, when he heard the thud. A large monkey had dropped in, locked eyes with him and, before McCrodden could react, grabbed two bananas off the table and leaped back onto the roof. About five more followed — bounding balcony to balcony while workers below tried to clear them away by throwing stones and shaking trees. "It was a pretty intense few moments," McCrodden says.

In this story, McCrodden, an X-Teamer who spent six weeks working and traveling across India in late 2016, breaks down the stark contrast between North and South India for remote workers, the connectivity and logistics obstacles that shaped his work schedule and the moments of culture and wildlife that made the trip one he'd revisit.

The North and the South: 2 Different Countries

Ask McCrodden where to go in India and he'll tell you the question needs context.

The country, as he describes it, operates as two distinct travel experiences. "If you want an easier trip with sun and beach, you go south," he says. "South is a different country, it does not have the intensity of North and is considered 'India Light.'" The North, by contrast, is demanding. "The North is intense and has much to offer," he says, adding that he'd advise seeing it on limited work hours or during free time.

From a nomad-practicality standpoint, the South is better suited to remote work — less poverty, stronger infrastructure. The North rewards those who can absorb disruption.

McCrodden traveled through New Delhi, Agra, Khajuraho, Rishikesh and Varanasi in the North, and Varkala in the South's Kerala state. Of all of them, Varanasi left the deepest impression — specifically the evening Aarti ceremony on Dashashwamedh Ghat and the cremations at Manikarnika Ghat. "Watching the bodies being burned at the cremations in Manikarnika Ghat is a very moving experience," he says.

He would return to two places above all others: Rishikesh in the North — for yoga and what he describes as the "beautiful clean Ganga in the mountains" — and Varkala in the South for Ayurvedic medicine, sun and beach. He also found time to complete a cooking course in Rishikesh with Cooking Masala, which he counts among the best experiences of the trip. Food was, he says, one of his favorite parts of the whole journey. Having loved spicy food since he was about 10, he adapted quickly to eating curry for breakfast. "We loved it and miss it already."

McCrodden is also an instructor of Shivam Yoga — a non-devotional, tantric yoga that he describes as meaning Shiva's Yoga, with roots in Dravidian tantric philosophy. He gave classes in India during the trip, though the style is uncommon there. The main ashram for Shivam Yoga is in Brazil; an Indian ashram was being built in Khajuraho at the time of his visit.

Connectivity, Currency and the Cost of Delays

Working remotely from India is possible. McCrodden did it for six weeks. But he is candid about the friction involved.

The central challenge was internet access. He worked mainly from wherever he was staying, provided it had a stable connection and a desk. When neither was adequate, he moved to a café — though WiFi in most establishments was unreliable. The turning point was getting a SIM card in his second week, which allowed him to tether a 3G/4G connection as a fallback. "Having a SIM card was an absolute must," he says. The delay in getting that card came down to timing: he arrived in India in the middle of a currency demonetisation, and it took nearly a week to access cash — cash needed to buy a SIM, purchase a train ticket or handle basic logistics.

The connectivity ceiling forced him to plan his development work carefully. He was working on Docker at the time — both on the X-Team Unleash project and for a client project environment — and had to defer tasks that required building Docker environments. Pulling down machines and large libraries consumed too much data and put too much strain on connections that were already unstable.

Transportation added another layer of unpredictability. The team opted to fly between cities wherever possible, since Indian trains are not so reliable and time was short. That strategy backfired at least once: a morning flight from Agra to Khajuraho was cancelled sometime in the afternoon due to pollution and fog. One staff member was handling a crowd of furious passengers. The alternatives offered were illogical. After hours of negotiation, the group found a driver — one traveling with Spanish passengers from the same cancelled flight — who drove them 11 hours through the night in fog. They arrived, but lost more than a day.

"You will get there, as you will in India," McCrodden says. "We just lost over a day." For a working trip, that kind of delay is expensive. His advice: plan simple, local activities on workdays — things that don't depend heavily on others or long-distance transport.

On personal safety, he wasn't concerned about theft or violence. "Indian people mostly don't steal and are not violent," he says, adding that he'd probably be more worried as a tourist in Ireland. His practical precautions were modest — wearing a backpack on the front in Delhi and staying aware of pockets in crowds. The worst incident of the trip was leaving a charger in a taxi during an argument with the driver on the New Delhi-to-Agra route, and then spending a stressful stretch trying to source a Mac charger in the midst of Agra. He found one. He would, however, avoid both Agra and New Delhi on a return visit.

Wildlife, Inequality and What Stayed With Him

Beyond the logistics, India left McCrodden with a specific kind of cognitive dissonance — one that he found himself returning to long after the trip.

The thing that moved him most was the integration of animals into everyday life. "The most inspiring for me is the integration between man and animals," he says. "In the streets, fields, etc., it's animals without borders, with minimal human restriction." The North was almost exclusively vegetarian due to Hindu ethics, and for McCrodden — who described that ethos as feeling like home — it was a place where that value was structurally embedded in daily food culture. Wild pigs ran out of side streets. Monkeys moved through balconies. Cows wandered unmarked.

The counterpoint to that was waste. Rubbish was everywhere, and it puzzled him enough that he asked locals about it. One theory he heard: India's traditional packaging — banana leaves, biodegradable materials — was replaced by plastic faster than the cultural mindset and infrastructure could adapt. Discarding a banana leaf had never been a problem. Discarding plastic, the same way, became one. He drew a comparison to Rwanda, which banned plastic bags in 2008, and expressed hope that India could find a similar path sooner rather than later.

On inequality, he noted the jarring contrast of Mumbai's airport — "pretty amazing art everywhere," he wrote, but also "over the top in comparison to the rest of what we saw" and something he described as a symbol of inequality. In smaller, poorer places, the experience was more culturally intact. He also noted the visibility of foreigners varied widely: Rishikesh had many, Varkala had loads, while Varanasi and Khajuraho had far fewer relative to their local populations.

He met no other digital nomads during the entire six weeks — in either the North or the South. When he mentioned he was on a working trip, the reaction was consistently one of shock. Most travelers he encountered in the North were there for yoga tourism or longer spiritual journeys. In the South, most were on two- to three-week holidays. Digital nomadism in India, at least in late 2016, was still an unusual concept.

He'd go back.

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