Tigers, Temples, Palaces, and the Perspective That Only Time Can Give
In September of 1998, I departed Vancouver on Semester at Sea bound for Japan on my first true international journey. I was 20 years old, and though I didn’t fully realize it at the time, that voyage would permanently alter the trajectory of my life.
A few weeks after Japan, we arrived in India. The travel bug, already stirring, fully took hold.
I returned home with little understanding of how profoundly those months would shape me. I certainly had no idea that 28 years later I would return to India as a husband, a father, a professional photographer, a travel advisor, and perhaps most significantly, a person shaped by both tremendous fortune and meaningful loss.
Back then, I carried a disposable camera with black-and-white film alongside a very basic point-and-shoot. I barely understood composition. I simply knew enough to sense that photography mattered.
This time, I returned with a professional kit, hundreds of flights behind me, over 250 international trips in my lifetime, and decades of perspective I could not possibly have possessed at 20 years old. And yet, somewhere between then and now, I realized I had not simply gained things. I had lost things too.
India has a way of forcing reflection.
It is impossible to describe India in a single word, but as a photographer, if I had to try, mine would be contrast.
There is a contrast between profound spirituality and overwhelming sensory chaos. Between extraordinary kindness and unimaginable hardship. Between ancient rituals and modern luxury. Between streets that at moments reminded me of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, and magnificent 350-year-old palaces that now operate as some of the most remarkable hotels I have ever experienced.
There is color everywhere. In the markets. In the spices. In the saris worn by women walking through crowded streets at sunset. In the painted walls, flower arrangements, and temple offerings. India is visually overwhelming in the best possible way.
And then there are the people.
I’ve often said that people travel to Africa for the first time because of the wildlife, but they return for something far more difficult to describe: the warmth of the people, the depth of the culture, and the humanity woven into everyday life. India stirred that same feeling in me immediately. Despite what can often be an extraordinarily difficult way of life, the people we encountered were remarkably kind, deeply spiritual, welcoming, gracious, and proud of their culture in a way that leaves a lasting impression.
I suspect that spirituality itself is part of what drives that warmth.
This was not a trip where we merely observed India from behind hotel walls. This was Opulent Exploration in its purest form.
We navigated Old Delhi by rickshaw. We wandered crowded markets overflowing with color and motion. We visited temples at sunset. We rose before dawn and took a golf cart directly from our hotel to the Taj Mahal as the morning light began to soften the marble.
And then, after days spent immersed in the energy of India, we would return to extraordinary hotels where cocktails appeared effortlessly, service felt deeply personal, and centuries of history surrounded us at every turn. India is the kind of destination where, remarkably quickly, a 16-and-a-half-hour journey begins to feel completely irrelevant.
I have written many times about my admiration for Belmond hotels around the world. Their magnificent historical properties, exceptional sense of place, and uniquely warm style of hospitality have long represented some of my favorite travel experiences anywhere.
During this journey through India, I found myself feeling the same way about Oberoi Hotels & Resorts , several extraordinary independent properties and the legendary Taj Hotels.
The hotels were not merely luxurious. They were emotional. They carried history in their walls. They reflected India itself: layered, soulful, elegant, spiritual, and deeply connected to place.
And nowhere was that contrast more vivid than during our tiger safari.
There are fewer than 100 tigers in the national park we visited. Sightings are never guaranteed. I have now spent well over 100 hours on safari game drives across South Africa, Zambia, and Tanzania over the years. In all that time, I had only witnessed two attempted kills, both by lions, animals that dramatically outnumber wild tigers.
Then came the pre-dawn hours in Madhya Pradesh, India.
Through my binoculars, I watched a full-grown female tiger lower herself into the grass. Ahead of her stood a deer. Her posture changed first. Then the focus. Then absolute stillness.
And suddenly she exploded forward.
The deer escaped.
The guides whispered excitedly to one another as she disappeared into lower grass beyond our sightline. Moments later she emerged into an open field less than 100 yards from our vehicle and locked onto a second target.
This time she didn’t miss.
What unfolded next was one of the greatest wildlife moments of my life. The tiger made the kill directly in front of us while our entire jeep sat frozen in disbelief. The guides later told us it was the first successful tiger kill they had personally witnessed in seven years.
Then somehow the moment became even more extraordinary. A nearly full-grown cub emerged from the woods in the distance and slowly approached its mother to share in the bounty. For several minutes, nobody spoke. I lowered my camera and simply tried to absorb where I was.
India does that to you repeatedly. It overwhelms your senses, then suddenly quiets you.
But this trip was about far more than photography. It was also about memory.
India was one of the last major international trips my mother took with my father before she passed away suddenly eight years ago this month. So when I stood before the Taj Mahal this time, I didn’t just see myself there. I saw her there for the last time. I saw my twenty-year-old self there for the first time, and then I saw myself there now, 28 years later, as an entirely different person.
That emotional overlap is difficult to describe.
At 20 years old, I was simply excited to be seeing the world. At 48, I understand far more clearly how precious time actually is.
As a child with cystic fibrosis, my parents spent much of my life hoping I would outlive them. When I was born, cystic fibrosis was still commonly referred to as the number one genetic killer of children. Doctors forecasted a future for me that “the best case scenario is Stuart lives to seven years old.”
I was still seeing my lifelong pediatrician well into my thirties because no adult cystic fibrosis clinics existed. Patients simply were not expected to live long enough to require them.
Then medicine evolved. Life evolved.
And somewhere along the way, I remember quietly telling my parents something unthinkable for me:
“I know I’m going to lose you someday.”
Not from hopelessness.
From gratitude.
For the first time in my life, I realized I had likely been given enough time to actually experience life beside them. Enough time for memories, perspective, and ultimately, no regrets.
I miss my mother deeply eight years later. I thought about her often in India.
Travel has become many things to me over the years: passion, inspiration, career, photography, adventure, and connection. But increasingly, it has also become perspective.
I’ve long believed that the secret sauce of a travel advisor is simple: experience. Not information. Not algorithms. Experience.
These annual educational journeys with our top global partners are, in many ways, reward-based research and development. They allow us to experience destinations at the highest possible level alongside the very best suppliers and travel advisors in the industry.
In this case, our extraordinary host, Vivian Peres of Ventours, continuously opened doors throughout India that most travelers would never even know existed.
One evening in Jaipur, we visited a magnificent private fort, the personal retreat of the founder of Oberoi Hotels & Resorts. As the sun began to fall, we sat poolside within the fort’s walls under canvas tents overlooking the city below. Cocktails were poured. Dinner was served beneath the evening sky as Jaipur illuminated in the distance.
Even Vivian’s wife and daughter joined us for the evening because this experience was once-in-a-lifetime for them as well.
Moments like that are difficult to explain in a brochure because they are not merely seen, they are felt. That is the difference experience makes.
Years ago, during my equity derivatives and risk arbitrage days in New York City, I used to tell people something half jokingly, but completely sincere: you can become a wine person, a car person, a watch person, a golf person, or a clothes person. There are dozens of passions one can pursue in life, but choose only a few and enjoy them deeply. We all work hard for a reason.
And while saving for the future matters enormously, life eventually teaches you a very important truth:
Experiences compound too.
I chose travel.
And standing in India 28 years after my first visit, camera in hand, reflecting on everything gained and everything lost between those two versions of myself, I realized something that felt profoundly comforting:
The long road is the point.
Not avoiding loss.
Not avoiding change.
Not freezing time.
Simply having the privilege to walk the road at all.
Years ago, shortly after meeting my father’s significant other, Tish, for the first time, I noticed a simple phrase printed on decorative paper hand towels in her powder room before dinner.
“Take the Trip. Buy the Shoes. Eat the Cake.”
Amen to that.
Before leaving for India, I spent a late night in my music studio recording a cover of Long Road by Pearl Jam, a song that had my mother on my mind before I ever boarded the plane.
Perhaps that’s fitting. Listen HERE on SoundCloud
Whether through travel, family, photography, loss, survival, or simply the passage of time, we all eventually walk the long road.
The gift is getting to look back and realizing just how much life was packed into the distance between where you began and where you stand now.
