Part 5: Settling down for a few months - Saying goodbyes and wrapping up projects

If you want to read about how we decided to stay in this part of India, how we found this place, and how we spent our time here, you can read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4, of this series of posts.

After traveling in Nepal, Sikkim, Assam, West Bengal, and Odisha for four and half months, we came back to Ibrahimpatnam to prepare for the arrival of our next baby.

The place we were staying in Ibrahimpatnam was about 2 -3 hours journey from the birthing centre in Hyderabad we wanted to deliver our baby at, and also we had to walk about 1 1/2km to get to main road from our home to find any vehicle. In case the baby decided to arrive early, or at night, it would've been an adventure for all of us. So we moved to a rooftop apartment in Hyderabad two weeks before Nina's due date. Nina's birth was a beautiful experience for all of us. We wrote about it on this blog, and you can read it here. After the birth of Nina, we stayed in Hyderabad for another two weeks to make sure she is stable and then came back to Ibrahimpatnam.

It felt relaxing to be back in nature with just the sounds of nature and quietness around us, which we forgot a bit for the month we stayed in Hyderabad. As Nina was growing healthily, we traveled with her a few times to Hyderabad for her checkup and also for getting her citizenship documents and passport from the US Embassy. We started taking her to the local markets for shopping and traveled with her on local transportation like shared tuk-tuks, buses, and metros from the time she was two weeks old. When she was two months old we made a long trip to New Delhi by train which was almost 36 hour train ride each way with Nora and Nina to get some administrative work done at the Austrian Embassy. Nina and Nora enjoyed the ride a lot. When Nina was three months old, we made a visit to Sam's parents home, which is an overnight train ride, to introduce them to Nina. We stayed with them for a few days and came back to Ibrahimpatnam. Nina was growing healthily and we felt that it's time for us to restart our travels and move away from this place and expose Nora and Nina to new environments and people. We made flight reservations to Europe for May to meet Kathi's family and friends, and further flight reservations to fly to Mexico in July.

We decided to leave Ibrahimpatnam in March and leave India in May. And for the remaining two months we were in India, we made the train and stay reservations in a small village in Goa, which is a costal state on the West Coast of India. We were still unsure where we were going to spend the remaining one month in India, but we thought of figuring it out after we arrived in Goa. We thought we would either extend our stay in Goa or go some place in North India close to New Delhi as our flight leaving India was from there.

Once all the reservations were made, it was time for us to wrap-up a few mini projects we took on during our stay there and say goodbye to the people we've been interacting with regularly for the last year-and-half.

During our almost 17 months in Ibrahimpatnam, along with our experiments with a vegetable garden, we also tried a few other things -- created a fence around the property with dried coconut leaves that fell from the trees, built a bamboo fence around the house to keep the animals like dogs at bay, we started another small vegetable garden with seedlings instead of starting it from seeds, created a swing for Nora, created a small watering station for animals to quench their thirst during hot days, made a compost area to use the wet waste from the residents of the community and turn it into soil, and a few other experimental projects. This place gave all of us a lot of personal freedom and presented us with a lot of opportunities to try out many new experiments and gain knowledge about a lot of things. It was also a wonderful place for Nora to spend her early childhood in nature and learn to interact with it.

A few times each week we made a visit to a nearby market to buy our food and other supplies. There were people who we met at the market regularly and we had a nice relationship with. They were always excited to see us, Nora, and later Nina. We used to go to a vegetable stall owned by a family selling fresh vegetables, another person on a street cart who sold fruits, a grocery shop where we bought all our grains, a chicken shop where we bought our eggs and chicken, and a diary shop where we bought milk, yoghurt, and ghee. There were a few other people who we met less often like the electric shop, electronics shop and a nearby small eatery where we ate sometimes. During the last few weeks of our stay, we met all of them and said our goodbyes. As always they were all very kind and gave us their best wishes for the upcoming journey.

A few of Sam's family members and old friends lived a few hours away from our place but they never got a change to come visit us. As they came to know that we were leaving, some of them made time to visit and spent some time with us.

Coronavirus was making news for the past few months and there was news that it was starting to spread slowly in India as well. Lockdowns were starting all around the world, but India was yet to implement any lockdowns, but the Coronavirus was on the news cycles everywhere.

We packed our life again into our two big bags and one small bag and started our journey by train towards Goa with the hope that the trains won't be stopped on the way. We got on the train to Goa from Hyderabad, and it was almost empty. There was a notification sent out regarding the risks of Coronavirus so most of the passengers cancelled their travel plans. Our train took off and our time in Ibrahimpatnam finally came to an end.

We came to Ibrahimpatnam to spend a month, but we ended up making it our base for almost a year and a half. We believe that the universe provides us with exactly what we need at any given time. We think this is another thing that we all needed and it came to us.

We were looking forward to see what the upcoming journey of our life is going to unravel for us. We were also curious to see how the Coronavirus spread might be impacting our plans of living and traveling around the world in the coming months and years. Only time will tell.