Hello Friends,
Some trips you plan for months. This one I fell into almost by accident, and a few years on it is still one of the most vivid stretches of road I have ever walked. I want to go back and remember it here — a yoga workaway in India that put me in a small Pune yoga studio for a few weeks, the family who took me in, and the strange, dusty, crowded, generous country I got to see for the first time.
This is the flashback. If you want the day-by-day as it happened, I have linked all the original stories from that spring throughout, so you can follow the whole trip.
How I Ended Up in a Yoga Workaway in India
To explain the “why,” I have to back up. COVID had kept me away from home for a couple of years, so once travel opened up again I flew back to Connecticut for a long visit with my parents. India was never the plan. The plan was to get back to Vietnam, where my dog and my friends were waiting.
But I did not want to just fly straight through. So on the way back I gave myself a slow route. First a little time in Madrid, Spain, then on to Greece. Somewhere in Greece, half on a whim, I opened Workaway and applied to the Swasti Yoga Center in Pune, India — a place where I could trade some help for a bed, meals, and a front-row seat to a way of living I knew nothing about. They said yes. It seemed like too interesting an adventure to pass up, so I booked the flight to go check it out.
That is the honest origin of this trip: not a lifelong dream, just an open door I decided to walk through. If you want the “before” version of me — the one who was still just reading about the place and getting his facts from the internet — that is the research piece I wrote before I left. It is funny to read it now, knowing what the month actually turned into.
The Longest Travel Day of the Trip
Getting from Greece to India was a saga of its own — three flights, a gamble on checked baggage that I lost, a mad dash through Abu Dhabi to fill out a passenger locator form on my phone, and a boarding gate they were literally holding for me and one other guy. I have the whole ordeal written up in Travel Day From Greece to India if you enjoy a good travel-day disaster.
I landed in Mumbai around 8am, running on almost no sleep, and took a cab the roughly two and a half hours out to Pune. First thing I did outside the airport was buy a big cup of ginger chai and a plate of samosas from a street stand. That was the moment it hit me: I was actually in India.
When I finally reached the studio, they did not just check me in. They put flowers around my neck, sprinkled me with rose water, and washed my feet. It was the second time in my life anyone had ever given me flowers, and I did not know what to do with myself. Then they fed me dinner two floors up in their home. That was my welcome.
Life at the Swasti Yoga Center
Here is the thing nobody tells you about a few weeks at a yoga studio in India: most of it is quiet, ordinary, and hot. Really hot. The season I was there was bone dry — the whole city had gone a dusty orange, everything coated in a fine grit that got into your clothes and your lungs.
My days had a rhythm. Wake up early, roll into the 6:30 yoga class, help the center with some content and posts, greet people as they came in, help organize things, and take classes myself to learn the practice as best I could. In the afternoons I would head out for a walk. I spent a lot of time talking with the director, just soaking up what I could.
And this is the part I want to be clear about, because it is the whole point: this was not westernized yoga. No air-conditioned room, no Lululemon pants, no instructor on a microphone. This was a small space serving mostly local people, practicing traditional Indian yoga at a deeper level than the studio version most of us know back home. That authenticity was exactly what pulled me in. I wrote more about what I learned in Exploring Yoga in India, and about the center itself over on the Swasti Yoga Center page.
Vikas and Shwetambari
I cannot write about this trip without writing about the two people at the center of it. Dr. Vikas Chothe and his wife, Dr. Shwetambari Chothe, run the studio, and they are two of the most open-hearted people I have ever met. They genuinely want to connect with people and carry real yoga out into the world through their center, Swasti Yoga, and they folded a total stranger into their family without a second thought.
The foot-washing felt awkward in the moment — I am not used to being received like that. But over the weeks, eating meals with them, sitting in their home, tagging along on their downtime, that awkwardness turned into something that felt genuine and real. On my second night they took me to their teacher’s birthday party, where I watched blessings made with rice, coins, and a lit lantern, ate with my hands for the first time (much harder than it looks), and listened to Shwetambari recite a poem she had written in Hindi. That whole evening — and the heavy, powerful film we saw afterward — is in Birthday in India and Seeing My First Movie in India.
Looking back, my one regret is that I did not connect even more than I did. They opened a door, and I sometimes wish I had walked further through it.
When the Circus Met the Yoga Mat
One afternoon we went to a local park on their day off, and this is where two halves of my life collided. Before the travel blog, I ran a circus — the Imperial OPA Circus in Atlanta — and I spent years on acrobatics and AcroYoga. So there in the park, I started balancing things on my face to make the kids laugh, and then I got Vikas to stand on me.
He was a natural. So was Shwetambari. Within ten minutes these two yoga doctors were doing thigh-stands and reverse balances like they had trained for it, a little crowd of kids gathering to watch us be ridiculous. It was one of my favorite moments of the whole trip. AcroYoga is really just a branch of yoga anyway, so it felt like the perfect meeting point between what I knew and what they practiced. My circus background gave me a different appreciation for the flexibility and health side of yoga, and their practice gave my old party trick some roots. The whole silly, joyful afternoon — sugar cane juice and all — is in Afternoon in the Park With My New Friends From India.
Mumbai, and a Visa Held Up by a Broken Fax Machine
The last chapter of the trip was Mumbai, and it could not have been more different from Pune. I went because I got word my paperwork was finally ready — I needed to collect my visa at the Vietnamese embassy so I could get back to my dog and my friends and get my life in Vietnam moving again.
I ended up in Mumbai for about a week, staying in what was probably one of the most run-down corners of the city. My room had no window. You step out of it onto the street into objective poverty in every direction, and into crowds so dense you move shoulder to shoulder whether you want to or not. Honestly, it felt like being stuck in the mosh pit at a rock concert that never ends — the noise, the heat, the sheer press of people. My cab driver told me, “money rains from the sky in Mumbai.” I could believe there was opportunity somewhere in all that motion, but what I saw up close was hard, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
And then the visa itself got held up — not by anything digital, but by a fax. The Vietnamese embassy needed a fax sent from Vietnam with my visa information. Not an email. Not a phone call. An actual, physical fax. And their fax machine was broken. So there I was, a guy trying to get across the world to his dog, sitting in Mumbai waiting for a repair technician to come fix a fax machine before a government office could do anything. I was genuinely surprised the whole thing still ran on fax paper in this day and age, but that was the situation, so I waited it out.
In the meantime I walked the city. I saw the Gateway of India standing there against the harbor, wandered through the crowds, and just took it all in — the good and the overwhelming. I finally gave that whole Mumbai stretch its own post: A Week in Mumbai: Stuck Waiting on a Broken Fax.
What India Left Me With
Years later, memory keeps the true things and quietly drops the filler. What sticks with me from India is not a list of landmarks. It is the dusty orange of Pune in the dry season. It is chai and samosas at a roadside stand with a cow wandering past and an old man across the street watching me with mild curiosity. It is the packed, roaring density of downtown Mumbai. It is the feeling of being washed with rose water by strangers who decided, instantly, that I was family.
So here is my honest take, if you are thinking about doing something like this yourself. Go do it. Do a workaway, live somewhere real, put yourself in it. But research the place first and make sure it actually fits what you want, and go in with your mind wide open, because you will see things that stay with you — some beautiful, some hard. My experience was the real, traditional, small-room kind of yoga, not the polished studio version, and that is exactly why it mattered to me. The hard part is that there is a lot of poverty, and you do not get to look away from it.
It was my first time in India, and it will not be my last. I would love to go back and travel through the south with more time and less of a deadline. It is firmly on my bucket list. I landed at the end of March 2022 and flew out to Vietnam on the 10th of April — less than a month start to finish. But those few weeks — the studio, the family, the dust, the fax machine — I would not trade for anything.
The Full India Collection
If you want to walk the whole trip in order, here are all the stories from that spring in India:
- India, a Land of Diversity — what I knew (and didn’t) before I left
- Travel Day From Greece to India — three flights, one very long day
- Birthday in India and Seeing My First Movie in India — a birthday party and The Kashmir Files
- Afternoon in the Park With My New Friends From India — the circus-meets-yoga afternoon
- Exploring Yoga in India — the practice, at its source
- A Week in Mumbai — the final chapter: a visa, a broken fax, and a city of extremes
- Swasti Yoga Center — the studio and the people who run it
Thanks for taking this walk back with me. If you have ever done a workaway or lived somewhere far from home for a while, I would love to hear about it.
Cheers.
