Following the Path of Rama - Sort Of

It looks like I'll be heading back to India in the spring, and including a trip to Sri Lanka (which would be a first) as well.  I've been using short re-tellings of the Ramayana in my Heroines and Heroes course for years (well, 500 pages, but in regards to the Ramayana that hardly qualifies as a pamphlet) and finally decided to build upon the experience and embed a spring break trip into one of my COR 270s.  I started talking about it last year and my students started to freak out at the thought - some even going so far as to duck last spring's Zanzibar trip and this fall's Spain/Portugal trip on the chance that a) the Rama-themed trip made and b) that as a junior (who come behind sophomores in the pecking order for the course) they could get in the class.  I quickly recruited my great friend Cyndi Brandenburg, and it didn't take much cajoling.  We wanted to follow the path of Rama - or at least the mythological/literary path of Rama - and that became more than a bit of a logistical nightmare immediately (more on that later).  So, in the face of incredible challenges, why not just dream bigger; and thus the India trip became an India/Sri Lanka trip.  Again, I'll fill in more details later.  How can it not be epic?  Wait, I used that tag line before on the Zanzibar trip, so I guess I need a new one.  Nevertheless, it will be epic.

Four days in India and four days in Sri Lanka are an insanely short amount of time, but you have to start somewhere.  I'll include a lot more detail later.