She Feared for Her Life in Varanasi. She Also Called It Her Favourite. The Full Story of Hanna’s India.
A Japanese woman spent three months alone across India got stalked, got sick, got moved, got fed, got followed, and got completely wrecked by a plate of dal at a dhaba she can’t find on Google Maps. Here’s the whole, unfiltered story.
There’s a particular kind of traveller India makes out of you. You don’t plan it. You don’t read about it in any guidebook. It happens somewhere between your third stomach problem and the moment a stranger invites you into their home for tea and you think: I cannot explain this country. And I cannot stop thinking about it.
Hanna is that traveller now.
The Japanese solo traveller visited India for three months, documented her journey with quiet honesty, and posted a video in June that split the internet not because she was angry, but because she refused to be. She talked about stalking in Varanasi, harassment in Mumbai, getting sick in Delhi every single time, and hotels in Bihar refusing to serve her. She also called India “incredible.” Both things were true. Both things, she held simultaneously, the way only people who’ve actually been somewhere deeply uncomfortable and deeply beautiful can.
The internet responded. Comments poured in. Indians apologized. Debated. Pushed back. Agreed. And kept watching.
The Ranking Nobody Asked For But Everyone Needed
🔴 #1 Most Unsafe: Varanasi
The twist nobody expected.
“This might surprise people because Varanasi is also one of my favourite places in India,” Hanna said. She experienced the most stalking of her entire trip here. In one incident, she genuinely thought: “Okay, this could end very badly.”
Here’s the contradiction India doesn’t like to talk about: Varanasi is sacred, chaotic, breathtaking and for solo women, particularly foreign solo women, it can also be predatory. The same narrow ghali lanes that look gorgeous on Instagram are easy to get cornered in. Touts, self-appointed “guides,” and men who follow quietly for three blocks are part of the texture of the place. Nobody puts that in the travel brochure.
And yet she calls it one of her favourite places in the entire country. That sentence alone tells you everything about what India does to people.
🔴 #2: Raxaul, Bihar
The most overlooked entry on her list, and also the most structurally telling one.
Raxaul is where you cross from Nepal into India. Hotels refused her. Others quoted triple the price. “One of the most stressful places I visited,” she said simply.
This is a border economy functioning exactly as designed you’re assumed to be transient, foreign, and therefore fair game for extraction. There’s no tourist infrastructure because there are no repeat customers. Raxaul doesn’t need your good review.
Hidden reality: This happens at almost every Indian land border crossing. Moreh (Manipur-Myanmar), Attari (India-Pakistan), Sunauli (UP-Nepal) the same dynamic. Budget for stress, not just money. Better still: pre-book a hotel in the next proper town before you cross.
🔴 #3: Mumbai
This one stings because Mumbai prides itself on being India’s safest, most cosmopolitan city. Hanna experienced sexual harassment here. “Because of that, the city is connected to some difficult memories for me,” she said simply.
The hidden reality: Mumbai’s safety reputation largely rests on late-night local trains being “safe enough” compared to other cities. That’s a very low bar. The city’s crowd density, which it celebrates as energy, also creates cover for harassment that’s hard to report or even process in the moment.
🟡 #4: New Delhi
“I visited New Delhi three times. Somehow I got sick every single time. At this point, I think Delhi and I are just not compatible.”
Three visits. Three illnesses. That’s not bad luck that’s data. Delhi’s winter AQI regularly crosses 400, the level at which the air itself becomes a health event. Add to that the water, the dust, the heat in summer, and a food scene where everything delicious is also a Russian roulette with your gut if you haven’t built up immunity.
Delhi also has a specific exhaustion it inflicts on solo foreign travellers, the aggressive touts near Connaught Place, the cab drivers who take long routes, the men at Paharganj who offer “help” until it becomes pressure. Delhi rewards the prepared traveller and extracts a tax from the spontaneous one.
Beyond that, Delhi has a specific kind of tourist fatigue baked in: aggressive touts, frequent scams near major sites, and a general assumption that foreign = wealthy = target.
🟡 #5: Guwahati
“Nothing terrible happened, but compared to other places in Northeast India, I felt less comfortable walking around alone.”
The most quietly damning sentence. Because what she’s saying is: I’d seen what Northeast India can be. And Guwahati wasn’t it.
She’s right, and locals knew it. The comments filled with apologies from Guwahati residents genuine, embarrassed apologies. That matters. The Northeast’s reputation for being India’s safest, warmest region for foreign solo women is real. Nagaland and Mizoram topped India’s official NARI 2025 women’s safety index. Guwahati, as the gateway city and commercial hub, has absorbed a different energy. It’s the exception that confirms the rule.
🟢 THE BEAUTIFUL LIST: Places That Stayed With Her
This is the half of Hanna’s story the internet almost missed.
Hanna didn’t just rank the difficult places. She made it clear that most of India was “incredible” and user comments pointed her toward the South: Karnataka, Kerala, Tamil Nadu. Northeast India outside Guwahati: Nagaland, Mizoram, Sikkim came up repeatedly as places where foreign solo travellers, especially women, report feeling genuinely comfortable and unwatched. Rajasthan, paradoxically, gets a split verdict: visually overwhelming and generous in spirit, but tourist infrastructure has created its own ecosystem of hustlers.
🟡 #1: Ajanta & Ellora Caves, Maharashtra
She placed these first. Not the Taj Mahal. Not Jaipur. Ajanta and Ellora, 34 rock-cut caves in the Maharashtra hills, home to 2,000-year-old Buddhist frescoes painted with mineral pigments that have somehow survived monsoons, centuries, and Instagram filters.
What hits foreign visitors about Ajanta isn’t the scale, it’s the intimacy. Paintings of the Buddha’s past lives rendered in brushstrokes so detailed you lean in. Cave 1’s Bodhisattva Padmapani is regularly compared to the Sistine Chapel in artistic ambition. Nobody argues the comparison. The Japanese, with their own tradition of meticulous craft and Buddhist art, tend to respond to Ajanta with particular emotion.
Unheard tip: Visit Ajanta first, Ellora second on separate days. The paintings at Ajanta fade by afternoon when tour buses arrive. Go at 9am. Ellora’s Kailasa Temple (Cave 16), carved top-down out of a single mountain, is best seen in late afternoon light when the rock turns gold.
🟡 #2: Hampi, Karnataka
“Hampi” is not a destination. It’s a mood. Boulders the size of buildings, stacked as if a giant got bored. Temple ruins of the Vijayanagara Empire scattered across 40 square kilometres. Banana plantations between ancient pillars. A river crossing on a coracle a round boat made of bamboo and buffalo hide that costs less than a chai.
Hampi is also one of the few Indian heritage sites where the infrastructure hasn’t caught up with the tourism, which means it still feels like a discovery. You can sit on a boulder at sunset with no one around and watch the light die over ruined palaces. That’s increasingly rare in India.
🟡 #3: Meghalaya
The Northeast again and this time the good side. Meghalaya is what India looks like when it gets 12,000mm of annual rainfall. Living root bridges grown by Khasi communities over centuries. Waterfalls that fall sideways in the wind. Dawki, where the river is so clear the boats appear to float on glass.
For a Japanese traveller specifically, Meghalaya has a quality she’d recognize: quietness with purpose. The villages are small, people are genuinely hospitable without agenda, and the landscape is aggressively, relentlessly green.
🟡 #4: Dharamshala, Himachal Pradesh
The home of the Tibetan government-in-exile. Little Lhasa. The place where Tibetan monks share mountain trails with Israeli backpackers and the chai is cardamom-heavy and perfect.
Dharamshala also happens to be one of the most genuinely safe places in India for solo women. The Tibetan cultural presence has shaped the town’s social texture it’s quieter, more respectful, less aggressive. The harassment dynamics that define plains India largely don’t exist here.
🟡 #5: Varanasi (Yes, Again)
The same city that tops her unsafe list also makes her favourite list. Read that again.
This is the most honest thing she said about India, even if she didn’t say it in those words: a place can terrify you and possess you simultaneously. Varanasi does this to everyone. It’s the city of Shiva, of death rituals, of burning ghats, of the most complex, layered, ancient human settlement still functioning on Earth. It takes things from you. It also gives you something you can’t name yet.
Japan vs India: The Comparison She Didn’t Need to Say Out Loud
Japan is a country where you can leave your wallet on a café table and return to find it untouched. India is a country where a stranger will spend forty minutes helping you find a train platform and then ask for nothing. These are not the same kindness but they are both real.
Hanna’s video, without ever saying the words “Japan vs India,” made the contrast clear through implication. In Japan, safety is structural built into systems, architecture, social norms. In India, safety is personal, it depends enormously on who you encounter, what neighbourhood you’re in, what time of day it is, and honestly, how lucky you are.
One is infrastructure. The other is humanity. Both have their failures.
The Food, the People, the Unforgettable Parts
Hanna mentioned the kindness of Indians repeatedly and this is not a polite disclaimer. Three months alone in a country of 1.4 billion people will give you more strangers who helped than strangers who didn’t. Indian hospitality, particularly in smaller towns and rural areas, is not performative. A family in Rajasthan who invited her to eat. A woman in a train compartment who shared her tiffin without being asked. Street food that she called “the most exciting eating of my life.”
She got sick. She got followed. She also got fed, guided, laughed with, and seen.
Will She Return?
Yes. That’s not a guess it’s in the subtext of every sentence she spoke. You don’t describe a place as “one of my favourites” and spend three months there and mean never again. India doesn’t let go of people who’ve been moved by it, even the ones it roughed up along the way.
Her parting words deserve to be carved somewhere: “Travel is complicated. Sometimes a place can be both beautiful and difficult at the same time.”
That’s not a criticism of India. That’s the most accurate description of it anyone has ever given in one sentence.
For Indian Readers: What This Video Is Actually Asking
Hanna apologised for nothing. She qualified everything. She praised generously and criticised specifically. The correct response isn’t defensiveness, it’s the Guwahati response: “I’m sorry you felt that. We can do better.”
That’s it. That’s the whole conversation.