Travel Logbook

Delhi, India to Pokhara, Nepal: 9th-17th March 1999.

Arrived in Delhi at lunch time on the 10th. I sat next to a Swiss backpacker guy called Daniel on the plane so we agreed to share a taxi to the centre of town, Connaught Place. Somehow we ended up in a dodgy tourist information office, who told us that the area we wanted to stay in, Paharganj, was too dangerous. We should stay in slightly more expensive hotels if we wanted to be safe. For 600 rupees (about £8.50) they would get us a safe room. I knew this was a bit of a con but I thought "first night, better safe than sorry."

They took us to this hotel and the room was clearly not worth more than 150 Rs. Anyhow, I took it. What I didn't bargain on was the fact that these bastard touts wouldn't leave us alone. For some reason they wanted us to go north to Srinagar in Jammu & Kashmir. But that is a trouble spot and the FO advises against going. They tried to persuade me by putting me on the phone to some guy who claimed to be from the British Consul up there, but clearly wasn't. Then they tried to put me off going to Nepal by telling me it was raining. It's not. Daniel gave in and bought a plane ticket to Srinagar.

They left us alone that night saying they'd be back to pick us up at 9.00am the next morning. My only chance of escape was to disappear on foot into the city at 7.00. I walked to Connaught Place but the place is crawling with travel agent touts and you can't get any peace if you have white skin. I walked to the train station and bought my ticket to a place called Gorakhpur, from where I could get a bus to Nepal. From the station, I walked into the backpacker district, Paharganj, and got a room for the night.

Next evening I arrived at the station at 6.00pm for my 7.45 train. It was delayed until 10.00pm. Welcome to Indian Railways! Anyway, after the chaos of finding the right platform (which kept changing), getting on the train (which was packed) and taking my rightful bunk (which was impossible), the train got going. I actually slept right through the night, and by lunch the next day we were in Gorakhpur. From there a bus took me to the Nepalese border at Sonauli, where I spent one night, before taking me on to this place where I am now, Pokhara.

The mountain views here are supposed to be breathtaking, but it's so dusty right now you can't see them. I had a dodgy Chinese for dinner the first night and there then ensued the worst case of diarrhoea I've ever had, including two very unfortunate occurrances of complete loss of sphincter function (not sure the public needed to know this - Huy). Anyhow, I seem to be OK now so tomorrow I start off on a three week trek around the Annapurna mountain range.

Annapurna Circuit and White Water Rafting in Nepal: 18th March-14th April.

After a few days spent in Pokhara, recovering from my ailments, I set off on my trek round the Annapurna Himal in central Nepal with just a map and a guidebook for company. The first stage of the journey involved taking a bus to a place called Dumre, halfway between Pokhara and Kathmandu. The bus was full of travellers but I was the only one getting off at Dumre. I was sat next to a very attractive Italian girl who fell asleep with her head on my shoulder, and I was so distracted we drove right through Dumre and I didn't even notice... I had to trek ten minutes back up a hill and by the time I got there I was exhausted. Maybe this trek would be harder than I thought...

Next stage was to take a bus northward for a couple of hours over some of the bumpiest roads imaginable. On arriving at the start of the trekking trail, Besi Sahar, at about 2pm, I met a group of people who were setting off straight away, so I joined them and off we went. The trail led lazily up and down over gentle hills, but after about two hours my back was killing me and my legs would barely carry me any further. We reached a small village called Khudi at about 4 pm so I stopped there for the night, along with a French guy from our group, called Ludovic.

As we had our dinner, two German guys, Stefan and Gunther, turned up and we decided to all set out together the next morning. However, Ludovic disappeared before the rest of us were even up, so the three of us remaining set out at 10am. The next few days involved some long hard climbs as the trail wound up the valley of the Marsyangdi River. The vegetation changed from tropical palms and rice paddies to deciduous forest before giving way to Alpine conifers as we climbed past 3000m. Eventually we reached the town of Manang, at 3500m, where we spent a day acclimatizing. From Manang, we really began to feel the effects of the high altitude. Altitude does wierd things to your body; it makes you pee all the time, stops you sleeping and also you fart all the time, which as anyone who ever sat next to me at work will tell you is bad news.

The trail leads over the Thorung La pass, which at 5416m is 608m higher than Mont Blanc. The last guesthouse on the Manang side of the pass is at a place called Thorung Phedi, at an altitude of 4400m. The air was freezing during the day and unbearably so at night. Days in Thorung Phedi are miserable. We had arrived there at lunchtime and intended to head over the pass the next morning. However, Stefan had a severe headache and was sick during the night, sure signs of AMS (altitude sickness) so we stayed in Phedi an extra, interminable, day. We started out at dawn the next day to make the long 1000m climb up and over. The feeling of achievement we felt at the top was incredible. It was our own mini-Everest, the roof of our world.

After overcoming the psychological and physical barrier of the Thorung La, it was plain sailing all the way down. By this time, Gunther had got a day ahead of us, and Stefan was flying back to Pokhara from an airstrip just over the pass. I was now on my own again so I decided to rush back to civilization and walked eight hours a day for three days to get back to Pokhara.

After a few days spent relaxing in Pokhara, I decided to go white water rafting. I took a three-day trip with Equator Expeditions on the Kali Gandaki river. The river wasn't the wildest in the world; there were several rapids but most of the time we were just floating along, admiring the scenery. However, it was very enjoyable; the crew were a great laugh and we played drinking games round the campfire late into the night before crashing out under the stars. From Pokhara I travelled to Kathmandu, which is nice if you like old temples... I stayed there two days before heading back down to the Indian border.

Varanasi, Kanha National Park and Agra, India: 15th-24th April.

From Kathmandu I took the bus down to the city of Varanasi in northern India. On the bus I got talking to the bloke next to me. His name was Bernhard and he was Austrian. He was friendly with two Dutch girls named Haike and Yvette and when we arrived in Varanasi we found a nice place called the Urvashi Guest House just back from the river. The room rate was 40 rupees a night (60p) and they had a fridge where you could help yourself to beer and soft drinks, noting them down in a book to pay when you left. This was a potentially dangerous situation, of course... Later I bumped into Daniel, the guy I met on the plane to Delhi. Small world... he had lost all his hair and was blaming it on Lariam malaria tablets.

Varanasi is a sacred city to the Hindus; it is the abode of the god Shiva, and they believe that if they die in the city, and are cremated on the banks of the Ganga (Ganges) river, they escape the circle of birth and rebirth and obtain moksha. Just bathing in the holy water of the Ganga is enough to do their karma considerable good. There are a number of ghats, or steps down to the river where the people gather to wash in the morning and evening. One of the most interesting is called Manikarnika Ghat, otherwise known as the Burning Ghat. This is the holiest ghat in Varanasi, and cremations go on 24 hours a day. Some people die too poor to be cremated and are simply dumped in the Ganges - we saw one or two corpses floating in the river. While we watched the cremations on the ghat, a man approached us and told us we weren't supposed to stand on the ghat, because it was reserved for the families of the deceased. He invited us up to a first floor room overlooking the ghat from where we could watch the cremations. He said the place was an infirmary where old ladies with no family went to wait to die. He said we could watch for free, but of course nothing is free in India so I wasn't surprised when he asked us to make a donation to help pay for the women's cremations. I gave a small amount but Haike and Yvette refused. Their opinion was that they would rather give money to beggars than to fund to some crazy practice that they didn't believe was right. The man showed his true colours when he promised Yvette that "bad things were going to happen to her" and told Haike she was "going straight to Hell". I told him the girls weren't going to be too bothered by his threats.

From Varanasi I took a train to a city called Jabalpur, from where I would catch a bus to Kanha National Park. The train was scheduled to leave at 11.00pm but eventually turned up at 3.00am. Welcome back to Indian Railways!! As I waited for the train to depart, who should turn up to take the bunk beneath me but Ludovic, the French trekker who had disappeared in Khudi, Nepal, a month earlier. Small world...

Kanha is the place Rudyard Kipling set the Jungle Book, and it has India's largest population of wild tigers. I arrived shortly after lunch to find I was the only person staying in the park's dormitory. This was a blow because the jeeps that take you you into the park carry six people and to hire one on my own would be expensive. However, as the park gates opened at 5pm, some jeeps turned up carrying some Indian tourists and I managed to scrounge a lift on one. Unfortunately, although pleasant, the hour and a half ride in the park didn't reveal anything more exciting than a few sambar deer and some peacocks.

Next morning I got up at 5am, ready to scrounge another ride when the park opened at six. This time though, all the jeeps were either full or refused to take me (!). Fed up, I was about to give up and depart when a final jeep came past, this time with a space. We drove around the park for a while, seeing more deer and some buffalo, until suddenly, as we drove over the bed of a dry stream, two deer shot out of the bushes behind us, evidently running for their lives. I looked into the bushes behind just in time to see a leopard bring down a third, before disappearing into the undergrowth. Later, after a stop for some breakfast, we came across a group of jeeps parked by the trail. Some elephants were returning from the bush carrying tourists, so it was clear they had found a tiger. I climbed aboard one of the large, bored-looking heffalumps and we set off. Excitement grew as my pachyderm strode through the bamboo thickets and forded a small stream, and then we saw him; a large, wild tiger laying in the shade of a copse of trees. It was a completely different experience to seeing a tiger in a zoo; here we were in his territory, and I felt very privileged he had allowed me the pleasure of meeting him.

I had planned to spend three days in the jungle, but I felt after that morning that I had seen so much that if I stayed any longer it would only seem disappointing after such a great day. So I headed back to Jabalpur and tried to get a train ticket to Agra. Many big cities in India have special offices to assist foreigners in buying rail tickets. But Jabalpur is off the tourist trail so I had to queue up with the Indians to get my ticket. "Queue" isn't really the right word, more like "crowd", really. Everytime I reached the front of a crowd I was directed to a new one until, at the fourth attempt and after three and a half hours, I got my ticket.

The train journey to Agra took 14 hours, although as usual I managed to sleep through a lot of it. Agra proved to be an up and down experience. The Taj Mahal is an unbelievable monument, and well worth travelling half way cross the world to see, but the people of Agra, particularly the rickshaw drivers, make the town itself an absolute nightmare for the tourist to endure. The Taj Mahal was built by the emperor Shah Jahan to honour his beloved wife who died giving birth to their 19th child. 2km away up the Yamuna river is Agra's red fort, where Shah Jahan's mad son imprisoned him for the last seven years of his life, locked in a tower, staring poignantly at the last resting place of his wife down river.

I spent as little time as possible in Agra because by now I was quite desperate to leave India. It is a beautiful country with fascinating culture and amazing people, but it is not for the fainthearted or the inexperienced. I definitely fell into the latter category and in retrospect it was something of a mistake for me to make India my first stop. I just wasn't prepared for it and for that reason didn't enjoy it as much as it deserves to be enjoyed.

Back in Delhi I tried to bring my flight forward a week - I was told to go to the airport and wait on the standby list. Before heading to the airport I went for a last Maharajah Mac in McDonald's, only to bump into Bernhard from Varanasi who was also flying out (to Indonesia) that night. Small world... I arrived at the Thai Air check-in at 8.00pm for the midnight flight. I handed my ticket in and was told to come back at 11 to see if there was any room on the plane. 15 minutes before take off they were still checking in confirmed passengers so I was resigned to another day in Delhi. Just as I had given up hope, they called my name out and with a huge sigh of relief I checked my bags in and boarded the plane. Next stop Thailand!