Welcome to my travel diary for India, which I visited from November 1997 to January 1998.
This was without doubt the most difficult of my adventures overseas, but one of the most rewarding. Six weeks is a long trip in such a challenging country, and a busy itinerary meant the constant travelling took its toll. My girlfriend at the time K and I became caught in a cycle of sickness, though rarely did the cycles match up, so often one of us was sick in bed while the other was OK. It wasn’t so much the usual stomach troubles, but a bad flu that left us completely run down and exhausted.
Thankfully, it was a long trip and there were plenty of excellent days to outweigh the bad ones. India is endlessly fascinating; a continual assault on all the senses. One’s privacy and piece of mind is always being assaulted as well, by touts and con-men. Never in the world have I been to a place where the hassling is more persistent and annoying. We found it difficult to get to know people in India, because of the impenetrable wall of shonky ‘businessmen’ between the traveler and the average person. And they are always men; it’s also a misogynistic society that sadly, only seems to have gotten worse in this respect in recent years (or perhaps we’re all just hearing more about it); which made things even more difficult for my companion.
A country of challenges, but definitely a must-see; there really is no other place like it on the planet.
Please note these are scans from photo prints; I tried to get the best quality I could but they simply don’t match today’s digital standards.
How to navigate this diary
The India link at the top of the page in the main menu takes you to the main India page where you can access all the days of this diary. Alternatively, start reading here (or anywhere, for that matter) and use the Previous and Next links at the bottom of each page to navigate through the days. You can always keep track by looking at the date.
When you’re reading a page, you’ll see blocks of photo thumbnails (wait a little while for all of these to load onto the page). You can roll over a thumbnail to read the photo’s caption.
To see full-size versions of these photos (highly recommended, as the thumbnails are cropped), click on a thumbnail. Once the image is blown up, you can navigate left and right through the full size images, or click the X in the top right hand corner to exit them and go back to the text.
Leave a comment at the bottom of any page if you feel like it.
Badhai Ho!