After a week in the Adivasi heartlands it was time to return to modern India. It is often said that travel in India is all about the train but this was to be my only long distance train journey. 20 years ago I was used to interminable queues and the frustration of trains already fully booked up. This time it was as easy as a few taps on my laptop. Well, it wasn’t that easy, I needed to register on…
After a few days in the heat, hustle and bustle of Hyderabad, I was headed for a different world – the tribal markets of Odisha and Chhattisgarh. But to get there, I first took a flight to the seaside resort of Visakhapatnam. Vizag is Andhra Pradesh’s biggest city and port but staying near the wide, long beach, and sniffing in the fresh salty air, it definitely has a resorty feel to it. There is also a very wide prom and…
Week 1, Chennai to Hyderabad, Feb 2016 According to the Lonely Planet, with its withering southern heat, roaring traffic and scarcity of outstanding sights, Chennai has always been the rather dowdy sibling among India’s four biggest cities. I don’t know about dowdy sibling but I have have to say Chennai doesn’t really have much going for it. Having said that, it IS India and therefore there is always something to see, taste and experience. And I spent a couple of…
I stayed in Hampi for a few days relaxing and exploring more ruins and then got yet another overnight train, this time to Bangalore. I can only assume I kept on travelling overnight to save time and money (on hotels). I didn’t have much luck in Bangalore as all the hotels seemed to be full so I went back to the train station and got a train to Mysore. I had more luck here. My diary just says I stayed…
After a pleasant few days in Diu it was time to move on. My next stop was Bombay (as it was still known then). Nowadays I would have no hesitation in finding a cheap flight but then it was another long distance trudge by road and rail. It started with an overnight bus journey to Ahmedabad. It wasn’t an auspicious start as I noted we only moved 8kms in the first hour and although the bus was only one third…
So I was waiting at the bus stop in Jaisalmer waiting for the bus to Barmer bathed in sweat. It was a fairly short hop of 2 hours. But once in Barmer, I noted that after the relatively clean streets of Jaisalmer I was back to the stench and pollution of a big Indian city and reflected that it wasn’t so much of a surprise that there was currently an outbreak of bubonic plague. From Barmer I took an overnight…
From Amritsar I took the overnight train to Delhi, quickly changing to another for Sawai Madupur. I must have been pretty hardy in those days or just in a mad hurry because I didn’t even stay a night there before heading off to Jaipur. But I digress. The reason for going to Sawai Madupur was to visit the Ranthambore National Park and spot a tiger. My diary says I got a pony and trap from the train station to the tourist office…
After my trip to India in 2016, I managed to dig out the photos of a previous trip I did in 1994. It was over 20 years ago but I am still amazed at the changes that have taken place over the years. Not just on the ground in India but also because it was a time before digital cameras, so I had to scan my old photos from a yellowing photo album. I’m not sure how many I took…