I awoke to the muffled beeping of my mobile phone’s alarm, heard through airline issue earplugs and the metal of the train clattering on its tracks. Fumbling through my handbag, I found the phone and switched the alarm off. The faded sari fabric of my bag, seen through sleepy eyes, comforted me; I had awoken at involuntary intervals during the night to confirm its presence. It’s green and gold strap was still tied to my arm.

I shot a look toward Iain, who was asleep on the upper bunk across from mine. Yes, the laptop bag was still there, chained to the caging beside his sleeping head. It was 4:30am, fifteen minutes before our train was due to arrive in Hyderabad. I woke him up, with just enough time to splash water on our faces in the grimy carriage toilet, and unchain all of our belongings from under the bottom bunk. (Read on …)

The train rattled along, inducing in me the sluggish fatigue of rock-rocking train travel and blanketing heat. I sat atop a wooden luggage rack in third class, legs crossed, ankles pressed into the hard wood, to prevent my mosquito bitten feet from dangling in the faces of the people below. The man beside me sat hugging his knees. He wore a mint green handkerchief, folded into a triangle, over his mouth and nose, to prevent the dark coating of fine dust in his nostrils that was ordinary after an Indian train journey. (Read on …)

The typical Indian bus resembles scrap. It is made of metal sheets, generously dented, perhaps a metre wide. The sheets are joined one to another by rivets, and this leaves a visible seam – covered and reinforced, in places, by a dull-silver strip.

It has rectangular openings positioned along its sides. The openings resemble windows, but cannot be shut. Three horizontal bars, or two or one, dissect the openings, and appear to serve an only incidental purpose: the bus gets enormously full, so full that people clutch and ride its bloated sides, using the bars as convenient handles.

It is chronically overused. The dull-silver strips spring away from its sides and protrude at sharp, bent-metal angles, making the vehicle look as if it is, quite literally, bursting at the seams. (Read on …)

A cock crowed, and crowed and crowed. I straightened, flopped my legs from the end of our just-bigger-than-single bed, and stood. I picked through a pile beside my bag, found a towel, toothbrush, toothpaste and the plastic tub containing our soap. I left Claire to sleep.

A sun-blackened man had slept in the next room. He was still there, awake, folding a bobbled blue blanket. The man, I gathered, was the family’s elder, the grandfather. He had arrived here, at the family home, occupied by his son, his son’s wife and their daughter, after dark, during our supper. The room he slept in was the room where paying guests, like us, were fed. He had been quietly greeted and, after adjusting his dhoti, had fitted a stiff body between blanket and bed. He had let his head loll sideways and, with weary eyes, had watched us eat. (Read on …)

Vagator, one of Goa’s coastal tourist towns, was said by our guidebook to have “long been the hot location for the outdoor rave parties that made the Goa party scene famous.” But on the day that we arrived, with only a week till Christmas, and accommodation supposedly jam-packed, it was deserted.

The restaurants were all empty, and shiny Christmas decorations hung feebly from the rafters. Rows of clothes and souvenir stalls stood redundant, their proprietors calling out from shaded straw mats, “Hey, how you doing? Just have a look…” in feigned American twangs, or “Yes yes, have a look… please madam!” (Read on …)

The miniature train, royal blue with shiny red trimmings, known fondly as the ‘toy train’, waited patiently on its narrow tracks at Neral Junction. We boarded, and began the slow, winding 800 metre ascent to Matheran, a small town set amidst mountains and forest – its name means ‘jungle topped’.

We sat opposite two Indian women: a mother in her mid-forties, wearing a pale pink sweatshirt and Capri pants, and her daughter-in-law, in jeans and a t-shirt. Iain’s backpack stood in the aisle, leaning against his legs, which poked awkwardly into the tiny train’s aisle. He had positioned the bag near the train’s door, where there was an area of unused space, but a woman in a green sari with a bright red bindi on her forehead had scowled at him and rattled off complaints in Hindi. (Read on …)

“An individual-to-individual callousness… is still so strong in the country that it is the greatest danger for a foreigner living in India, for it is a frighteningly easy thing to find it creeping into one’s soul.”
A. M. Rosenthal, The Future in Retrospective

I stepped, not looking, and slid; swayed backwards, snapped forward, and stopped. A smear of yellow brown behind me led to a large, fresh, now trampled, cowpat. It had been spread thickly over my sandal, and, despite thinning at the heel, continued up to reach my calf. A nearby woman – wrinkled, squatting, bony arms wrapped around her bony knees – noticed me: tall, white, with a soiled foot raised gingerly for inspection; she grimaced, then spat. (Read on …)

“The brown skins, the bare feet, the nose-rings, the humped bullocks – all these things were foreseeable, seemed obvious and familiar from the moment of landing. The really odd, unexpected thing about Bombay was its birds. There are more birds in the streets of this million-peopled city than in an English woodland.”
Aldous Huxley, Jesting Pilate: An Intellectual Holiday

A man unrolled his patterned carpet beside a metal detector. Neatly dressed, in a wool suit, he would, like us, soon leave Amman from the city’s international airport. He raised his open hands to shoulder level, looked up through simply framed spectacles, and bent from the knee, down, until his head and hands touched the floor. I recorded him in my journal, amongst other, final impressions of the Middle East: of people praying publicly, next to taxis and behind shop counters, oblivious to customers waiting to be served, outside full mosques on Friday and on the edge of a felucca, divining Mecca through a long relationship with the Nile. Three months before, I might have panicked. Airport, metal detector, Muslim. But I recorded no fear; what I wrote, instead, was a conclusion. (Read on …)

A predawn haze lit the kilometre of road before us. We trudged along it, still groggy from the half hearted slumber of our bus ride from Cairo. Through a small strip ‘of no man’s land’ we entered Israel, and left Egypt behind us. The immigration office was small, with gleaming white tiles on the floor and large cardboard posters dangling on strings from the ceiling. Grinning people were pasted onto the almost life-size cut outs – comically posing: hands on their hips – with their names below in colourful bubble letters. (Read on …)

A train deposited Iain and I in Aswan four hours behind schedule. A crowd of soldiers in combat uniforms guarded the platform, torso sized shields in their fists. A large group of convicts had been transported in the train that had taken us overnight from Cairo.

“We must hurry now,” said Omar, who strode through the station lobby, looking back to see if we were keeping up. “The bus to Aswan Dam will be waiting for you.” We had somewhat reluctantly booked a week long trip from Aswan to Luxor, including a night in a felucca on the Nile and visits to various ancient sites. Police escorted convoys have become compulsory for tourists travelling between the two cities because of Egypt’s recent terrorist attacks. It is difficult and time consuming for independent travellers to join these convoys, and most surrender to a package tour. And so it was that we became two among a group to be shepherded along this over-trodden tourist trail. Already it felt against the grain. (Read on …)