http://www.oldworldwandering.com Overland travel through Europe, Asia and Africa Tue, 29 Jun 2010 10:44:18 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en “Increasingly of late, and particularly when I drink, I find my thoughts drawn into the past rather than impelled into the future. I recall drinking sherry in California and dreaming of my earlier student days in England, where I ate…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2010/05/17/who-you-are-where-you-are-travel-and-nostalgia/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2009/04/10/hyderabad-slash-cyberabad/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/08/27/cochin-kerala/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/08/21/mysore/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/08/08/village-homestay-karnataka/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/08/05/goa/ 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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/07/29/matheran/ “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,…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/07/24/mumbai/ “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…

]]> http://www.oldworldwandering.com/2007/07/11/a-passage-to-india-with-apologies-to-em-forster/ 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…

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