Keep Smiling

Dry heat and bright sunshine at this time of year, when it's dark, cold and damp at home in Hertfordshire, do wonders for body and soul. My three-score-years-and-ten-plus-a-few drop away and I become a recycled teenager. I explore anew with a spring in my step, bounce in my friendly hotelier's jeep on long, straight military roads that lead to the Pakistan border, visit oases and simple settlements among desert sands, and search for ever-elusive Great Indian Bustards. Of course, I make time too for relaxation on my hotel's terrace with a glass of chilled Kingfisher, cool fresh lime soda or hot lemon tea while admiring views across flat rooftops and temple domes to a vast living fort that dominates the skyline beyond. I also meet my favourite family in a nearby musician's colony and take rice, ... read more

The alarm clocks sounded their merry chimes far too early. We’d have liked more time with our hospitable host, Raisal, and could easily have spent many more happy hours exploring his interesting little town. But, there's no rest for the wicked - and, with our combined age of 155 years, these two old farts had had plenty of time to be bad so, after a hurried breakfast, Santosh quickly ushered us to our car and we bid a reluctant farewell to Khandela. Off towards the Thar Desert we headed. An uneventful two-hour journey brought us via Sikar and Sujangarh to a long, flat, straight road with even more potholes and missing tarmac than usual. Thankfully, we only had to endure 5 kms (3 miles) of constant bouncing and zigzagging before we reached the entrance to the ... read more

The sun had barely risen above the horizon as we bid 'Namaste' to Raju and boarded the car he'd borrowed to take us to Varanasi's little airport. Our fascinating, intensive, exhausting three-week tour along the Ganges had come to an end. We'd been to remarkable places, seen amazing things and travelled a lot of miles - more than 2,000 of them since leaving Delhi. But what did we remember most? A tough question - there were so many wonderful things to remember! However, above all, I think it had to be the people, particularly the new friends we'd made: people like the Saigal family in Haridwar, who'd made us so welcome at the start of our Ganges adventure; like Gagan, who had devoted his time to ensuring we saw at least one tiger a day in ... read more

'Look over there,' said Raju, pointing with his chin in the Indian manner to some indistinct letters and numbers painted on a building. 'Would you believe that the Ganges reached up to there in the monsoon of 1978?' We looked down to the river flowing serenely beside the stone steps of Varanasi’s ghats today, a dizzy, mind-boggling 74 metres (242 feet) below. Ahead and beneath us, left and right, as far as the eye could see, everything would have been covered in a fast-flowing, brown inland sea. The vast sandbanks stretching to the horizon, the ghats, the temples and streets throughout the city would have been flooded, flushing away the grime of decades and adding to it with the detritus from towns and villages upstream. It seemed almost inconceivable that this remarkable city could have survived ... read more

Pilgrims often arrive in the holy city of Varanasi on foot. Tourists usually arrive by air or by road. A few travellers arrive by boat. These two grey-haired brothers, determined to be travellers rather than tourists, were among those latter few! In the late 1960s, one of the finest travel writers of all time, the late Eric Newby, wrote a book* describing how he and his wife Wanda set out by boat to cruise the entire length of the River Ganges. Travelling in a variety of unstable vessels, their journey was more treacherous and slower than they'd imagined, but it was absolutely fascinating nonetheless. One critic rightly observed that the book's pages contained 'all the exasperating charm, dusty enchantment and recurrent dottiness of India'. Perhaps it was my reading of those same pages long ago which ... read more