It was an early start for our run into the Indian capital city, but the heat certainly wasn’t giving us much of a break at that time. Fortunately, near desert conditions, few people and minimal traffic, along with a good quality road resulted in a quick run through to Delhi and we arrived at 2pm. This included a stop off at Amber City, a 16thcentury fort high up on a hill overlooking Jaipur. My body, which has not been in great shape since Kathmandu, took a further turn for the worst today, and I didn’t get to see much of the fort except for the toilets! The road into Delhi was surprisingly desolate, right up to within 40kms of the city. As a city, it appeared very much cleaner, less populated, and all round a much ... read more

A rickshaw driver took us the 3 km over the Nepalese border into Birganj (the joint border town with Indian Raxaul) and in time for an early morning feed. From there, along with 12 others, we passed through Immigration and Customs with a minimum of hassles. We encountered a magnificent sunrise at 6am as we walked across the border into Nepal. Our clocks were put forward by 10 minutes. We were immediately hassled by another rickshaw driver in our efforts to get a truck all the way into Kathmandu. We were offered a 9am ride for 15Re (a buck and a half), which we stupidly knocked back, a move we were to later regret. We finally gave away the attempt at a free hitch (or even a 15Re one!) on any truck by 11am, and along ... read more

It was a satisfying final night in Bangkok, sleeping in air-conditioning, and reinforced by a steaming hot shower in the morning. I took a final trip down to the Thai Airways office in the morning to finalise my claim. They agreed to pay me in compensation a lump sum of USD400, which while it may have been a true reflection of the value of the contents lost, was in fact far in excess of the inconvenience caused, so I was extremely happy with the outcome. Instead of lugging a suitcase around Asia, I had settled for a smaller, much lighter knapsack, and gone were all the ‘smart casual’ clothes I was never going to wear anyway. We were delayed in getting the bus to the airport but had no complaints about the cost. There was a ... read more

Our bus left Denpasar at 6am, and reached the ferry at Gilimanuk at 9.30am. We had to wait an hour for the ferry, which saw us reach Katapang, on the island of Java, at around 11.30am. The trip through to Surabaya was another 300kms and we did not reach there until 6.30pm that evening. The trip, in a little minibus shared with 7 others, was not too bad, all things considered, except for the 12 hours of constant horn-honking – an unfortunate driving habit round this part of the world that we are going to have to get used to. Asian drivers seem to only have two controls on their vehicles – the accelerator and the horn! Java seems quite a contrast to Bali. This part is very flat around the coast, although it appears to ... read more

I was fortunate enough to be sponsored through my undergraduate Chemical Engineering degree at the University of NSW via a CSR cadetship. For those old enough to remember, CSR was originally the ultra-conservative Colonial Sugar Refining Company. Amongst the benefits of this cadetship were that they paid you some pocket money along the way so you didn’t have to spend nights or weekends working in bars, and also you knew you had firm employment on graduation, although you didn’t know where. So just after graduation at the end of 1971, I was waiting to hear from my employer whether I was to be assigned to one of the North Queensland sugar mills, one of the capital city refineries, or one of the many divisions that CSR had purchased in the building materials sector. But by some ... read more