Below is a small excerpt from my 1997 travel journal “Making Memories” which is now available to purchase on Amazon Kindle or Paperback or read a short preview here.
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PROLOGUE
It was on 13 August 1997 that, with some trepidation, we set off on our travels after saving for several years (well, about three if you don’t count the first lot of savings which we spent on getting married, and a rather lavish honeymoon and safari in Africa). We didn’t really have a clear plan of where we were going, only as far as our first three stops – India, Nepal, and then Thailand. That’s where our tickets ran out. We were flying into Bombay, then crossing by land into Nepal and flying on to Bangkok. As I’d travelled before, I wasn’t worried much about “culture shock”. I thought I knew pretty well what to expect, and it wasn’t really that bad from memory…. or so I thought.
Our flight left Glasgow at 5am, and at the airport we said a sad farewell to my parents and brother, Craig. It was at this time that I started to feel rather worried about whether we were doing the right thing, having both given up good jobs and risked letting out our flat to a stranger. This trip had been hyped up in our minds for a long time, but what if it was a disaster? It was 8 years since I’d last travelled, a long time ago, when I was much younger. Paul had travelled round Europe by Inter-rail, but nothing much more extensive than that. I was 30 now, and Paul (my husband) was 26; should we not be settling down and having kids like most couples of our age? No way!
As the flight took off, I tried not to think too much of what lay ahead and how long it would be before we saw our families and friends again. Our arrival time in Bombay was around 11pm, not very good timing, and I didn’t want to think about the hassles that may be awaiting us.
INDIA
Diary Extract:
“Bombay, Thursday 14 August, 1997
My first impressions were ‘Oh no, why did we not book an earlier flight to Thailand?’ Despite having been in India before, I was not at all prepared for the absolute squalor. I must have been pretty hardened to it by the time I got here before. We arrived at 10.40pm but did not get out of the airport till after midnight. The queue for immigration was long and slow, then the same again for cashing a travellers cheque. We’d decided on a middle class hotel to break us in gently on the first night. We found one that was highly recommended by the Lonely Planet guidebook, but when we asked the airport tourist desk to book it for us, they were full. We ended up choosing one of the cheap hotels on their list and hoped for the best (it was actually not cheap at all by Indian standards, but cheap for Bombay, which is rumoured to be the most expensive city in the world for accommodation.) Well, it was a dump! It was on the third floor, up a dingy stairwell that smelled of urine, where drugged out people were sleeping on the steps. The management were far from welcoming. We got a tiny room with stained bedsheets and a dirty shared bathroom. However, to redeem itself there were no bedbugs (much to my surprise) and not a cockroach in sight (well, not in the room anyway). On reflection, I suppose it was OK. I’d slept in worse before this (just!).”
India was the biggest culture shock of our trip, so I suppose it wasn’t the best place to start. There is a lot of poverty, people living in corrugated iron shacks – you’d see a whole community of these little shacks; some without any doors, just a roof and three sides. Then of course there were all the homeless who just slept on the streets, many of whom were women with small children and babies; or badly disabled men, women and children, many with limbs missing. For these reasons it was understandable that many of the people often seemed to dislike tourists (though, of course, this wasn’t always the case), we were after all, much more fortunate than most of them would ever be. Theft, as we experienced, was a problem. It was simple – we had money, they hadn’t. It wasn’t just the foreign tourists who had to deal with this; the more affluent Indian tourists experienced the same problems. Then you had to contend with the different languages. Again, even the locals if going out of their state, could not sometimes understand, or be understood. Fortunately, though, English was widely spoken, so this wasn’t often a problem for us.”
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