The India Journals (Part 1)

This is part one of the journals I kept for my trip to India about 10 years ago... This se4ries will be partly journal and partly memories to fill in the gaps I did not write about at that time for whatever reason... I hope you enoy them... And without further ado...

Amsterdam 3 October, 1997


It is the night before we leave our tirp to India and we are finally packed an ready to go. Our flight will depart in 12 hours. It is somewhat scary, yet exciting to go to a strange land with no real plans, no hotel reservations and nothing prepared. We were in Nice, Cannes and Monaco only a few weeks ago. The only tning we have managed to arrange is a letter of invitiation for Ubekistan and out visas for Nepal and India. I have no idea what to expect except for a major culture shock. I have heard that Uzbekistan is very beaultiful and I am quite curious. I have alwyas wanted to see Russia, or placed in the former Soviet Union, but I always imagined it would be Moscow or St. Petersburg.

I have heard many things about India, mostly words like "dirty", "crowded", "poor", "fascinating" and "beautiful". I am very curious. I have visions of sleeping amongst cockroaches the size of cats and having major dairrhea within the first few days. We will just have to see. I always assumed that when people took backpacks, they took almost nothing with them. On the contrary, you have to take everything, but in small quantities. We have candles in case of power outages, which are supossedly very frequent, toilet paper as it is reportedly rare, clean needles in case we should need an injection or end up in a hospital, and of course bug repellent and malaria tablets. I could open up my own pharmacy. Everyone I know that has been to India and Nepal, prefer Nepal saying it is much more beautiful. well, tomorrow, it all begins...