1400 Bananas 76 Towns & 1 Million People

For my part I travel not to go anywhere but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move. ~ Robert Louis Stevenson in Travels with a Donkey Few of us have the panache to put in our papers free ourselves from our desks and take off on a half-year-long trip along the coastal necklace of peninsular India. This richly-flavoured travelogue combines adventure serendipity food and sheer joie de vivre. The narrative irresistibly draws us in as benevolent observers of the many facets and foibles of humanity. Living out of a backpack in budget lodgings and eating bananas as a staple only add to the heady challenges that stimulate the spirit of wanderlust of this maverick-explorer. The tour diary starting from the remote north-western coastal tip and climaxing rather precariously way above sea-level at the potentially sinister Indo-Tibetan border is an engrossing chronicle of discoveries about the desires views tribulations joys and sheer zest for living of the teeming millions of India. Thrown in for good measure in a refreshingly tongue-in-cheek style are recipes for some of the gastronomic delights offered in the places traversed. Itinerant sidelights about people of all classes and creeds – fishermen seafarers rickshaw-drivers priests salesmen radicals typical and atypical families and all the rest – create a colourful kalaidescope that is quintessentially India. This book is as enjoyable and energising as a good cup of chai...