This is a transcription of the diary I made when travelling to India for the first time. It was 1981 and I had never been outside Europe before. Travelling alone to India and Nepal was a great experience.

I have been to many places around the world since but this journey remains the most memorable. Like most young people at the time I had to travel on a small budget and this undoubtedly meant I got to meet more local people and experience the real hospitality of India than if I had stayed in large hotels and travelled by car.

What follows is transcribed with few changes from my original handwritten diary, scrawled into a journalist style notebook. It almost certainly reflects my youth and limited experience and probably the attitudes of the time but I hope it conveys something of the atmosphere, sights and sounds that I still remember so well.

The photographs were taken with a completely manual Olympus N1 camera and using Kodak Kodachrome 25 film (with one 64 purchased in Kathmandu and already well out of date). They were originally scanned around ten years ago and reduced to 20Kb for an earlier web site, dust and all> However, in recognition of broadband I have recently rescanned them and  reduced them to an average of about 500Kb. They are still dusty - despite my efforts - and have still lost something in the process - although this time the colour has been reproduced slightly better than before. I hope you will excuse the less than perfect quality the digital age taught us to expect.