Part One: India
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Why India?
For both Craig and me, this leg of the trip was recently triggered by Wes Anderson’s film, The Darjeeling Limited, Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown and Gregory David Robert’s Shantaram.
My own desire to visit the subcontinent was inspired at a much earlier age; The Jungle Book (both Kipling and Disney versions), EM Forster’s A Passage to India, a university module covering fiction of the Indian subcontinent, George Orwell’s Burmese Days, and more personal family connections are all to be held responsible. Portraits of distant relative General Sir Bindon Blood hung in my grandparent’s Cotswold house, alongside original, highly collectable posters for The Times of India, drawn by my great grandfather, Tony Royle. A hairy elephant foot served as an umbrella stand and all kinds of dusty-but-exotic knick knacks delighted my childish imagination.
Basic itinerary
From Delhi, the plan is to head north to Shimla, Ladakh and Kashmir. From Kashmir there’s nowhere else to go but south, so it’s down to Dharamsala for us. Next, we’ll visit Amritsar, travel through the Punjab and on to Rajasthan where I hope to learn more about Ajmer, birthplace of my great great grandmother. Her father, William Bagot Blood was chief engineer of the Rajputana-Malwa railway, so I want to travel along those tracks. From Ajmer, we’ll go to Udaipur and Mumbai before spending a month exploring Kerala, and then back to Delhi, via Agra, for the tail end of September.
The entire trip will be played out overland – no shortcuts flying across mountain ranges or hostile territories here, thank you very much!
After two weeks back in the UK, we’ll fly to Rio for Part Two, the Americas...
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