As an avid reader and traveller I’ve always been handicapped by having to lug around a decent supply of books. One of my great fears is not having enough to read. Some years ago I was caught up in a ‘strike’ on a road in India where our bus was held captive for a whole day. I didn’t mind this particularly except when I realized that all my books in my pack in the hold, and there was no way I was going to have access to it today, with all the demonstrators about. A day with nothing to do and nothing to read, it was very depressing and from then on I vowed I would always have at least 600 unread pages in reserve, just in case I was caught out like that again.

Of course books weigh a ton and always having at least two or three in the bag meant that I was always carrying a lot of weight. Places like Themal in Kathmandu where I am now were happy hunting grounds as I nearly always had books I’d read that I wanted to sell and I would spend hours trawling through the many bookshops, looking for new books, and deciding where I wanted to do my deals. The aim was always to be carrying only unread books to last me to the next place where there were bookshops.

Of course things have now changed as I now carry a Kindle which can store hundreds of books. I now don’t have to worry about running out of reading matter as I loaded my Kindle up with lots of new material before I left home. I still wander into the bookshops and look around but not with the avid interest I would have in the past. Of course using a Kindle brings its own problems, keeping it charged up which I do at every opportunity, and of course having ones’ eggs all in one basket so to speak, I would have real problems if it was damaged or stolen. It has now become one of most valuable processions. I could still read my books on my netbook, but it would not be as convenient as my Kindle. Luckily all my purchases are still stored at Amazon, so I could have another device FedExed out to me, or I could resort to buying the old fashioned paper versions.

At the end of the day my Kindle, even with its cover, only weighs the same as small paperback. I’ve just read a very long historical novel, which in its paper version is a 700 page brick of a book, only available in hardback. I’m very glad I could read that in its digital form.

I am still carrying some paper books. One is a history book which wasn’t available in a digital version; it relates to an area further on in my travels and I want to read it nearer the time. So I’m going to have to carry it until then but I rather resent it, and it will be sold or left behind as soon as it’s finished. Another book I have is a small guide to the birds of India. These kinds of books just don’t work on ereaders as they are now but who knows in the future?

When I planned this trip I thought I wouldn’t bother with a guide book, after all I’ve been to India and Nepal before so I could just wing it. On the day I was due to fly I bottled out and went down to Waterstones and bought the Footprint guide to India. It was like a comfort blanket, and I’m very glad I did as I would have been in real trouble without it, missing out on the most basic of information. I’m also carrying ‘Trekking in the Everest Region’ published by Trailblazer, another essential book as are all their trekking guides.

I have tried using digital guides, buying chapters of books as pdfs which can then be put on a Kindle. These are fine when you view them on a laptop, but on a Kindle the text is very small and it is very fiddly to move around the pages. They don’t really work. So to all my friends still in the travel book business who are today at the Frankfurt Book Fair, don’t worry there’s life in the guide book yet.

One thing I’ve been unable to do since arriving in the Indian sub continent is download any new books. The agreements that Amazon have to piggy back on wifi and 3G networks don’t seem to apply in India and Nepal. This again has implications for those travel book publishers who have gone for flashy digital material that can be viewed on smart phones and the like. What do you do if there’s no bandwidth to download all this information? In the end it’s back to the book.

Ereaders seem to have been designed for the traveller, limitless reading material for very little weight. I’m very glad I have one. However when it comes down to finding where you are on a street corner in a strange city, the guide book is still the gadget to have.

This was my first visit to India since 2007 so I was interested to see what changes had been made in that time. The news in the West is of India the rising power that will soon be one of the top dogs. Certainly on my last visit I could see signs of change and thought that India was becoming a more modern society. On my first visit in 1989, I arrived in Delhi airport which was something of a dump, now the new Inderia Ghandi (IG) Airport is slick and modern and at Western standards.

The first signs of the unchanging nature of Indian society came in the immigration queue. There were manned counters for Diplomats and First and Business Class travellers, except there weren’t any. So the half dozen or so immigration officers (all male and older and hence more senior) sat around and chatted while their colleagues’ a few desks away had to handle a plane load. Even these took time out every couple of passengers, so stop and have a rest, having a stretch and a yawn before beckoning the next person forward. Indian bureaucracy moves at its own place. Most of the passengers were Indians returning from the Gulf and they seemed to have reams of paperwork that needed to be examined, who knows why, after all they were only re-entering their own country.

Outside the airport, the swish new Metro link to the city was not working and no one knew why, so I had to get the bus. Outside the Airport, India was much as ever, endless honking horns, might is right traffic rules, traffic lights that were invisible; instead the push and shove of traffic that slowly grinds around the cities. There are lots of new cars on the roads and more motorbikes and the airport had big ads for RangeRovers and Jaguars but in reality the ideal Indian car would be Landrover with steel girders welded on the sides. There are still a few ‘Ambassadors’ on the road, the 1950’s British design, all of which are government cars, as it’s unlikely an Indian car buyer would choose one.

In 2007, the one thing that did impress me was the new Metro in Delhi, and since then it has expanded dramatically, so much so most of the journeys I wanted to make around the city could be done on the Metro. A new factor in Indian society is the threat of Terrorism and the Mumbai attacks a couple of years ago have clearly made an impression on the Indian authorities and this is most obvious on the Metro. To get onto the platforms everyone has to go through airport level security, so the bags go through a x ray machine and everyone is frisked and run over with a metal detector. I didn’t travel at rush hour but the queues must be impressive. Around the stations, in concourses and in subways there are sandbagged gun emplacements manned by soldiers, and as their AK’s have the disposable see through plastic magazines you can see they are loaded with live rounds. Soldiers and sniffer dogs wander the trains and platforms. This level of security surrounds every public building and they clearly don’t intend to be caught napping again.

The Metro fares are very cheap and even the longest journey costs IR 35, about 40 pence UK. Although there is a stored value cards to pay for journeys used by the more affluent who can make the investment, the cheapness of the fares brings its own problems. India just doesn’t have enough small change and no one has thought of either producing more or stocking the ticket offices with it. There are no ticket machines; you have to buy from a person behind a counter. What this means is that the ticket offices are besieged by people trying to buy tickets (actually a ‘smart’ plastic counter) but can’t as there is no change.

Glitches aside, the Metro is very impressive, clean, bright and punctual and in reality quite unlike the rest of the country.

Again on my last visit I was stunned by the growth in mobile phones and how everyone either had one or wanted one; so it was surprising how few I saw on this visit. The middle classes had their smart phones but the explosive growth I had expected in all phones was not evident at all. Again security may be the reason, the government is concerned that new phones may be used for crime or to set off bombs in Kashmir so in order to buy one lots of ID has to be produced, which many poorer people just don’t have. Even to use an internet café or log into wifi, ID has to be produced and names and addresses noted down in a ledger. As all this information is recorded on scrappy bits of paper all over the place its use as intelligence is practically nil as none of it is collected, and depends on terrorists not having false ID’s and telling the truth. All it really does is creates more bureaucracy and deters people from getting things like mobiles and internet access which could help the countries development.  It’s an interesting contrast to Africa where I was two years ago, competition was so fierce between the phone companies SIM cards were given away on the street and they were at the forefront of the development of new services like transferring money via mobile phones. This exists in India but is pitched mainly at the middle classes.

One thing that always impresses me about India is the Railway system, the biggest in the world. This has changed a bit in that some of the rolling stock is newer and on my trips I paid out for AC seat, which is really quite OK. Of course there’s no way you can buy a ticket from a machine, it involves filling out a form, producing ID (which you also have to show on the train) and queuing at a counter. The whole thing still runs on pre Amstrad software and the tickets are spat out on a dot matrix printer, just as they were in 1989. It’s the world’s biggest employer and it just seems too big to change but at the end of the day it works, I have never had a problem with it; every seat booked has always been there. The train masters, usually older, dignified men as belays their status, go around with their lists and make sure everything is as it should be, and it is. The trains are slow, stop and start a lot and are often held up by ‘strikes’ but they always get there. They may even be in for a revival, as many of the internal airlines that saw explosive growth a couple of years ago are headed for bankruptcy. So the middle classes may rediscover the pleasures of long distance train travel.

When I arrived I was ready to see the new ‘fast forward into the future’ India and apart from the some new infrastructure like airport and metro I haven’t seen it. India seems unchanging, there are some nicer cars on the road but they still have to compete for road space with cycle rickshaws and tuk tuk’s, and even the odd elephant. There are still frequent blackouts and every business of any size has a generator, a huge drain on resources and productivity. New technology, like mobile phones and the internet which should help moves things along seem to have hit the buffers. Even English seems to be less widely spoken, which is one of India’s natural advantages. I’m sure pundits will say it’s different in places like Bangalore, but these are only small spots in a huge country, a country too big to change fast.

I stopped off in Oman on my way to India, mainly because the plane landed there and it was a country I’d never been too. Arriving in Muscat and heading out of the Airport it seem very much like other Gulf States with plenty of land, and it has sprawled along the coast line, motorways, modern malls and the big trophy buildings which here are the Grand Mosque and the Opera House.

I was staying in the area of Mutrah one of the older parts. What was different here is that bare, rocky hills crowd around the coast and the developments are built between them. Even more interesting was the fact that many of them had turrets and Forts built on top of them, and if Oman could be said to have an architectural style, desert fort would be it, as many of the new buildings have castle like features on them as if they could also be used to repel attackers. Down at the centre of Mutrah is the corniche which has a promenade, places to eat, and a view of the harbour. Tied up is the sultans ship but I’m sure he considers it just a yacht. There is also a large covered souk selling mainly clothes and spices and at the corniche end, souvenirs for tourist so that they don’t have to walk so far.

And with good reason, as one thing that can be said about Oman is that it is hot, killing hot, 40 o C + when I was there. The place pretty much shuts down in the afternoon. Nobody walks anywhere and even at night it’s too hot to sit outside and eat.

Like many of these newly developing countries public transport seems to be none existent, as if they got stuck between cheap and cheerful mini buses fighting for trade and everyone owning a car. Interestingly they have bus stops but they seem to have forgotten about the buses. So to get anywhere I had to hail cabs, which are all owned by Omanis, all of whom only had a rudimentary grasp of the principal attractions in their own city. In fact I was quoted a price for a trip where it turned out that the driver had no idea where the place was. It turned out to be very close and I walked back to the hotel.

I took a cab from Mutrah to Old Muscat, the cities first settlement which is where the sultans palace is. There’s something rather nice about there being a least one Sultan left in the world.  The Palace is a fine building with a wide parade leading up to it, no doubt used for ceremonial purposes. There are a few ministries scattered about and you walk down to the harbour for a look at the Sultans back door. A large fort was being renovated here, one of many scattered around the surrounding hills. What was strange about the whole place was that it was deserted apart from workers tending the gardens and every blade of grass is on life support in this climate, and the usual Army guards. If the public buildings around about had people in them, there was no evidence of this. I found one place to have something to eat, so I guess most of them bring their own lunch.

The workers tending the gardens were Bangladeshi following the pecking order in this part of the world where the Pakistani and Bangladeshi’s do the donkey work, the Indians run the commerce while the Omanis drive taxis and do whatever nice jobs need to be done. At dusk I saw groups of Bangladeshi’s in blue overalls and their tiffin boxes getting into mini buses to be driven to building sites for the night shift, definitely the one to have.  All the Omanis I spoke to were all very friendly and it seemed a very relaxed. As my cabbie from the airport told me, we don’t mind people wearing shorts and there’s no problem walking around at night. They are traditional in certain ways in that they all seemed to wear traditional dress, the white jelabia and round skull cap, while the woman were dressed in black but unveiled; and although one hears the call to prayer I never saw anyone actually praying and it seems generally very tolerant. My hotel served alcohol.    

One attraction I went to was the Armed Forces Museum, which is housed in one of the original forts so it’s worth going to see it just for that. It’s  still managed by the Military and you have to have a solider accompanying you around, although it wasn’t clear why as he only announced what was in each room which I could read for myself, or maybe it was to stop you stealing the rifles that were just hanging on the walls? It is a very informative museum and a good introduction to Omani history. It seems that they spent most of the twentieth century engaged in internecine tribal warfare, hence the need for all those forts. They have strong ties to the British army, Royals and Sultans sticking together, and most of the weapons and kit on display were British although I looked in vain for any mention of the help we gave them putting down the Doufan Rebellion in the 1970’s or the 24 British soldiers killed along the way but I suppose it’s their museum.

The grounds are lots of big kit, like a small ship, some aircraft and a group of manikins in uniform having a pay parade.

Cost wise, I paid £36 for one of the few budget hotels which I booked online, and it was pretty good and managed and run by Indians. If you eat with the locals food is about £5 - £8 for a reasonable meal. What does push the cost up is getting around with the ‘think of a number’ cab negotiation. When cabbies are ignoring the locals and insisting in taking the foreigner first you can be pretty sure it’s not to improve their English; which by the way is spoken by just about everyone. As a guide the cab fare to the airport was around £13.

If money isn’t a problem and you can hire a car I’m sure there’s a lot to see out in the countryside but my impressions from the Army museum are that Oman is very big, very empty and there is not a lot to see apart from forts, of which there is no shortage. So a return trip is not on my ‘to do’ list.