In the course of my work I often meet young people setting off on their first adventures, their Gap Year trip or what has become the standard Australia trip with some time in South East Asia along the way. Very often the parents are in attendance forking out for insect repellent and complaining about the cost of all the jabs; all to keep their offspring ‘safe’. I usually point out that bugs and bites are not where the risk is, the real danger is in simply travelling about.

This is illustrated in an article in the Economist magazine (Oct 24/30th 2015) on world road accidents. Globally, road accidents are the leading cause of death amongst 15 – 29 –year olds. Travelling anywhere on the road in the developing world carries a risk, usually far more than a traveller would face from catching any kind of disease. The World’s deadliest roads are in Africa, with forty of the top fifty most dangerous countries, where traffic often kills more people than malaria. That is why exploring the continent using organized tours or truck trips is always going to be infinitely safer than going it alone on public transport, which is always a nail biting experience, even in daylight.

The real surprise is that right at the top of the most dangerous list is the supposedly ‘safe’ country of Thailand. It’s no surprise to me; anyone who has ever taken a long distance bus at night in Thailand cannot forget the crazy overtaking, absurd speeding and the general recklessness with which the buses are thrown around. In the past, Thai bus stations used to display police pictures of all the crashes and carnage; unpleasantly graphic, this no longer seems to happen, and I was never sure whether it was to deter passengers from getting on the buses in the first place or just to fully acquaint them with the true risk.

Everyone needs to get about and I always recommend to travellers that they always travel in daylight as this does cut some of the risk, and in some countries you are less likely to be robbed as well. If you can, don’t travel by road, I’ve travelled all around Thailand by train, it’s a small network but you can get to most of the big cities using it and compared to the bus it’s like travelling wrapped in cotton wool. India is another country where going by train should be the first option.
​
With the modern obsession with safety, I feel that people, especially young people seem to think that because they have had the jabs/taken the pills that they are invincible, immune to all disease. Road traffic deaths have become increasingly rare in the UK, the number has halved in the last ten years, but elsewhere, in places where we like to travel, dying on the roads have become the new plague. The causes - drunk drivers, bald tyres, corrupt police, bad roads, nonexistent maintenance, greed, speeding, overloading and so on....

Unfortunately, you can’t take a pill to guard against that lot. 

See also: Colombia, the real risk. 

My trip took me into Montenegro and around the Boca Kotorska, the mouth, which is major inlet that is connected to the sea by a passage. Surrounded by high mountains the inlet curves around the mountains which run parallel with the sea, forming what must by one the safest anchorages on earth. Our journey took us all around the inlet to the town of Kotor on its furthest and safest point, a place of strategic importance for centuries. In many ways a sort of Dubrovnik in miniature, an old city heavily defended by city walls and fortifications that stretched up high up the mountainside. Again another car free city that’s great to wander about despite having to share it with passengers from a cruise ship, which makes it feel very crowded.

There are subtle differences between Croatia and Montenegro, things are not as well maintained, the roads are narrower and it’s a bit shabby in parts. The Cyrillic alphabet is used for some notices and signs, and some cars have Serbian plates. In Kotor, there are Orthodox churches filled with incense and icons and decorated with the Serbian flag next to baroque Catholic churches. Despite Montenegro not being in the EU, it uses the Euro as its national currency.

We drive onto the seaside resort of Budva which looks a prosperous place with lots of buildings going up; mostly apartments aimed at the Serbian/Russian market and a large shopping mall. On the seashore the beach is packed with good looking young men and women all having a good time; if you’re young it looks like a great place to go for a holiday. On the way back we cross the Boca’s mouth on a ferry that crosses at the narrowest part, for the short drive into Croatia. 

The part of Croatia I visited is a thin slither of territory that hugs the coast, bordered by Bosnia Herzegovina to the north and Montenegro to the south. This was land that was fought over during the Yugoslav wars, where Cavtat, where I stayed was occupied by Serb and Montenegrin forces who moved up the coast to besiege the city of Dubrovnik. I didn’t follow the war in any great detail but one of my clearest memories is watching dun shells bounce off the great walls of Dubrovnik on the nine o’clock news. The Croatians fought bravely to defend the city and to liberate the land to the south.
 I went to Dubrovnik as a day trip and it is truly a wonderful city and one of the great sights of Europe. Enclosed by its medieval walls you can really imagine it as it was when it was a great trading port. Almost inaccessible to cars it’s a great place to wander around, with lots of small alleys, courtyards and fine churches. Walking around the city walls which were built to withstand a siege its astonishing to imagine that twenty three years ago, this town was besieged, only this time the attackers were firing high explosive shells. Even though the town roofscape looks old, a closer look reveals that most of the tiles are modern because a large numbers of houses took direct hits from shells fired from the hills above, which took their roofs off. At the entrance to the city is a map showing the damage to the city, only 1% of houses were completely destroyed but 55% were damaged in some way. Ironically, when in past invaders like Napoleon came to take Dubrovnik not a shot was fired, such was the respect for this unique city, yet we sat back and let it be bombarded in modern times. 

When the Croatians forced the Serbs and Montegrians out, they looted everything they could, all down the coast even taking equipment from the airport. Luckily, they couldn't and didn't take this gem of a city. 

In recent years I have taken to escaping the winter weather in the UK by heading to the Canary Islands. They have enormous appeal to northern Europeans, being warm throughout the winter, are Spanish territory so a good standard of living and are not that far away, only four to five hours by air. Everywhere else that’s warm at this time of year is either a long way away, like Argentina, or dodgy, like most of Africa including Egypt now, or dull, Dubai and Australia. So the Canary’s fit the bill and the islands economy and existence has been built on the tourists that swarm here in their thousands.

Of course, people don’t only come here for holidays; many have stayed and bought homes. Tenerife was particularly German, Fuerteventura very British and Gran Canaria just about everybody but it seems to be a particular favourite of the Scandinavians.

This trip was very different for me, as apart from some high end packages to inaccessible places, I’d never been on a package holiday before. The flight was routine but a pretty Swedish girl was waiting at the airport to tell me which bus to get on, which then took me to the hotel. No haggling for taxis or waiting for the airport bus. Then onto the world of mass tourism, huge hotel complexes have been built on almost every inlet or cove which has a beach. The hotels are massive concrete structures that climb up the sides of the hills, each floor only having the depth of one room before hitting bedrock, but this ensures that every balcony had a sea view. Some of the hotels are miles inland where you’d need a telescope to see the beach. Not all of these have been a success, due to Spain’s financial crisis when the property boom went bust, many workers just walked out leaving half completed shells which will probably be left to decay.

Luckily, my hotel was close to the beach which had black volcanic sand. It was warm enough to swim in and due to protection of the cove not too choppy. On most of the islands the Atlantic breakers make swimming something of a trial.  

My fellow holiday makers were all somewhat older than me but I was staying in a ‘child free’ hotel. A mix of nationalities, British, Norwegian, German, even Spanish. Some people clearly never left the hotel but ‘hung out’ around the pool all day. This was an all inclusive hotel, where food was continually available for fourteen hours a day, and booze for even longer, just help yourself.

Of course I did go out, several times to the nearby town of Puerto de Morgan which still retained a village feel; and to Morgan itself, a hill village higher up the valley from the coast, few tourists made it up here. Beyond Morgan the road rose up and climbed up to the high mountains. On one day I did hire a car and made the gear grinding trip up, switch back after switch back to the top of the valley then onto the rolling plateau area at the top. The hills are covered with pine forests and a few people still scratch a living up here with goats and fruit trees. Also here are the reservoirs that supply the coast that keep the whole society/ economy going. At this time of year there was very little in them, I looked for one as a feature to calculate where I was but soon realized that what should have been a large lake was no more than small pond in the middle. The money, probably EU money that has been spent on roads is phenomenal. A motorway runs almost all around the island, and even the road into the mountains was new and well maintained, all you need is a head for heights.

The walking trails on the hillsides are well marked and maintained and as you have to be fairly determined to get this high, not far off 2000m, you will meet very few people. The coastal fringe is a world of mass tourism and in winter very much geared towards older people but just inland is another world, with very few people and a very natural landscape. Probably the nicest Canary Island that I’ve been to, and with much more to discover I shall probably go back.

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.

Yesterday I started my journey back to Dar es Salem by getting a mini bus up to Mazuz, which is on the main Malawian North/South road. So far so good, I got there at about eight in the morning and saw that a big bus from a 'reputable' company was heading to the border. So I got on board which was a big mistake. By thinking big I thought fast, big, big error. When we finally rolled out of the station we then stopped not only at every village and town, often standing idling for half an hour or move, but we also stopped for just about everyone waving at the side of the road.

As the bus was packed, with people standing in the aisle, it usually took ages for them to get on and off. Many of them, particularly the women had been to market, so had big bundles. Most of the women also had a child hanging off their back as well, nearly all these kids were incredibility stoic, they just hung there and observed the world without a murmur.   

I'd spent the last of my Malawian money on the ticket, so I couldn't jump off and try my luck on something that looked like it was going to move faster. So add to it all, as we got closer to the border there were lots of police checkpoints. At these most people had to get off and the policemen got on the bus and poked through their belongings. I asked one of the policemen what they were looking for, Reply - Everything. Then he made me open my rucksack. At the next one I had to produce my passport.

On the way down, the journey from the border had taken four hours, the trip back lasted nine. We rolled into the border village of Songwe at dusk, too late to cross the border as Tanzania is an hour ahead and they keep office hours. So I had to spend the night at the 'rest house' a very simple room and very clean but unfortunately with no running water.

After crossing over this morning and another packed mini bus I decided to spent the afternoon chilling in the pleasant town of Mbeya. Tomorrow will be taken up with another white knuckle ride back to Dar.

After three days for travel I've now stopped at the beach on the side of Lake Malawi, in the village/backpackers hangout of Nkhata Bay. From my beach hut I can look across the small bay and watch Fish Eagles on their perches. What I can't see is the other side of the Lake, the air is hazy and although it should be possible to see Tanzania on the far shore, in fact it's like being on the edge of the sea.

An uneventful journey to get here with most of the journey done in one day on an express bus from Dar,which really was express, sitting at the front I could see that we rarely dropped below 120km/h the whole way. Thankfully the roads are reasonable. Most of route was through uninhabited wilderness which still seems to make up most of Africa.

On the Malawian side, transport is in beat up mini buses with lots of hassle from touts to get you in their bus. It is a pretty country of wooded hills and of course the Lake.

Since leaving Zanzibar I've met a lot of interesting people. Unfortunately, facebook has decided that I'm a security risk because I'm logging in on a strange machine, even though I've now been doing that for weeks. It doesn't allow me to answer the security questions and has now shut me out. So if people are trying to send me messages, apologies as I can't reply.

Its the question of keeping things secure, but if things are so secure that you can't get into them then why bother?

Next week I shall have to head back to Dar as I'm coming to the end of my trip, but I want to keep on going.