Trip to INDIA - Log Introduction

SPOKANE – 47 deg 40 min N.   117 deg 25 min. W.     

January 2008     Temp:  32 deg. F

Dear Friends and Family

I am close to the beginning of another one of those trips that was mentally planned some times ago (This one in 1998 when I  crossed India on my way to Katmandu  - Nepal). After my usual readings of several travel books and a pile of clippings collected over the years I made my wish-to-see list.

I immediately faced three major problems.:

The great distances between the sights (many bus or train trips around 15 hours or more).

The monsoon season (a serious consideration when visiting India) generally moves from the    SW corner of India and across to the NE corner over a period of several months.

Some of the roads in Northern India, at the foot of the Himalayas, are open for travel only for a     short period of time during the summer.

I decided to plan a much more manageable trip and tour the lower Southern portion of India only, restricting my touring to a roughly triangular area between Mumbai, the southern tip of India (Varkala), and Kolkuta. 

My trip, as planned, will start January the 7^th and end March the 20^th, basically avoiding the beginning of the heavy rainy season.

I have made the plunge and switched from film camera to a digital SLR (Nikon D80). A necessary but expensive and painful switch. I haven’t had much time to learn how to use it, and this trip will have to be my opportunity to learn how to take pictures that (hopefully!) do not require spending a bunch of time in front of a computer (my experience with slides should help).

Some areas of India have some mean female mosquitoes that can give you a deadly strain of malaria. I hate taking drugs but the potential alternative is totally unacceptable! So, last week I started a one-pill-a-week regiment (Lariam). The same evening I got very sick to my stomach, a condition that lasted three days, and that turned out to be unrelated to the medicine. My sickness was, no doubts, created by my mental aversion to any kind of drugs/medicines.

I am prompted by my son Robert to start using a blog to post my story.

What I will do is to post a weekly report of my trip on the following blog: http://henrifolie.blogspot.com/.

The advantages of a blog:

    There is an available record of all the published posts from the beginning of the trip.
    It is easy to attach digital pictures to the text
    Anyone can attach comments that can be read by everyone.

I will occasionally send an email listing the postings.

As a remainder, anyone interested in reading the emails published during my second and third trips can go to www.henrifolie.com