Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder in the kitchen.

And that's because, well, if you were kind enough to listen to yesterday's podcast, you will have

heard that this was all about the Indian e-visa opening up again for UK travellers and this has been something which

me and many thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people have been waiting for.

As discussed, the facility was taken away and yesterday the High Commissioner in London said it had been restored. So I have

been trying on and off to get a visa and I thought right three o'clock I'm going to sit down.

I'm going to have a cup of tea and very nice it is too. Always helps when you're applying for an

online visa and I'll start the process.

That was, hang on, 54 minutes ago.

The good news is it lets you start the process.

It allows you to say, I'm from the United Kingdom and I'd like an eVisa, please.

I did fall at the final hurdle and I can tell you about that.

When I get there, do excuse me clicking to refresh because I've been doing this quite a lot.

It says you can attempt the next payment after about 13 minutes. So therefore you can guess perhaps where I fell but it is a

complex thing and I wanted to talk through the issues that are involved in it so that if you are

lucky enough to be thinking of a trip to India you will know what you've got to go through

it's quite an

exercising bureaucracy. I think I don't know of any country, with a possible exception of Russia,

although, of course, I haven't been able to try their visa because they certainly don't

allow British people to apply for that,

just like the Indians.

There's a lot of questions which are designed to find out if you have any Pakistani heritage.

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