Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast. It's Wednesday, the 26th of November.

You might remember if you were kind enough to listen last week that my colleague Sophie Dickinson

was talking all about her adventures in India. She was there for the first time just in the last few

weeks. But I wanted to get a very different perspective and very

fortunately, Richard Loosley has come up with a book called What a Way to Go to India. And the front

cover of the book rather gives you the idea there's a battered old truck with backpackers

falling out of the windows as it drives

through a Himalayan pass. And that's because Richard was involved in the overland business

travelling to India from the UK by public transport. And he's now written all about it.

So welcome, Richard.

Tell us how you are feeling, dare I say, half a century on.

I wanted to put my stories down about travelling overland in the 1970s for posterity and for some of my family and also friends that came along with us and reminisce about

travel on buses, trucks and various other modes of transport on the way. Let's be clear,

this wasn't the kind of magic bus operation where you got on a big old coach in London and then

you ended up in Kathmandu, you were actually using public

transport and yet you were organising tours. A lot of people would think, well, that's never

going to work. Yes, I think a lot of people did look at us in a bit of a strange way. We used to

use rail through Europe from London down to Istanbul, which took four days, stopping off in places like Venice

and Belgrade.

Forgive me, this was during the days of the iron curtains.

That must have been quite challenging.

Yugoslavia and Bulgaria were a little bit different, but we took four days to get down

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