Travelers' Tales India

This is a delightful, easy read by many authors on India and their travel experiences. I found it interesting to hear these tales and dive into their wild mix of stories. India is a multi layered, historical and moving place to travel. Most of my books on India are by Indian authors so the insight from foreign travelers was a different 'read' and of value. I would highly recommend this book to anyone interested in or wants to travel to India.

I agree with the above reviews. There is such a variety of subject matter and types of writing collected in this book and I found myself saving so many pages with great information about places in India that I had not yet heard about but wanted to make sure I visited now when I plan my own trip!

I'm giving this book five stars not because the individual travel stories comprising this are five star stories (though many of them are), but because the breadth of subject matter and perspectives this book offers are remarkable. From the frosty passes of the Himalayas to the bustling streets of Calcutta, from the Ganges to shores of Goa, from the rarely-visited tribal interior to the even more desolate Rann of Kutch, this book portrays a country with a topography perhaps as diverse as Europe's. From the barriers of caste to the oppression of women, this book portrays a social evolution still in progress but with roots in ancient times. Highlights for me included Rory Nugent's eccentric search for the supposedly extinct pink-headed duck, and David Yeadon's brilliant portrayal of character interactions (including an Indian interrupting his narrative digression in real time "Sir, are you hearing me, sir?"). For every traveler that timidly scratched the surface of India without real discovery (such as a particularly uptight and sheltered Oxford Fellow's first trip) there was one so recklessly bold that you're glad you could relive the experience from the safety of your own home (including one author's visit to a tribal island where past visitors had been killed). Somewhere in the middle there's bound to be powerful inspiration for a trip of one's own. Reading this book was not only satisfying, but served as a launching point for future reading of the complete works from which these tales were excerpted (David Yeadon's Back of the Beyond and Jonah Blank's Arrow of the Blue Skinned God seemed particularly interesting to me).

I read this book after reading the DK guide to India and Leila Hadley?s A Journey with Elsa Cloud (the latter is about a tour of parts of India in the 70s). This excellent collection of true stories really made all the places come alive and gave me a much richer and fuller sense of India than I could get from just Hadley?s book. The poverty, sexism, and daily encounters with excrement that are a part of life in India are compellingly conveyed at the same time as we come to feel the vast heavy weight of so many centuries of history, so much spiritual questing, so much diminished glory. Since I finished the book, I have found myself repeating stories to friends from the excerpts from Rory Nugent?s The Search for the Pink-Headed Duck and from Mark Shand?s Travels on My Elephant, which were particularly vivid and fascinating to me. There are a suprising number of tales featuring cyclists--evidently India is a popular place to tour by bike.

A collection of many essays, book excerpts and stories from many different authors about travelling in India. Nearly every aspect of travel in India is covered: heliskiing in the Himalayas, staying at ashrams, being sick, travel in the women's compartment of trains, standing in a monsoon, bicycling from Leh to Pakistan, riding with a truck driver. Some essays cover unique aspects of the society, such as the enterprising dish-wallahs who set up a satellite dish and sell cable tv to an apartment building or two. Several of the source books are now out of print, making this collection particularly valuable