I finally got around to typing up my handwritten diaries from my India trip back in 2008. It was a hugely enjoyable exercise reading through the diaries again 12 months later — probably the reason it took me so long to plough through them.
Why put them online? A couple of reasons. I wanted to be able to access them quickly wherever I was, as I often find myself talking to someone about a particular place or event in India that I want to be able to show them a more detailed description of, or sometimes just to remember the name of a hotel to recommend to someone. I also thought they might be useful for other travellers considering a trip to India. Before we went, other than IndiaMike I couldn’t really find any useful ‘on the ground’ reports of day to day travelling around India. In some ways this was a good thing, as we tend to travel extremely independently and this allowed us to travel without any preconceptions. But some people might feel they want to get a flavour of a place before they get there. Also, and probably the most pressing reason, I wanted another nice, simple idea to practice my Django development on.
So I put the new site here: http://www.indiadiary.co.uk. Please check it out and let me know what you think. I’ve included photos of the trip from Flickr and a recommended reading list of the books we went through as we travelled around.