I just had a month or so on H’s ship, cruising from Valletta to Mumbai. Stopping at various places in Greece - Katakolon, Piraeus, Volos/Meteora, Santorini, Rhodes and Heraklion. The through the Suez Canal to Aqaba. Then into the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf to Salalah and Muscat, Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

We will be arriving in Mumbai tomorrow (4^th Dec) and it is definitely time for me to get off and do some real man traveling all by myself.

The plan now is to trace the route of the Ganges River from its source in the Himalayas to the sea in the Bay of Bengal to the south of Calcutta. I have a couple of weeks to play with but it is a trek of 2500 km and I have no idea if it is possible to see it all. If I use a boat at all it will only be for short legs. Much of the trip will be by plane or train. Indian Railways will be a nightmare. I’ve been waiting ages for them to register me to make online bookings. So far I’ve not been able to make any reservations so I might be travelling 5^th Class on the roof.

I usually use this blog for sailing trips. The coordinates taken from each entry are joined up so readers can see a rough route on the map or on Google Earth. It doesn’t really work with land based trips that are not always in straight lines. I tried to set up another blog but had some technical problems so I’ll carry on using this blog but I’ll not be including position coordinates this time. Instead I’ll post Google Earth tracks and locations in a folder on Dropbox. The .kmz files should open Google Earth when you click on them. I’ll update the files along the way so you will need to keep reopening them. I’ll also put photos in the same folder.   

click here to open my Dropbox folder for Google Earth tracks and photos