WELCOME! PEGASUS ON THE RUNWAY

So welcome to my travel Blog, THE FLIGHT OF PEGASUS, which I am starting up as I make myself ready to fly to India next week. I'm writing this on a train going up to Manchester to say goodbye to some friends before I go, so in a sense I am travelling already.

The plan is to by away from the UK for six months, but this may change. Who knows? Next week I fly to Mumbai, stopping over at Kuwait City to make a connection. The flight will be pretty gruelling. Ten hours from Heathrow to Kuwait, a few hours in the airport, then arriving in Mumbai at a jovial 4.50am in the morning. Smashing. It'll be one of those classic endurance tests where you finally get to your hotel room having run on empty for hours feeling sweaty and dehydrated and then fall over unconscious on the bed. The time difference in India is about five hours ahead of the UK so my body will take some time to get used to it. Oy vay.

Friends have been amazing in helping me out with my journey. I have never been to India before and Mumbai is famous for being a massive, amazing, overwhelming city. Parachuting in and hoping a charming smile might get me round might have been a bit of a crazy thing to do. Happily, some friends of a friend there have offered to help me orientate myself, show me around and get me at least a little used to how India works. I have been living in the India of the Mind for about eighteen months now, having made the decision to go back in 2007. I have been looking forward to it all that time. Now it is nearly here I am filled with a mixture of real excitement and real fear. Everyone says India is amazing, life changing, rich and vibrant but also takes a little getting used to. And it is big. Really big. And I don't mean just REALL BIG but REALLY REEAAAAALLLY Big.

So why on earth am I going? Well, when I made the decision to change my life and strike out on my own after fifteen years of hard slog I decided I wanted to get out of the UK. I wanted to travel, to be stimulated, excited. I wanted to go somewhere where things would be an immersion in something utterly different to what we are used to here in the UK. I also wanted to go somewhere culturally vibrant and which had a rich spiritual history ie somewhere where the mystical is still alive, still part of the discourse of the society (we shall see what I will find). There were two countries which appealed - Israel and India. Having spent a year or two allowing countries to chose me, I decided to do the same with these two. I put out feelers to both to see which one would open up as a possibility. Israel quickly closed up as an option. I just couldn't make any headway with connections there (I now see why that was a good thing! The Universe clearly went "No, you're not going there. We have something else planned for then. You're going somewhere else."). India, on the other hand, never went away.

I have something of a personal history there. Although I have never been, my maternal grandparents met, fell in love and got married there in the 1930s. They first got together in the gardens of the Taj Mahal one evening and for most of the war were billeted not far away from Hyderabad. My Grandmother has never forgotten the experience and loves telling me stories about it (although I have had to ask her to yield them up!). She was unusual for a Brit at that time in that she was captivated by the country and learnt some Urdu to communicate beyond the narrow circle of the white Raj community. She wasn't quite a Mrs Moore or a Ms Quested, but she was fascinated by the culture and the history, but found herself frustrated by the fact that among her fellow Brits there was no-one who shared her interest or even cared about it. Thus when I asked her about the Taj Mahal she told me she had visited it but could not find anyone to tell her anything about it. It would seem that the state of stubborn ignorance and indifference to India beyond the British colonial boundaries described by Forster and Scott was exactly as it was.

Nevertheless my Grandmother has never forgotten her time there as a special era in her life. My mother and aunt spent their early years there. My brother has been over while he was at University but I have never been at all. It felt like it was time.

My itinerary, such as it is, is this: I fly to Mumbai and will stay for a couple of days before getting a flight down to Bangalore. From there I will get a train or bus across to Mysore where I will be met by people from The Children's Project (http://www.childrensproject.org/index.html), a school for homeless children dedicated to giving kids from the street an education. I will be working with them for about a month, after which I will set off on some backpacking travels across India, taking in, I hope, Cochi, Madurai, Hyderabad, Delhi, the Taj Mahal, Amristar and Dharamsala, by which time I will have covered pretty much every major religion in India!

It should be an adventure. Anything could happen and probably will! Although I won't be taking my laptop, I will be checking in at Internet Cafes if I can find them to update this Blog and let you know what has been going on.

It could be the adventure of a lifetime! Wish me luck and join me if you can!