Prologue
In the autumn of 1994, following eight semi-nomadic years teaching for the British Council, I decided to return to the UK and see if I could try a more settled life. I packed up my home in Tunis and found myself back at my parents’ home with a bit of cash saved and a couple of months to spare before I needed to start looking for a job in earnest. I might not have so much free time again until retirement. I was young(ish) free and single and adventure beckoned. I set out alone for Nepal with no accommodation booked and no set plans other than a vague intension to go trekking. I had a ball! Looking back over the diary I kept at the time, what strikes me is how I was probably among the last generation of backpackers to wander the world before the advent of mobile phones and internet cafés made it a whole lot more accessible and much less exciting. We ran into people by chance, struck up friendships, split up, met up again by chance weeks later and several hundred miles away, exchanged postal addresses and perhaps wrote once to exchange promised photo reprints before losing touch forever. Now we would be able to track each others’ lives on Facebook and send digital photos by email, What’s App or Instagram. Yet since people did not spend half their precious travel time sitting in internet cafés, texting existing friends or staring at iphones or ipads, we were more open to new contacts. We would all spend hours simply talking to each other. I fear that the spontaneity we enjoyed has been lost. If my fellow travellers, also now middle-aged, should read these pages via the internet, I hope they will bring back happy memories of adventures past
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