Day 0: 21 November – London to Doha

(written somewhere over Turkey I think)

Photo of the day: an airline meal (lamb biryani)

If you think that is weird I will say (a) that the woman in front of us took a picture of hers, and (b) you haven't seen www.airlinemeals.net where there are hundreds of similar photos.

It's a good flight: six hours from London to Doha and I think that most of the people are going to be transferring to other destinations. We are spending 21 hours in Doha and taking our connecting flight to Delhi tomorrow evening. A relatively easy trip to the airport and even Heathrow Terminal 3 seemed more pleasant than before.

We planned this trip months ago and bought the flight tickets in April, so it was a pretty good price of £380 each to Delhi. For the arrangements in India we were looking at planning our own itinerary around the national parks, but it was looking quite complex to arrange. (The Indian Railways website has a huge number of railway classes and discounts – one for circus performers for example.)

So then we found a company that would offer a tour, customise it for us if we wanted, and make the arrangements. The company (India Travel Plan) has been really responsive and enthusiastic – Bryony there has looked after us by sending emails with lots of information and detail. We're going to combine two tours - “Camels and Castles” and parts of other ones and cover a wide area which even Bryony describes as “whistlestop”. I'm looking forward to some great scenery, three or four different religious sites and lots of interesting things to see, sunshine, and curry three times a day for the next two weeks. Yay! What more could I ask for?

(And I've never been to India before, so it will be interesting to see what it's like...)

I am travelling with ... ah, blog writers always make their travelling companions sound more interesting and mysterious than they really are, so let's call him The Doctor.

I will plan to write something every day and upload it when I can. We'll see if we can do a photo each day as a base.

So … we'll be in Doha in about two and a half hours, so back to the guide book and the Hindi pop on the headphones.