NOTE: Who would imagine that 5 years have gone since I walked this route on this exact day – that is a SURPRISE!

Day Three on the Camino Ingles was all about surprises – good surprises like churros and castles. The climb out of Pontedeume was not a good surprise, but there was a reward at the end, the little village of Mino, nestled on the mountain with views to the sea, and a railway line vanishing into the distance. On day three, we climbed over the next headland from Pontedeume, and down again all the way to Betanzos, through farmland and forest, and at Mino we turned inland towards Betanzos.  This day was sunny and warm, just the type of day to life your spirits after previous damp and soggy day.

Mino

The next time I walk the Ingles, Mino is definitely going to be the night halt for me. Apart from the blindingly beautiful views, the chocolate and churros in the cafes was to die for. I could scarcely believe how good it was. The churros perfect light and melt in the mouth, and the chocolate thick and smooth like molten earth. not sweet,not runny and not a quagmire either. The look on my face is a mixture of stunned joy!!!

About the castle

Why is there a little castle in the picture? Why not? Someone built themselves a little castle in the middle of the forest that we walked by, it was gorgeous, and another surprise, so while there was great architecture, beautiful scenery and soaring churches on Day three, thisis what I loved about Day Three. After Mino, we walked parallel to the coast, before turning inland after crossing the river, and heading into lush green forests filled with birdsong and trickling streams. Fortunately there was no rain!  While it was a steady climb until about 10 kms from Betanzos, it was not as steep as the climb out of Pntedeume, and this time, we stopped whenever we could for cafe con leche,

Alas, today was also the day that my backpack split, and I had to use the trusty old nappy pins to secure it, and prevent further tearing.

If you want to read all about the more important stuff, like how you can walk the Camino in just 6 days, check out my book.

I’m looking for my third travel book and we’re having a bit of an adventure by literally going out to sea. You don’t write a bestseller by just looking – you have to have the experience, and the more experiences you have the better – so come along for a literal boat ride with me!

I’m in Goa, a lush green and laidback place, set like a jewel on the coast of India facing the Arabian sea, and I’m finally on the sea! I’m on a boat in south Goa, sailing up and down and the swells are quite bumpy. This morning we’ve been to a couple of quiet beaches and we’re now heading out for breakfast. This is what I think of as the quintessential old school Goan holiday, where you rise with the tender morning sun you catch a boat that whisks you off to quiet beach for breakfast. The stuff of dreams mostly, but once in a while it’s good to make things happen to live out your dream and see if it’s all that it promised to be.

All my adventure books are based on my own experience, so I need to travel and find out what it really feels like. And for now, it feels fantastic. I’m also updating my very first bestseller  – 
The Camino Ingles as the route has changed. I just walked it again, and I’m looking for you to help me launch.
You can join the launch team for the new edition, and it might be as bumpy as this boat ride, but you won’t get wet or fall overboard. If you would like a free copy of the book before it’s published, You can join my launch team right here.

Teju is the name, both of our boat and our captain. And my companions on the boat are family, my husband, and sister and her hubby. Of course, it was I who suggested this adventure when my sister said we should have some family time!

For you nautical types, I’m not sure what kind of boat it is but we’re heading out after launching it, with the early sun sparkling on the waves. It’s so beautiful that inspiration is welling up inside me – oops until that wave hit us and splashed water on my face and camera. but it is waterproof – the camera that is, and our skin is definitely waterproof.

Teju assures us that normally the sea is flat and quiet, but it’s the turn of the season so we’ve got a big swell as the winds change for the monsoon and the winds start blowing in from the Arabian sea. I don’t quite get why this is an assurance..but..

I’m online with my mates in Australia, and telling them that this is where they need to be. I keep telling them to come with me – and you should come and travel. Or you can dip into one of my books.

Shortly we will be landing at Palolem for breakfast and then on to Honeymoon Beach and Butterfly beach. We’ve been to Cola Beach, a secluded beach with a rocky tidal pool that is, you guessed it the colour of Coca Cola. It used to be that there was no way in except by boat or by trekking in, but now, there is a rough track that can be used by 4WD.

I’m looking for my third travel book and we’re having a bit of an adventure by literally going out to sea.

Meanwhile, I’m updating The Camino Ingles. If you would like a free copy of the book before it publishes, you can join my launch team right here. I’d love to see you onboard.

I’m looking for my third travel book and we’re having a bit of an adventure by literally going out to sea. You don’t write a bestseller by just looking – you have to have the experience, and the more experiences you have the better – so come along for a literal boat ride with me!

I’m in Goa, a lush green and laidback place, set like a jewel on the coast of India facing the Arabian sea, and I’m finally on the sea! I’m on a boat in south Goa, sailing up and down and the swells are quite bumpy. This morning we’ve been to a couple of quiet beaches and we’re now heading out for breakfast. This is what I think of as the quintessential old school Goan holiday, where you rise with the tender morning sun, you catch a boat that whisks you off to quiet beach for breakfast. The stuff of dreams mostly, but once in a while it’s good to make things happen to live out your dream and see if it’s all that it promised to be.

All my adventure books are based on my own experience, so I need to travel and find out what it really feels like. And for now, it feels fantastic. I’m also updating my very first bestseller.,
The Camino Ingles as the route has changed. I just walked it again, and the book is all set up for launch.
You can join the launch team for the new edition, and it might be as bumpy as this boat ride, but you won’t get wet or fall overboard. If you would like a free copy of the book before it published, you can join my launch team right here.

Teju is the name, both of our boat and our captain. And my companions on the boat are family, my husband, and sister and her hubby. Of course, it was I who suggested this adventure when my sister said we should have some family time!

For you nautical types, I’m not sure what kind of boat it is but we’re heading out after launching it, with the early sun sparkling on the waves. It’s so beautiful that inspiration is welling up inside me – oops until that wave hit us and splashed water on my face and camera. but it is waterproof – the camera that is, and our skin is definitely waterproof.

Teju assures us that normally the sea is flat and quiet, but it’s the turn of the season so we’ve got a big swell as the winds change for the monsoon and the winds start blowing in from the Arabian sea.

I’m online with my mates in Australia, and telling them that this is where they need to be. I keep telling them to come with me – and you should come and travel. Or you can dip into one of my books.

Shortly we will be landing at Palolem for breakfast and then on to Honeymoon Beach and Butterfly beach. We’ve been to Cola Beach, a secluded beach with a rocky tidal pool that is, you guessed it the colour of Coca Cola. It used to be that there was no way in except by boat or by trekking in, but now, there is a rough track that can be used by 4WD.

I’m looking for my third travel book and we’re having a bit of an adventure by literally going out to sea.

Meanwhile, I’m updating The Camino Ingles. If you would like a free copy of the book before it publishes, you can join my launch team right here. I’d love to see you onboard.

Time is running out for all the adventures I’d planned to have as a child that were forbidden or forgotten.Sandakphu is the Himalayan dream I’ve been chasing all my life. I’m afraid that if this may be a dream too late. Forbidden when I was 16 – can I do it when I’m sixy?

To gaze on towering Kanchenjunga and the Sleeping Buddha nestled in a snow-white blanket against brilliant blue skies, I snatched glimpses of this impossible, ridiculous and forbidden over the long tiring years of motherhood and career.

Did you have a dream at 16 that is buried deep under the messy muddle of more important things?

This is the story of that dream and how it became a reality. This dream is only about the right place, at the right time, to do nothing at all. To be in a waking dream in the white heart of a sacred mountain. I must walk five days and 61 kilometers to do this. Three days up and two days down. Touching 4000 meters.

It is the mountain that has been calling me, and it’s time to answer. At 16, the perfect age to fall in love I saw Kanchenjunga from Darjeeling for the first time. It called me relentlessly since then – but as a 16 year old girl alone? Impossible!

No, not even a group of girls together. Unthinkable. I started my subversion – at the top of Sandakphu, I asked a group of schoolboys where their classmates who were girls, were. That started them thinking, and hopefuly, changing. Maybe there is a 16 year old today, who will walk to Sandakphu before she is 17!

Today they have “YA fiction”,  my “YA” favourites alternated between the classic quest stories, Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, and Tolkien’s The Hobbit. They inspired me to laze on the sun warmed stone benches on long winter afternoons, plotting out, with complicated maps, how I could cycle from Lucknow to London, or take a train from Vladivostok to Venice. 

Until I finally did it, and then write the bestseller about it. Check it out!

You can also check out a slightly flatter adventure on the Camino

The Camino Ingles: 6 days to Santiago

Chasing Himalayan Dreams is out and roaming the Amazon wilds, drawing readers and reviewers into its journey. There are so many reviews that rave about the book, that I am truly humbled and amazed..oh wow did I make you feel like that?
Then there are the ones who are silent, or who don’t like the book, and that is ok too. I don’t write to please everyone, in fact, I’m not trying to please anyone – I’m trying to share my experience in the hope that it will inspire others to do something that they thought they could never do.
I do know that the book was rewritten about a dozen times before I stopped. Not because I was happy – but because I said enough was enough. After the writing come the journey of editing, formatting and finding a good cover. I don’t try to do this alone, these tasks need a bit of distance, so I had help with it. Fortunately, I have found professionals who deal with the seemingly endless rounds of revision, and the level of detail that is required to get the book to look polished.
Check out this page to find where you can grab a copy of Chasing Himalayan Dreams: A trek in the shadow of Kanchenjunga and Everest.

You can also check out a slightly flatter adventure on the Camino
The Camino Ingles: 6 days to Santiago

 

Day Five is when you are suddenly hit by an existential conflict, you are nearing the end of the pilgrimage, and suddenly you are filled with both relief and a strange kind of sorrow. And because it’s a sort of in-between day, we go from the sublime to the slightly ridiculous.  On day Five, we walked from Meson Do Vento, or Bruma to Siguero, under 20 kms from our destination, Santiago.

Dinosaurs

Today we were on a fairly easy road, no major climbs or downhills, but also limited bars and cafes. But there was no shortage of farm animals, we saw them all from hens, to dogs to horses, donkeys and cows..and yes, even a dinosaur – and I have a photo to prove it. Dinosaurs and farm equipment dotted this stretch of the road alongside the many statues of saints and camino markers.

It was definitely spring, the trees were only just bursting into bloom, and the crops were already deep green and waist high. When not walking through fields that were green with new crops, we were plunging though remnant patches of verdant forest, frequently alongside rivers, or crossing trickling streams – occasionally in muddy paths that were almost streams in their own right. A time to be grateful for the heavy boots, and a time to take off the boots and plunge our feet into a running stream dappled with sunlight and freezing cold. It was better than any other luxury, except perhaps clean laundered clothes.

 

Sigueiro

Siguiero was our destination for the day, although many pilgrims choose to walk the 40 kms into Santiago on Day Five, we chose to linger because the trek was short enough, and coming to an end soon. At Siguiero too, we found that the private hostel we had booked into was more of a boutique hotel, complete with a laundry service. So we had the thrill of clean, warm, folded clothes. On the camino you stop taking things for granted.

If you want to read all about the more important stuff, like how you can walk the Camino in just 6 days, check out my book.

If you need some maps of the cities, you can down load them from this page.

Day Four on the Camino Ingles was the hardest day, with a steep climb out of Betanzos, and then later in the day, the longest and steepest climb from Cafe Julia to Visono and then a long stretch into Bruma. But you are rewarded with great vistas and an eye-blindingly bright decor at the restaurant at Presedo. Day Four is also the midpoint of your hike, sometime in the middle of the day, you are suddenly closer to Santiago than to Ferrol and that makes a huge difference to your psyche. The path is mostly fields, with a few patches of forest, which was good as it was a hot day. However, today, route changes have made it an easier walk, with the rerouting of the path from Leiro to A Travesas totally skirting the steep hill.

Here we passed the Museo- Meson, a gloriously garish restaurant in Presedo. It was too early for lunch, but with our new rules in place, we had cafe con leche. It’s a rule that you have to stop and have a café con leche whenever you find it on the Ingles – at least in my book. By all reports, this restaurant has excellent food as well. So it’s a serious reason to stop at the Presedo Albergue for the night, if only to eat here!

The hotel at Meson do Vento was a good choice, as after a hot and tiring day, we liked having a hotel to relax in, despite the albergue in Bruma containing a portion of the ancient “Hospital” or hostel for pilgrims. Sometimes one has to pick one’s battles.

If you want to read all about the more important stuff, like how you can walk the Camino in just 6 days, check out my book.

The Camino Ingles is an authentic pilgrimage route for English and Northern European pilgrims in the middle ages, who came by sea from their homelands to La Coruña or Ferrol, and then walked to Santiago. Santiago de Compostela is roughly 60 km from La Coruña, and 120 km from Ferrol. To gain the compostela, you must walk at least 100 km, hence the modern-day preference for Ferrol as the starting point, though there is a campaign asking Cathedral authorities to allow pilgrims starting from La Coruña to gain the compostela.

You must get your credencial and get it stamped for those 30 kms. So why were we doing the Camino?

What’s a Camino?
The Camino is a pilgrimage, a route that has been around for over a thousand years. Anyone who has done the Camino gets a lot of credibility that can be applied to any goal in your life. This is just the first step. I had no intentions of writing a book – I wanted to walk to achieve a health goal and to prove to myself that I could do this! And I did much more than that – the Camino Ingles also launched me on a bestselling author journey.

This is hubby and me starting out from the docks at Ferrol, with the port behind us and the first marker of the Camino Ingles in front of us. After weeks of training, and a long journey from Australia we are finally here and ready to walk. Boots on, hats on, rain gear handy, and water bottles filled, but where do we get the credencial?

The tourist office had run out of them, was there a mob of pilgrims ahead of us? So we got the credencial from the exquisite little Cathedral, just before the office closed for siesta. It’s always good for a bit of sheer magnificence before a 15 km trek .. and yes, we did get lost on the first day.

That’s why I created maps for the cities! Download my sketch maps.

The local authorities in Ferrol are actively promoting the Camino Ingles. Here is a great promotional video about the first few kilometres of the way through Ferrol itself.

And as an adventure writer as I come close to writing my own book, I start reading fiercely and wildly! I must have read over 50 books on the Himalayas over the last 6 months, here are the ones that stood out, make me think, and gave me ideas that transformed me.

Worth Every Gasp by Anamika Mukherjee, I like to read Indian authors, and if they are women, and in this case, this lady is from Bangalore and a technical writer to boot. Her account of an adventure on her own in Indian himalayas is a fascinating read.

Kanchenjunga – A Valley too Far  A great account of an early foray into the valleys and peaks near Kangchenjunga, via Eastern Nepal, with vivid descriptions of the plants, people and landscapes of this wonderful area of the Himalayas. It is no longer as quiet and undiscovered as in the past, but well worth reading if you want an alternate trek to the well-trodden paths of Nepal.

Himalaya by Michael Palin –  In a rare complete traverse, Palin takes on the full length of the Himalaya, from the Pakistan–Afghan frontier through India, Nepal, Tibet, and Yunnan in China, before recrossing the mountains to Assam, Bhutan and Bangladesh.

Himalaya – Ruskin Bond and Namita Gokhale – On a different note, this is one of India’s most beloved writers writing about his favourite topic, the Himalayas and the people who live on them.

Himalaya – Philip Parker – This an anthology for mountaineers and people who want to climb every mountain.

The next four books are legacy books, now available from Project Gutenberg. It is wonderful that we can find these historical books and read the love the writers have for the mountains, as well as the huge adventures they had in earlier times.

Himalayan Journals by Joseph Dalton Hooker. This is a book that is nothing short of an epic description the landscape, plants and flowers of the Himalayas, in particular following the Singalilla ridge. This was the same path we followed – literally  walking in the shadow of giants! A close friend of Charles Darwin, Hooker is recognised as the founder of geographical botany. According to an 1887 journal written by Indian administrator Richard Temple, many of the rhododendrons found in English gardens of the time were grown from seeds collected by Hooker in Sikkim in the 1840s.

Kashmir – Sir Francis Younghusband and Major E Molyneux is a richly ilustrated book that waxes lyrical about the paradise that was Kashmir.

The Heart of Nature; or, The Quest for Natural Beauty – Sir Francis Younghusband – is the book about the Eastern Himalayas, and is again one that contains rapturous descriptions of Kanchenjunga.

Kim by Rudyard Kipling, the classic adventure quest was a childhood favourite, possibly because it is set in India, but also because it is a cracking good adventure tale. I wasted a good hour re-reading it just now when I should have just been linking to it!

You can also check out a slightly flatter adventure on the Camino

The Camino Ingles: 6 days to Santiago