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It’s hard to sum up four and a half months on the road from Norway to India. Here are a few photographs to remember the journey by.

A study in blue and white: the church overlooking the caldera in Oia in Santorini.

The Treasury at Petra, Jordan comes magnificently into view after walking for more than a kilometre through a stunning narrow canyon known as The Siq.

We climbed through the morning to reach the top of Mt Sinai in Egypt, surrounded by singing pilgrims and overlooking a barren landscape lit up by a spectacular sunrise.

We climbed Mount Olympus once; I assure you that we won’t be climbing it again. Picture taken before fear of the descent set in.

Our Canadian friends Jerome and Caroline enjoy a moment of solitude at the magnificent Taj Mahal in Agra, India.

Overlooking the lake palace at Udaipur, India.

We took a walk through Rose Valley in Cappadocia, Turkey and were surprised to find that we were not alone among the rocky outcrops.

We had seen a few largish things along the way in Egypt but nothing could prepare us for the sheer “hugeness” of the Pyramids of Giza.

These little feluccas looked terrific on Nile… from the window of our luxurious Moevenpick cruise ship.

I was delighted to share my thoughts on Iran’s propagandistic religious regime with the enthusiastic reporters of Esfahan TV.

I couldn’t quite get the hang of the stick dance at India’s Navrati celebration but it provided ample opportunity for interaction between the thousands of young men and women of Udaipur.

This magnificent citadel stood out over the predominantly grey concrete sensibilities of Syria’s Aleppo.

Lone Pine, Gallipoli, evoked a strong sense of familiarity, even on our first visit.

To experience Pamukkale in Turkey, you genuinely have to get your feet wet.

Norway in “summer”. Andrew swimming; Kate leading the way.

Back in Bondi, in some ways it is almost as if we never left. Things look oddly the same around here and it is hard to believe that we’ve spent the last four and a half months visiting some of the most incredible places on earth.

Sadly, the blog lagged far behind in the latter stages of the trip after a power surge in Jaisalmer blew the Sony’s sorry little circuits and left me unable to recharge. To complete the record we’ll fill in the details in the next few weeks from our time in South India.

No, we haven’t taken a detour from our carefully planned itinerary through the south of India. This is Kate’s folks, Roger and Roz (2nd and 3rd from right) together with a few recruits from their African safari tour group, flying the flag for Kevin in one of the remotest capitals on earth, Timbuktu. The T-shirts? Roger explains how:

A t-shirt tout was selling shirts when we were having dinner in a restaurant in Timbuktu & we asked if he could make these up for us. When we asked how to collect them, he said don’t worry I know Kunta (our guide). Next morning about 8 am we were doing a walking tour with Kunta & our group when someone tapped Dad on the arm and it was the T-shirt man with the 5 T-shirts. We were surprised that he found us and thought it was pretty funny but good service!

Not surprisingly, the folks at Kevin07 liked the shot too. Mum and dad, we’re proud of ya!

Days 123-124: Cows on a beach. That’s Goa in four words. There’s nothing that quite puts one off swimming than seeing a huge bovine wandering down to the water’s edge and discharging about five litres of urine.

With a dozen or so different beaches to choose from, we spent a couple of days in Anjuna, a very laid back beach resort that surprised on the underdeveloped side.

Days 121-122: India! Hindu one day, Catholic the next. So it was in Panjim, the capital of Goa, where we paused to acclimatise to the humidity of South India. This striking silver Christ figure welcomed visitors to the Bishop’s Residence, in the hills above Panjim. Typically for a country in which people of different faiths live closely together, we passed a colourful Hindu temple on the way there and a mosque heading home.

The Christians, however, were dominant here, with the whitewashed Church of Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception the centrepiece of the town square. Memories of distant Santorini perhaps?

Days 117-120 : In India, I’ve been reading Rohinton Mistery’s A fine balance. Set partly in Mumbai, it’s a moving story about four characters whose livelihoods are bound together in an unlikely way. Struggling to make their way in the world, they’re living on the edge in every sense, with the slightest external shock having the potential to catapult one or all of them into homelessness and abjection. The title’s “fine balance” is the balance between hope and despair by which each of the characters live their lives.

Here in Mumbai I felt that balance acutely, especially when Kate and I took a highly recommended tour of Mumbai’s Dharavi slum. Millions of the permanent residents of Mumbai live in Dharavi, in an improvised but now well-organised community complete with local industries adjacent to family homes.

Much of the industry in Dharavi is related to recycling and reprocessing of various waste products. We saw small factories devoted to sorting and melting down collected pieces of household plastic for reuse. Others worked on reconditioning old oil drums for resale. Among the crowded streets there were also potteries, bakeries and corner shops. Our trip also took us past what was described as Asia’s biggest laundry. From our viewpoint hundreds of people were hard at work soaping and beating clothes.

According to our guide, the municipal authority’s medium-term plan is to reclaim the land, build apartments on it, and give to each family living in the slum before 1995 (an arbitrary cutoff date chosen for legal purposes) a flat measuring 225 square feet. It’s unclear what will happen to people in the interim, or how the city proposes to make accommodation for the cohabiting factories and industries which make up so much of Dharvati’s complex social fabric.

While a resolution is not expected in the short term, Mumbai’s many slum-dwellers will continue to live for years to come in that fine balance, until the issue is resolved one way or the other.

Thanks to Jerome recommending Rohinton Mistery’s outstanding work to us.

Day 119: The highlight of our stay in Mumbai was our trip to the Twenty20 cricket game between India and Australia, keenly anticipated by local cricket fans (and that means just about everyone) and the first international Twenty20 game ever played in India. Getting into the stadium itself was possibly the biggest achievement.

Clutching our scalped tickets, we joined a mass of some thousands in a queue for Gate 7 which ultimately became a mad, unticketed, rush to get inside the iron gates before they slammed shut. I had brief nightmares of being crushed underfoot in the melee and at one point had to be tugged out of a mass of collapsed bodies by a security official holding a stick. Very undignified.

(I foolishly assumed that the utter mayhem, characterised by danger and a complete breakdown of order, would be reported and analysed in the newspapers the following day. Nothing of the kind happened, from which I can only assume that the disorder and panic that we witnessed was par for the course for the cricket in Mumbai.)

Once we were inside Bradbourne Stadium, we were caught in the middle of what would formerly have been described in Australia as “The Hill”, with locals to a man and woman booing Andrew Symonds and carrying on with monkey chants. It was hard to construe this as anything other than racism, despite the efforts made by local media to explain it otherwise - with the exception of the highminded broadsheet The Times, which called a spade a spade.

Australia proceeded to lose the game, which wasn’t the best finish to the tour, but probably guaranteed our own personal safety.

Day 116: En route from Rajasthan to Mumbai, we broke the journey in Ahmedabad where we stopped in at the ashram from which Gandhi planned his campaign of satyagraha in support of independence for India. It’s now a museum to Gandhi’s life, it was a peaceful place, full of the rich history of the path to Indian independence and a reminder about the shocking communal violence that ensued when the British carved off Pakistan and Bangladesh before finally quitting India.